Death of the podcast

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, investigates the decline of podcast hype. Plus, streaming layoffs and new Lana.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about something Freud wrote in an essay on transience. I’m likely misremembering (or misconstruing) his point, but the statement was, unsurprisingly, about death—how death, or the transience of life, gives our existence meaning. It brings pleasure to a fleeting moment; it makes nature beautiful. Death, as of late, seems to be the primary diagnosis we prescribe to the state of the internet. Twitter, since Elon Musk’s takeover, is dying. So is Instagram and YouTube and influencer culture and…you get the point. None of these things are really dying; they’re just transforming. But I suppose transformation is, in a sense, a slow death. An observer attuned to certain slight changes, which occur almost imperceptibly, is aware of the transience of our digital lives.

But I digress. In January, I came across a tweet by Nick Catucci, co-founder of the Embedded newsletter, that added yet another endangered piece of digital ephemera to my list. “I’m worried about podcasts,” Catucci said, posting screenshots of recent Embedded interviews, wherein interviewees admitted that, after a pandemic-induced period of eager listening, their podcast diet has dwindled. 

This observation interested me, so I queried Dirt readers, many of whom supplied me with an abundance of anecdotes to formulate my conclusion. Podcasts are not dying, but the podcasting industry, like much of the greater streaming ecosystem, is at an inflection point. The boom times are over. Advertising dollars are drying up. (The podcast ad market, too, isn’t growing as quickly as projections.) The days of exorbitant show budgets are behind us. Vulture’s Nick Quah writes that “the specter of more consolidations, more layoffs, more shuttered shows, and studio closures” has come up more frequently in talks with industry insiders. This is, all things considered, very concerning for professional podcast people. It’s the nature of the entertainment business: The (revenue) tide ebbs and flows. But something has changed, and we’re not sure what.

Audiences are, of course, still tuning in, although not as much or as often as during the pandemic’s peak. Listenership growth in general has slowed. Remember that brief period of mass psychosis in early 2021, when we were fooled into thinking that Clubhouse was the future of audio-forward social media? As post-Covid life became more “normal,” podcast habits have unsurprisingly and inevitably changed. Those without an office commute, for instance, are less likely to listen to shows. And when people fall off the listening wagon, they’re less compelled to hop back on and catch up. Their time is valuable. They already have an abundance of content to stream or scroll through. There isn’t a dearth of podcasts either, although fewer shows are being formally launched. Actually, there are more podcasts than ever. Spotify has over 5 million titles on its platform. (This leads me to think: Perhaps the internet isn’t really dying. Users are, after all, the ones drowning in content.)

So, what’s really behind this presumed death-talk? If I may bastardize Freud’s point once more, I think it has something to do with our collective recognition of transience. The transience of existing content-mediums and the transient nature of relevance in a highly saturated content landscape. 

There really is no reason to worry about podcasting as a content-medium because, well, just look at commercial radio. Podcasts displaced radio by making it culturally irrelevant among a specific group of consumers—i.e. young-ish professionals who reside in urban regions, the “tastemaking” demographic catered to by advertisers and brands. Now the current podcast landscape looks a lot like the radio landscape, in the same way that streaming now resembles television, down to the ads.

But also: What distinguishes a Reel from a TikTok on your camera roll before it’s uploaded? Or a YouTube Live from a Twitch stream without the watermark? In my Vox piece on the video essay boom last March, I wrote about the emergent “video podcast” phenomenon introduced by Spotify: “Users have the option to toggle between actively watching a podcast or traditionally listening to one. What’s interesting about the video podcast is how Spotify is positioning it as an interchangeable, if not more intimate, alternative to a pure audio podcast.” 

Content boundaries are blurring. It’s same, same but different. 

I keep returning to this one prediction Quah listed: “The decline of This American Life as a tastemaker.” Culturally speaking, This American Life isn’t a tastemaker. It may be so among podcast industry folks, but the show, more significantly, was representative of a certain type of listener in the mid-2010s. Say, a New Yorker tote-carrying, creatively inclined professional, who was once deemed a relevant “tastemaker” before personalized algorithms shattered our conception of monoculture. Podcast studios are worried because flagship shows are losing steam. No new high-production podcasts are breaking through or making it “big.” That window of opportunity is long gone; the zeitgeist is too fractured.

Recently, Daisy made a similar point in her essay on scenes: “People are realizing there is no exact center of the algorithm, and your sense of what is cool is equally limited by spending all your time on Twitter as it is spending all your time in Silver Lake.” There is no center, so nothing—no podcast, TV series, or movie—can be centralized. When was the last time an episode of The Daily or This American Life felt like a must-listen? 

From Dirt reader Sally Simms: “I used to enjoy high-production podcasts (like Radiolab [during its] earlier days), and now I strongly prefer podcasts that are just a couple people who either know each other or get along well, talking through a topic or just hanging out for like an hour.” Angie Meltsner expressed a similar sentiment: “I often find new podcasts when I start getting super interested into a particular subject matter (like when I went freelance, I was looking up a bunch of freelance podcasts) and then I consume a ton of episodes in a short amount of time, and then move on to the next subject I'm interested in.”

Listenership is more distributed; an audience can be accumulated via an active meme page (as was the case for the male skincare podcast Dewy Dudes) or per viral TikTok (which was where one of the Nymphet Alumni girls got the idea). The podcasters with Patreon accounts aren’t too worried. On the contrary, podcast bros seem to be thriving, earning their cultural keep in memetic posterity. It’s the media companies that are scrambling. Podcasts aren’t endangered; the TAL-type of show is. Audio is, once again, becoming an ambient medium. But instead of turning the radio dial, we’re left to scroll through the RSS feed.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Roku lays off 200 employees, roughly 6 percent of its workforce, in a second round of layoffs. (Reuters)

• Disney plans to slash 7,000 jobs in three waves of layoffs. The first round will primarily be in its television production and acquisitions departments. (The Hollywood Reporter) 

• New York’s state assembly is proposing a 4% sales tax on digital media streaming subscriptions. (IndieWire)

• Whenever Lana releases a new album, I find myself inevitably re-listening to her 2019 masterpiece Norman Fucking Rockwell. For what it's worth, I think Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is her strongest album since. Her approach to songwriting has changed with "automatic singing," a process in which she records directly into her Voice Notes app. She's more improvisational and lyrically digressive; you get the sense that her vocal narratives are being written freehand, on the go.

  • I loved Paul Thompson's review in The Ringer: “[LDR] traffics in detritus, and no one has to ask why little remnants of Dylan and Elvis are lying around. What has animated and elevated Lana’s music over the past half decade is a curiosity about what of her might cross the next threshold—not what she might leave behind, but what she’ll be able to take with her.” 

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• I’m reading Pulphead, a 2011 essay collection by John Jeremiah Sullivan. It’s by far the best nonfiction book I’ve read in the past year. Sullivan is a perceptive, hilarious, and stylish writer. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but “Mister Lytle,” an essay that recounts Sullivan’s year living with the 92-year-old novelist Andrew Lytle before his death, is engrossing and entertaining as it is profound.

• Everyone wants natural lighting in their apartments. (NYT)

• An excerpt from Maggie Smith’s newly released memoir on the viral reception of her poem “Good Bones” and its role in her marriage’s demise. (The Cut) 

• This Alison Roman vanilla pastry cream recipe. I have been in a mousse mood since my return from Lisbon. I ate an unholy amount of this high-protein chocolate mousse, which is not yet available in the US. (Please email me any good stateside alternatives!)

• Legendary Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto is dead at 71. I love this video of him playing "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence."

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