If This American Life Needs Help...What About The Rest Of Us?

Is this the zombie apocalypse? And...Things You Don't Hear at a Podcast Festival, a voice-memo driven piece by Lina Prestwood that premiered at the XMTR Festival in the UK last month.

Last week I was at my desk when I noticed my podcast app pinging. Multiple alerts told me that there were new Serial Episodes available. I thought this was odd…I hadn’t heard of anything. Could it be a sneaky new fall series?

About this time last year, they released The Kids of Rutherford County, their final of three series for that year. This year there’s only been one series so far. Serial Season 4, about Guantanamo Bay, was released last March, to…crickets?

I quickly followed the push notification to see what I had missed. Was there a new series?

But what I found was instead a subtraction

There had been a change to the Serial feed, which would trigger a push notification from my Podcast app. But the change was that there were fewer episodes than the day before. For all Serial shows, going back to Serial: Season 1, S-Town, The Retrievals…and everything in between….everything north of Episode 2 was now paywalled.

Not long after this realization there was a new episode in my feed from This American Life. It was uncharacteristically short, just a few minutes, and it begins with a cold open from Ira Glass: “Hey there podcast listeners, Ira here. Not with a new episode of our show, but to say a few things about some of the backstage, behind-the-scenes stuff going on at our program. And to make an announcement.”

He goes on to say, sic, that the blatant reality that has afflicted many other podcast companies out there has finally come home to roost at the TAL offices. Those lovely ad dollars have shrunk there too; he shared the round figure that last year they had one-third less ad revenue compared to years prior.

My immediate thought was: If they are willing to admit they have one-third fewer dollars, with their millions-of-listeners-guaranteed-reach, the real number for the rest of the middle-class-sized podcast outfits is way way more than one-third. And then, for lots of smaller studios and outfits, there aren’t enough thirds in the pie to keep the doors open.

But you know this already. You’ve already seen your jobs disappear, companies fold, and massive shrinkage all around. The fact that the biggest, most stable production outfit in the industry is not immune, felt like its own watershed moment. The industry knows this…but now the public does as well. The rogue wave had finally landed on the lauded shores of TAL.

Ira Glass then goes on to pitch the idea that This American Life will still be free for listeners…but…if you really want to stay connected, if you like what they’re doing, want exclusive content, and want to have Zadie Ira’s hand-picked 250 episodes…then you will need to subscribe.

There are a couple of different immediate results for this. First, the regular feed for TAL is extremely convoluted with 250 of Ira’s Archive that appear at the top. This is an app problem (some are better than others), but it drives home the point.

Say you want to pick up and listen to a TAL episode that you missed in July, you’re going to need to set aside 5 minutes to scroll back. This will no doubt prove annoying, and in our fickle world of instant gratitude, it might push casual listeners away from TAL—when they click on something else to listen—and forgo the long scroll.

Second, this will leave the True Believers, who are the most likely to become subscribers, in the room. But these are also the only ones that remain valuable to TAL, so maybe, job done? The life partner matchups can begin from there.

Don’t get me wrong; I love This American Life. This announcement felt like an obituary for me. For years those hosts and producers were my also teachers—for how to make a podcast and make work in this industry—because for years there was very little formal training to be had. During 2010 and 2012, it was my long walks in the park listening to TAL that taught me the three-act structure, the cold open, the importance of surprise, amazing examples of how to write for the ear (which was very different from the “radio” of the day).

What is there to say now?

If there was an Ancestry.com page that could trace the lineage of this industry, most of the familial roots of the podcast industry more-or-less go back to two entities: Transom and The American Life. Those OG staffers and founders have gone on to create an entire industry.

And now? The podcast that single-handedly created an entire industry is not entirely free any longer. Free and accessible, the two basic tenets this industry were built on.

It’s not all paid. Sure, TAL still exists as an actual radio show, and yes, those recent episodes are still free, and they are still there, somewhere, carefully located on the website in a way that is tricky enough to get to that you will either pay, or leave.

As for the successful spin-off of Serial, it’s now Freemium.

What does this say about the rest of the industry? If they are going to charge for their content, content which even with a 2/3 drop in ad revenue has a hope of being funded through advertising…how on earth will anyone else possibly fund their content?

Ira Glass pulled out his best jovial tone, and penned a quirky message about becoming a This American Life Partner, emphasis on the correct pause on either side of the word “Life” draws distinctly different connotations (a life partner, or a just a partner?). But no doubt he’s lost sleep over this. And it overshadows a much darker story.

If they can’t afford to do it, to make narrative series, who the eff can?

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I’m heading to Resonate tomorrow

I can’t wait to connect with other industry folks who will be there.

You going? Want to connect there?

Drop me a line.

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And all this thinking about festivals and conferences reminded me of something that Lina Prestwood made

Things You Don’t Hear At A Podcast Conference

On the heels of the London Podcast Show, Prestwood felt “ick.”

But then a new thing was announced. XMTR announced they were going to start a conference that focuses on the creative side of the industry, she wanted to know what the creators felt…about this industry…in the moment that we’re in now.

Is it a lament? A provocation? Or an alt-keynote?

Well, it’s a bit of everything.

So she sent out a questionnaire to a bunch of people. They provided audio memos in return. This piece is what resulted.

Hear what these folks have to say about the industry:

Talia Augustidis 
Jasmin Bauomy 
Benbrick 
Davy Gardner 
Sarah Geis 
Axel Kakoutié 
Starlee Kine 
Anna Sinfield 
Julie Shapiro 
Shreya Sharma 
Deborah Shorindè 
Ross Sutherland

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