In a recent article by Charlie Locke on WIRED , Pandora product manager Scott Riggs explains his companies plan to start offering podcasts in addition to songs:
"To cater to listeners accustomed to three-minute songs, Riggs and his
team [at Pandora] break episodes into smaller chapters, unlike the hour-long episodes
available on the Podcasts app. “From a streaming perspective, we think
about it as a continuous listening experience—people will listen for a
bit on their commute or at the gym,” says Riggs. “Taking an hour-long
experience and breaking it into chapters seemed like a seamless way for
users to digest this content.”
Well, yeah, but doesn't breaking the narrative of a podcast like as Serial down into smaller clips - essentially sampling a podcast - kind of defeat the purpose? Serial was literally designed to be longform, that is, the producers want people to take a whole hour and listen straight through. That is actually an important part of the listening experience that effects how deeply we connect with the story and, possibly, how much of it we remember it afterwards, and for how long.
Multimedia is the other big question mark here. I wonder how many people actually go to the websites of podcasts to look at their other content. It's an auditory medium, and that makes it a fundamentally different experience than watching a TV show or Netflix (well maybe not that different from Netflix though, as Netflix is also contained within its proprietary streaming medium). I navigated to Serial's website only once to look at the photos of the burial site. But I never went back. Why? I forgot to. And I didn't really care what they had on the web. I wanted to listen to it. I liked to listen to it.
Similarly, I do not go on other podcasts websites, like Undisclosed, or any, really . I listen to Podcasts. They end, and that's that. And to that extent, Podcasts might as well live on a separate planet from The Internet. I think about them, and often I will actually talk to people about it face to face, in, you know, real life. Say Whaa...? Yep. Weird, I know. But maybe not so weird: To quote from the Wired article:
“Podcasts largely rely on word of mouth,” says Anne Wootton, co-founder and CEO of Pop-Up Archive, which transcribes podcasts, and Audiosear.ch,
which makes them visually searchable. “It’s much less common for people
to come across an excerpt or a clip on Twitter or on Facebook.”
So, to come full circle, I agree that we need a way to share soundbites of podcasts on social media. For instance I want to comment on something at 11:50 into Undisclosed, I can only post a link to the whole podcast and tell people to fast forward to that time stamp. Plus, dragging a little slider is awkward, especially with your finger on a touchscreen.
Most people don't share podcasts because its simply a pain in the ass.
"If you want to respond to a ridiculous tweet, you can embed a GIF on
Twitter. If you want to share your favorite moment from last night’s TV
episode, you can upload a video on Instagram. But there’s no easy way to
share podcasts, other than posting the external link to a full episode
and explaining which part of it you like best. For a medium that relies
on personal recommendations, that’s an especially cumbersome problem."
I agree they need to be more shareable. But I hesitate to make them available in short pre-cut clips. That is starting to seem like a bastardization of the Podcast medium. It verges on saying to the makers, "Hey, I know you spent hours crafting the flow and music and narrative of your podcast, but I know better, thank you very much. And it is important to point at that not all Podcasts are an hour long. Some are longer, like Undisclosed, or Dan Carlin's popular Hardcore History which verges on audio book territory boasting 3 hour long episodes. Some people like long, they want long.(Lets not fail to mention the countless short podcasts out there too. I've found 20-30 minutes to be a great length for a podcast (hello, Stuff You Should Know). Some people don't. In a culture with supposedly ever-shrinking attention spans, the longform medium of podcasts emerged as some kind of backlash against the soundbite society. Now that mainstream media is taking notice, thanks to Serial, they want to have their way with it. Oh no, they say, we want to improve it! "Increase the audience!"
The question is, will this solidify the place of Podcasts in our iOS-crazed culture, or will it fragment it and commercialize the medium to such a degree that whats left is unrecognizable, it's tiny soundbites blown away into the digital netherworld of lost Snapchats and forgotten tweets?
As Ira Glass once said: Stay tuned, listeners.
No comments:
Post a Comment