Is This January In Wonderland?
Welcome to 2024, are you really ready for this?
I know 2024 just began, but I want to take you back to 2022 for a moment. That fall I went to New York for a week to take Robert McKee’s Story seminar—which was the last time he would offer this infamous session in person. It had been on my bucket list for years. McKee is well into his 80s and he’s known around Hollywood as “the screenplay doctor” and while that’s cool, it’s not why I went.
I went to cement my own idea of what “story” is, and then better understand how the classic “story” elements relate to other forms of storytelling (and for me, that’s narrative podcasts).
At the end of this very intense and focused week, my friend Summer Love and I needed a moment to blow off some steam after an intense week. So we found one of those big interactive exhibits, this one based on Alice In Wonderland.
And that’s how we found ourselves in a hilarious hour of being silly, taking photos, laughing, and getting to pretend for a few moments inside a world with themed “rooms” that didn’t quite connect with each other. There were oversized props, garishly coloured rooms, pretend tea cups and adult-sized hobby horses. It was very easy to get lost moving from room to room, either through one of the those mirrored tunnels, or a room where strobe lights flicker and you have to wend your way through a bunch of neon hanging objects animated by a strobe light.
The reason I’m bringing this up here is that I realized that’s exactly how I feel about 2024…I feel like I’m inside an Alice in Wonderland-style labyrinth, with many well-appointed rooms and lots of interesting things that don’t quite fit together.
No, it’s not that it’s a pretend world out there; although one could argue that some of the business models that have failed were quite grandiose. No, it’s not that everything is completely bizarre; but I do feel that we have passed beyond the world we knew, gone through the looking glass, and we are now in a different place.
It’s taking me a moment to adjust my eyes to the new sights and sounds of 2024.
There Are Problems Out There
We don’t need to go over all of them again. They have been well-documented. The lay-offs. The show cancellations. The shifting tides of advertising dollars.
If you want an eloquent summary of this, please find Rob Rosenthal’s Sound School podcast, and listen to his opening audio essay.
Rob often does his essays in the studio, so I was pleased to see this as an essay done with field tape—in the way that he once taught me at the Transom Travelling Storytelling Workshop.
Rob heads out for a walk around his local conservation area; a park that was once slated for development but was then bought by a Land Trust. But instead of a condo tower, today it’s a park with some walking trails.
To me, this is the perfect analogy to where we are at this year:
There’s a bunch of land, and it could be sold to a condo developer.
Or it could be turned into a park.
If it becomes a condo, a handful of sellers will make some money, and a small group of buyers will be the lucky few who get to live in what I assume is a beautiful area…park land converted to housing (this is not a new concept).
But if instead it becomes a park, it’s there for everyone to enjoy. The owls and the chipmunks and the birds don’t have to move, or get pushed aside. And folks like Rob can go here to record an excellent audio essay about where our world is at.
His audio essay was just the lead-in for a replay of an old conversation with the beloved Jonathan Goldstein where he discussed his creative process (or lack thereof) and various fonts with Rob. Heavyweight did become the equivalent of a condo development: if went exclusive on Spotify, after years (or decades if you’re an old fan of Wiretap like me) where anyone and everyone was able to enjoy it.
I don’t fault Heavyweight for trying this move (or maybe agreeing to this move as a condition of their contract).
But the announcement of that show being cancelled did set off the SOS beacon. If Heavyweight can’t do it…who can?
Eric Nuzum Thinks We All Need To Do Better
It’s January, which makes it a month of resolutions and intentions. It’s also a month where many of us tell ourselves that we can, and should, do better and
thinks we can do better.This week in The Audio Insurgent, Nuzum takes a view (from about 30,000 feet) of where the podcast industry is at.
His take is that yes, for sure, 2023 was a hard year. And that now that the “dumb money” is gone, things are going to change. Yes, he reminds, podcasting is still vibrant and strong—don’t worry about that.
His message is that for those who recognize that 2023 was a hell ride, it’s going to be better, or different, this year, so long as we can “do better.”
The good news is we find ourselves at a rare moment: while everyone in podcasting has different problems, the solutions are very similar across the board.
You need to be better. Better at executing your idea.
More thoughtful in planning for your future.
And you need to get WAY better at telling stories, specifically, your own.
~ Quoted from his post
I don’t disagree with his basic message. January is a moment to atone and reflect on how to improve our lives. But I do struggle to see how we can, or should, do better, working so very hard, and better, to make our shows fit in the existing system. The same one that sold parkland for condos.
He asks the creators to find more, and bigger audiences for their shows and he casually throws out giant numbers; if your previous exclusive ad deal package required a 50k minimum, that’s now 100k…just like that…buckle up (yikes!). He also challenges us to go out an find a matching numbers of new listeners to the existing base, so if you already have 10,000 listeners, we need to go out and find the next 10,000 listeners. Match, repeat, grow.
But I worry that the whole idea of building and growing, within the existing system, the “old” system, is ever going to be enough.
Those who do well in 2024 and through the next cycle will be those who take stock of what changed in 2023, what opportunities 2023 created, and how to avoid the systematic and strategic pitfalls that screwed them up last year.
~ Quoted from his post
Sure, yes, reduce salad days expectations. Right-size your production team; make better sales decks; have a realistic vision. And for the industry/network side, please, some accountability and better management. I totally agree with all of those observations.
But the question that I’m left to ask myself is this: How do we work better inside a system that has repeatedly shown us that our hard work is not actually good enough?
Is there even enough room in the ceiling cavity to grow bigger, and be better?
What if instead of ‘better’ we tried for different?
What if the solution for how to work better might actually require a more fundamental, a more seismic shift, of how this whole thing operates?
If I go back to Rob’s basic message from his episode of Sound School…which is a similar sentiment I’ve heard echoing around the Internet for the last month…if this system can’t work for Heavyweight (and the multi-award winning Stolen), then who can it work for?
I doubt the producers of that show feel like they didn’t work hard, or “better” than they had previously. I’m guessing that many people saw the writing on the wall of needing to pull things together in 2023, and they put in the extra effort.
It’s entirely possible that the powers-that-be at Spotify rested on the laurels of the success of how these shows could transform their earnings. Maybe they did overshoot on what they figured the potential was to make that audience “exclusive,” wooing them and all their podcast heavy listening over to Spotify….or they overspent on some giant celebrity deals, which negatively impacted the rest of the ecosystem when the numbers simply didn't add up.
In a world where there a billions of podcasts available for free, have we yet learned that exclusive walled-off content doesn’t pave the road with gold?
How oddly symbolic that Heavyweight turns out it was the harbinger, the show that proved their exclusive system just doesn’t work. The show whose name is written in the title, that takes on personal problems between random individuals, all with the wry whit of our fave armchair psychologist, Jonathan Goldstein.
So then what?
I often ponder the history of this industry: it was built on RSS, a democratized, a free and blind distribution system, which initially distributed a bunch of public-radio-stories (or those akin to them) made by folks who wanted to stretch their legs and tell stories a different way. They didn’t do this to get rich. They did this to share stories that change the hearts and minds of all the freaks and geeks who sought out these stories to listen to (which back in 2008, was not particularly easy to do).
The next thing the podcast industry did was that it built communities of people around shows that had a super-specific niche to them….and all of this was distributed by a free app on a phone that the whole world wanted to have (and could eventually afford by around 2012).
It was a long way before 300 million people downloaded Serial in 2014-15, and suddenly the business world shot straight up and said to themselves: We’ve got a whole new audience here. A new way to make money.
What if we take the lessons that we have from the past, and build them into a different future? What if we put our energies towards a different industry concept…one that remembers the collective ideas that were the bedrock of this industry (and largely came out of public radio, funded at some level by both government and the community of listeners who donate).
Did you get Mia Lobel’s newsletter Freelance Cafe yesterday?
There’s a new idea in there to consider. A new model, a new idea, based on old ideas and older models.
This post is a follow up from her previous post, which then also comes after months of conversations with a group of folks. She and I connected at Resonate, and have had almost weekly phone sessions since….talking through this idea together.
Mia’s idea is to create a new kind of podcast network, where like-minded creators and administrative people support each other. In this model, the money is pooled. A high tide raises all boats….an honest minimum salary. Producers retain autonomy as freelancers, and are not “owned” by this network.
Here’s how she says it:
A cooperatively-run network where creators can make a sustainable living and shows are monetized through a grassroots salesforce.
This is not a production network; that is assumed…this network concept brings together companies and producing teams that already know how to do this, and are ready to put shows out into the world.
In this network, the creators create, and the sales merchants sell. There are job descriptions for everyone.
But here’s where it’s a bit different:
Revenue is distributed equitably across the network up to a predetermined threshold for each show.
Through a distributed network of salespeople (here she uses her experience selling knives from Cutco as a college student) a pot of money is shared…and then it gets shared to those in the network at a predetermined liveable wage to support the creators. Of note: “hit” shows will still be rewarded, and there will also be a way out; everything is governed by a set of coherent and transparent by-laws from the organizing body.
All of this will be run by a small governing body (which will be cooperatively run) to provide administrative support and management; and connect the sales people with the creators. This body will also decide which shows are in the network, based on a set of clear and transparent metrics.
And sure, you might be thinking: what is the Jabberwocky nonsense? Can thou slain “the jaws that bite and claws that catch?”
Maybe, just maybe, once we walk through this looking glass, we can get to the next chapter in this fairy tale, and wake up to live happily ever after.
Does this appeal to you?
Are you a creator with an existing show who believes in this vision?
Are you a sales professional who can see this vision?
Are you a funder who might be able to get this off the ground?
Are you someone who can offer support in some other way that we haven’t even thought of, or just want to connect?
If you even thought about about answering yes to any of these questions, please go and fill out this GOOGLE FORM (your information will not be shared with anyone without your explicit permission).
As for my listening habit, I can’t wait to get back into that with you soon.
In the coming weeks, I will have an exclusive interview with Lauren Chooljian and Alison MacAdam, two of the creators involved in The 13th Step, which I named the #1 most Bingeworthy podcast of 2023.
Catch up on that show here:
Mildred, that's so fascinating...something interesting to research. Indeed distribution is a tough one, over and over. It's continual re-invention alongside all the technological changes as well. Thanks for the note!
The collective idea reminds me so much of United Artists in film. Elevating the artist. Striving for equity. Taking on distribution, always the hardest nut to crack and keep cracked.