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Twenty Thousand Hertz
Age of Audio: The Inside Story of Podcasting
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A brief history of this strange and beautiful medium.
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Hey listeners. A reminder that there are less than two weeks left to enter this year's Listener Story competition. I know that many of you have an incredible sound story just waiting to be told, and I want to hear it. Just like last year, we'll collect the winning stories into a special series of episodes starting this summer. The top creator will also get a $500 credit to our online store so you can wear a different super soft 20k T shirt every day of the week. If you so choose to see the rules and submit your story, visit 20k.org 2026submissions close on May 31st. There's also a link in the show Notes Summer is when we share more time, more memories, and More photos at ATT. The iPhone 17 Pro is your summer essential. Its center stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone and ATT makes sharing those pictures with everyone easy. Right now at at&t ask how you can get iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone. Trade in any condition requires trade in of iPhone 15 or higher excluding iPhone 16e and 17e requires eligible plan Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit att.comiphone or visit an ATT store for details. You're listening to 20,000 hertz, the stories behind the World's most Recognizable and interesting sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. Well, Dallas, I've told this story before, but this is the first time I'm telling it to the person who is in the story. I would love to hear it. This is my friend Sean. Hi, I'm Shawn Michael Colon. I'm a director and a audio engineer and a filmmaker. Sean recently made a documentary about podcasting called Age of Audio. How did Age of Audio come to be? Like, how'd you get the idea? I was working on one of the potential follow up documentaries to my first documentary and it was about this band called the Wilhelm Scream. And anyone who's a longtime fan of 20,000Hz knows that there's an episode on the sound of Wilhelm's Scream. The Charge at Feather river was the film that gave Wilhelm its name, but it was the second film it was used in. What was the first? And because I wanted to include where the history of that sound came from, I reached out to this podcast host named Dallas Taylor to see if he would do an interview with me about this particular sound as an expert, if you will. And just prior to meeting up with, well, you, I ended up hanging out with Ira Glass at a Punk rock show in Brooklyn. From WBEC Chicago, it's just American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in three acts. And after our interview, we got to talking and I told you the story about how I hung out with Ira Glass at a punk rock show. And also that Roman Mars had done a pull quote on on my previous documentary, this is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars, and you said something along the lines of, you know Roman Mars and now you seem to know Ira Glass. Why don't you do a podcast documentary? Hopefully I did not ruin your life in that, but it's a very good documentary. Yeah, you did, but it's okay. You set me upon a path and from the time you mentioned it to the time we were filming, I think it was about three, four months. But I appreciate our friendship, Dallas, and I appreciate you and also scorn you for giving me that idea. Age of Audio is the best presentation of the strange and surprising history of podcasting that I've ever seen. It's full of insights from podcast icons and unsung heroes. And it's narrated by a great podcaster named Ronald Young Jr. Who hosts a show called Wait for It. After I saw the film, I asked Sean if we could adapt it into a shorter audio only version for our show and thankfully he agreed. So without further ado, this is Age of Audio for Audio. Long before you know, television, film, radio, the printed word, we've been communicating with each other in sound. It's elemental to who we are. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by. Hey there. Welcome to Colonel Brian needs a friend, joined as always by. What is up, everybody? And welcome to the All NBA show. The doctor can take that up and you'd like. All over the world, millions of people are talking into microphones about anything and everything. They all believe they have something to say worth listening to. And they're right, because half a billion people are listening. The world is listening to podcasts. This is the Joe rogan experience. Throw $1 million in the problem. There's no body, no forensics, no admission. When you think of a podcast, you might think of two people sitting around a table talking into microphones. Or you might think of the crafted emotional narratives of shows like this American Life. Of course, podcasts are both of those things and more. And since you're hearing this, you're one of the world's 584 million- regular podcast listeners. You might even know someone who's made a podcast. And this is A story about those people, some you know and others you haven't met yet. They're all on a journey to make it in podcasting today. But what does it mean to make it in podcasting today? Is it even possible? What is this industry? To try to make sense of it, we have to go back to the beginning. I'm Ronald Young Jr. And this is Age of Audio. In many ways, the story of podcasting is a story about technology. Well, my name is Adam Curry. Adam Curry got his break as a video DJ or VJ on MTV in the late 1980s. Morning everybody, it's Adam Curry here with you and of course, all your favorite music and more is on the way. I am known as the co inventor of podcasting. Let me go back to the beginning because actually the technology of podcasting was invented in 2000. So before anyone was podcasting, before there was an ipod, interestingly, I was working with Dave Weiner. Dave Weiner is a software engineer who helped create the tools that made blogging possible. By the time we were getting to podcasting, we had already created blogging and he had created this RSS syndication format. RSS stands for really simple syndication. Syndication is a fancy word for broad distribution, like when a TV show is played on lots of stations or like when the Associated Press writes an article and lots of newspapers run it. Before podcasts, people used RSS feeds to get automatic updates from websites. Instead of visiting a site to check for new stuff, you could subscribe to its RSS feed and get notified whenever a new post went up. This worked great for text based sites like blogs and news sources, but audio and video were trickier. At that point in time, the Internet was much slower than it is today. Nobody's going to sit there and wait for three seconds of audio for five minutes. That's Dave Weiner again, the inventor of rss. Adam Curry came to Dave with an idea for how to tweak RSS to handle audio. I had this famous meeting with Adam Curry. The idea that he had, and it was a brilliant idea, is that you could time shift it. Basically you could set it to download overnight so that by morning your audio was ready to play. It knew to be looking for a new program. If it was there, it would say, oh, it would download it, put it on my hard drive and then would say, I have something new. You don't find out that the audio has been downloaded until it's already on your machine. This moment is huge. If you think about it, it's before Twitter, pre YouTube, there's no Facebook, no Instagram, no TikTok. It's a profound shift culturally and historically, but at first, no one really got it. I thought we'd just put it out there and then they would start doing the podcast. It doesn't happen like that. Three and a half years go by. It's now summer 2004. I had been on Adam's case the whole time. Adam, why aren't you doing one of these things? And so he makes. It's the daily source code. Adam was one of the first people to make what was basically a radio show but for the Internet. Things started to pick up after that. And then there was Don and Drew and Dave Slusher. Hello, friends and neighbors. This is Dave Slusher. This is the Evil Genius Chronicles. On and on. Boom, boom, boom, boom. This newly created system was perfect for those early Internet hosts. They would have never been picked up for broadcast radio shows. Their listening audiences were specific, small. But who needs a radio station anymore? All you need is a laptop and a blue microphone that costs you $200. That's Chris Bannon, who's worked in the industry for decades. You can throw a blanket over your head and create a show. And for a brief period in the aughts and the early teens, you might start a show in your living room that would have a million listeners soon. Radio shows wanted in on the action, so they started publishing their episodes via rss. Here's Radiolabs creator, Jad Abumrad. I remember on the Media. This is on the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. It was one of the first shows to do that. And suddenly they were like, oh, my God, we just got 50,000 people downloading our show. What just happened? To take these episodes on the go, most people used an ipod, which is where the word podcast comes from. It's a combination of ipod and broadcasting. But this term wasn't coined by Apple. I'm Ben Hammersley, and I do many things, but mostly I'm the person who invented the word podcast. In 2004, Ben was a writer for the Guardian newspaper in the uk. And at the time, the newspaper was paper centric, which meant that all of the deadlines were for the print presses to run. And I'd written this article about this sort of emerging idea of downloadable audio content that was automatically downloaded because of an RSS feed. I'd submitted the article on time, but then I got a phone call from my editor about 15 minutes before the presses were due to roll, saying, hey, that piece is about a sentence short for the shape of the page. We don't have time to, you know, move the page around. Can you just write us another sentence? And so I just made up a sentence which says something like, but what do we call this phenomenon? And then I made up some silly words. It went out, it went into the article. Didn't think any more of it. And then about six months later or so, I got an email from the Oxford American Dictionary saying, hey, where did you get that word from? That was in the article you wrote. It seems to be the first citation of the word podcast. Now here we are almost 20 years later, and it became part of the discourse. What happened next would seal the deal for the name and the medium. Here's Adam Curry. And then I got a call from Apple. Steve wants to meet with you. Do you have any time meaning? Steve Jobs, the famous Apple CEO, he invited me to D3 conference, where he was on stage, and he sits down, he says, I want to put podcasting into itunes. Is that okay? I'm like, yeah. At this point, Apple could have tried to make this technology the exclusive property of Apple, but they didn't do that. Instead, they decided to take advantage of all this free content to draw folks closer to their Apple devices. And they didn't worry too much about the fact that you could listen to podcasts lots of different ways. Part of the DNA of podcasting is that the user has a choice of how they listen to it. They're just listening to it wherever they feel like listening to it. There's hardly any podcasts that say, go listen to this at Apple, go listen to this at Google, or whatever they say, wherever you get your podcast, wherever you get your podcast, wherever you get your podcast, wherever you get your podcast, wherever you get your podcast, wherever you get your podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. One of the things that is beautiful about podcasting is that it is, in some ways, the last vestige of the idealism of the Internet. That's Jesse Thorne, founder of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network. It's about connecting people with each other. It's about something that almost anyone can do. Gradually, more and more people started seeing the appeal of podcasting. The tech folks were the early adopters, as usual, and public radio broadcasters were a natural fit. But there was another very specific group of people who embraced this new outlet, and that was comedians, people like Marc Maron, Kevin Smith, and Ricky Gervais. You're listening to Ricky Gervais with me, Stephen Merchant, and Carl Pilkington. You're thinking, well, why are we doing a podcast why are we doing a podcast for no money? Is there no money? No. For comedians, the appeal of podcasting was the freedom to say whatever they wanted. In the United States, the FCC imposes strict penalties on folks who break community standards on the airwaves. But the FCC doesn't control the Internet. It also helped comedians book gigs. They could show their download numbers to comedy club managers and say, look how many listeners I have in your city. You should put me on the lineup. But one of the most influential people in the early years of podcasting was Ira Glass, the host and main creator of this American Life. Here's Chad Abumrad again. When I first got into radio, I mean, I got into it just as everybody my age at that time, because I wanted to make some version of this American Life. Just gonna chill out with a little this American Life. Please welcome Ira Glass, wdez, Chicago. It's this American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. Before this American Life, NPR shows tended to be dry and unemotional, just stating the facts. President elect Reagan met with running mate George Bush and other top advisors today to plan their transition to power. But the stories in this American Life were full of emotion, with character arcs and unexpected twists and turns. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this whole story is how little our memories had deceived us about each other, even if they had deceived us about ourselves. So where did Ira get the idea to produce stories like this? A lot of it goes back to the writer and radio performer Joe Frank. For decades, Joe produced fictional radio stories that were absurd, beautiful, and philosophical all at once. An orchestra dressed in white tuxedos played on the proscenium stage at one end of the room, while above the dance floor, a disco ball with little reflective mirrors turned slowly, throwing off a splash of moving snowflake lights throughout the entire ballroom. Early in Ira's radio career, he worked with Joe at npr. I was assigned as his production assistant. I would sit in the studio as he would, like, record. And then we were skimming across the top of the water, and I could see the lights of the harbor and the hotel receding into the distance. I remember just standing there in the old, like, NPR office on M Street, recording on, like, reel to reel tape recording. And Joe's in the studio, like, performing his script. And as my hands began to tremble and my eyes welled up with tears, Dr. Riegert removed his stethoscope from his leather bag. And I remember just thinking, like, he's telling this story. And I just felt so like Caught up in it. And then when I started to make stories, like, I wanted to do that, but I wanted the stories to be true. I wanted it to be like real people talking about real stuff and just figuring out how to do that just took me years. This American Life started as a radio show. We've been on the air since 1995. When it started, podcasting wasn't happening at all. I found the funding myself and did it with WBEZ in Chicago, which is where I was living from WBEZ in the glorious city of Chicago, Illinois. I'm. I'm your mc. I'm your mc, Ira Glass. Here's Julie Snyder, who is this American Life's editor and senior producer. You know, the early years of the show was just trying to figure it out. And then we started doing live shows, Then we did the TV show. You know, when we started talking about doing a television show, we knew we wanted to do something that would keep the feeling of the radio show. We've experimented a lot. As soon as it was possible to put the show up on the Internet, we put it up on the Internet. And then it just gradually grew and grew and grew until podcast audiences larger than the radio audience. As this American Life became a hit podcast Ira Glass became one of the medium's first celebrities. And the style of storytelling that he pioneered inspired countless others, like Avery Trufelman. She was a producer at 99% Invisible, who now hosts the show Articles of Interest. I feel like a lot of us are just following the rules that Ira Glass set from literally the way we all open our shows, like this is blah, blah, blah, I'm blah, blah, blah that, like, doing it in separate acts. Like, the way we collect room tone, the hesitant, like, mm, thoughtful way we ask our questions, the earnest yet unctuous tone. And while Ira may have set the tone in front of the mic, behind the scenes, there was a whole team of folks who deserve credit for fueling the success of this American Life. Here's Emmanuel Jochi, a co host of Serial and Reply All. I think we talk about, like, Ira as being, like, a blueprint for a lot of people, and he totally is. But there's a blueprint for hosts and there's a blueprint for everybody else. And I feel like the blueprint for everybody else, especially editors in this business. The narrative podcasting is Julie. Like, Julie Snyder is the person that I feel like every editor I've met, like, wants to be Julie Snyder. She's a major character in the history of podcasting. Got her start at this American Life, Ira was really fun and driven. It was all about the show. It was so important. It just felt like I lived and breathed the show and learning how to do it and the stories, that was all of our lives. That's what the other producers on the show did. It felt exciting. It felt like being like kind of part of something larger. And Julie Snyder would be a driving force behind Serial. Even if you know nothing about podcasts, you still probably heard about cereal. I think it's important to understand that Cereal's success came 19 years after the first episode of this American Life. From this American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial. One story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig. Serial has become the most downloaded podcast in itunes history. I was up until 4 last night listening to this new podcast called Serial. I did listen to Serial and I loved it. The thing that was new that we didn't know if anybody could do was we didn't know if anybody would stick around for a story that lasted more than one episode. Like in radio broadcasting and in podcasting, everything always ended after an hour. And so the question with Serial and the science project of it was, can you make something that has kind of the stickiness of a television show that you would binge watch? You know, would people stay with it the way they watch those shows? It turned out the answer was a resounding yes. Within six months, Serial had been downloaded over 80 million times, and it helped kickstart the true crime podcast craze that's still huge today. My next guest is the host of the wildly popular Serial podcast. Please welcome Sarah Koenig. What is it like to be big time in podcasting? Is it all just golden microphones and diamond studded water bottles? Pyro glass? Get my coffee. What is it? My favorite thing is that my neighbor in Pennsylvania calls me big time now. Oh, yeah, you are big time. You are big time. Serial got so big, it was even parodied on SNL in a sketch about investigating the mystery of Kris Kringle. Maybe there are people out there who claim they've seen Kris leave lots of presents. Maybe they've written in letters. Maybe they've seen sat on his lap. And then there's the Nisha call. Next time on Serial. This was the moment that podcasts really exploded into the mainstream. To be fair, like, it wasn't just cereal. Apple came out with a version of its OS on the iPhone that included a podcast app. And that happened a month or two before Serial dropped. Just coincidentally, they had this thing like right there. It was like podcast. And they could push it and then it would just list the top podcast. And sure, now anyone can have a podcast, but for a narrative show something in the style of this American Life, it's not fast and it's not easy. Honestly, it takes money and not everyone has that. But sometimes you could find folks willing to put up some cash. After the break, Roman Mars builds the indie record label of podcasts, Marc Maron interviews the president, and then the podcasting bubble bursts. You know why I love Summer? All those plans we made. Finally make it out of the group chat and into the real world because there's more time to fit everyone in. Whatever you've got in store this summer, capturing those memories with your crew is a must. And the iPhone 17 Pro from AT&T helps you do just that. Its center stage front camera Auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone. That means no awkward cropping or asking strangers to take it, just the perfect group selfie every time. And ATT makes sharing those moments with everyone easy because you have to share the picture or it didn't happen. Right? Right now at, at and t ask how you can get iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone Trade in any condition requires trade in of iPhone 15+ or higher, excluding the iPhone 6, 16e and 17e requires eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit att.com iPhone or visit an AT&T store for details. Congratulations to David Clark for getting last episode's mystery sound right. That's the drum fill at the start of the EastEnders theme song. It's a BBC soap opera that's been running continuously since 1985 and now has over 7,300 episodes. These little drum hits are known by fans as the Duff Duffs or Doof Doofs. They're used for cliffhanger moments at the end of episodes, usually right after a character says or does something shocking. Marry me. And here's this episode's mystery sound. If you know that sound, tell us at the web address mystery.2000. Anyone who guesses it right will be entered to win a super soft 20,000 Hz T shirt. When I started 20,000 hertz, all I really wanted to do was tell stories about sound. But pretty quickly I realized that running a show meant starting a whole new business which needed a logo, a website, a merch store, marketing on and on. If you could use help with any of the above, then you need Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. And it's also how we started selling our super soft 20,000Hz T shirts. It's a great way to build a web store, but it goes so far beyond that. It's really like having a built in business partner because Shopify has world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns. And when it's time to get the word out, you can run email and social media campaigns right from inside the platform. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com 20k just go to shopify.com 20k again, that's shopify.com 20k. For any successful business, good communication is crucial because if your team's communication is messy, customers feel it. Missed messages, dropped threads, slow replies. It's one of the easiest ways to lose momentum. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q U o the business communications system built so you never miss a call. More than 90,000 businesses, businesses from solo operators to growing teams, rely on Quo to stay connected with Quo. Your entire team can handle calls and texts from one shared number. That way there are no more missed messages or forgotten conversations. Everyone sees the full thread, replies are faster and customers feel taken care of. When you sign up, you can keep your existing number, add teammates in minutes, and sync any CRM software you're already using. Then you can let the call routing handle itself. As your business grows, money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com 20k that's qU-U-O.com 20k. From the beginning of 20,000 Hz, my biggest influence was 99% invisible. Because in many ways, 99pi laid the groundwork for how to make it as an indie podcast. From storytelling techniques to how you monetize and promote your show. And that goes back to the show's creator and host, Roman Mars. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I had worked in public radio since 2001, and I worked on every type of public radio show that has ever existed. The model for public radio funding is they put on the shows. They do fledge drives to pay for the shows. The producers were usually the last people to get paid in that system. Here's Avery Trufelman, one of 99 PI's first full time producers. There's this old world, right, where the expectation I was raised with was like, you will toil in obscurity for years, you will be paid nothing and you won't matter. Maybe in a few years you will help a very interesting host make a show, if you're lucky to get a job at all. And that was really something that I hated about the public radio system. Roman imagined something better, something like an indie record label, but for podcasts. In his vision, creators would retain control over what they make, but would support each other and grow their audiences together. Okay, imagine how dreamy this would be, right? Like one of your favorite bands asks you to join and they're like, oh, by the way, we're incorporating all your other favorite bands. And now you're all going to party together. In 2014, independent producer Roman Mars officially launched Radiotopia from PRX's Radiotopia. This is Radio Diaries. I'm Joe Richman. You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from prx, a collection of the best shows around. Fundamentally, the shows in Radiotopia, they're just fun to listen to, but I think they also represent the best of podcasting as an art form. I just believe that you should live life betting on yourself, and ownership is the ultimate betting on yourself. One of the creators Roman recruited early was Caitlin Prest, who launched the Hart podcast in 2014. Radiotopia gave us $25,000 as a starter bump. That's it. $25,000 doesn't go very far when you have a staff of people to pay. But the biggest incentive for joining Radiotopia wasn't the immediate money. It was the connection with the other shows in their network. Because of the association with the big shows on that network, our audience doubled. That allowed us to make money. All I wanted for this whole thing was for a bunch of people to be paid well, to do a good job creating something that people cared about. I wanted to make sure that the people who made the thing got paid first, instead of the administrators who made the station run. All these things were all about me trying to correct all these issues I had with my experience inside of public radio. I'm really looking for the people who, who want to run their own thing and own their own thing and remain independent. We are a collection of independents. There's fewer of those people who actually even want that. That's what I found more and more people really want a job. A network sounds very professional. But for a lot of indie producers, you have to understand things might be pretty DIY recording in your garage, for example, like comedian Marc Maron. Here's producer Brendan McDonald explaining the origins of the show that he and Marc Maron created, which is called WTF. Mark came to me summer of 2009 and said to me, hey, what do you know about podcasts? He said it like it was a thing that he had just heard the day before. I don't even know what this is like, because podcasting was so weird. It was the wild west. All right, let's do this. How are you folks? It's me, Mark. It's this DIY thing that this guy, this comedian out there in the outskirts of Los Angeles does from his garage. It was toward the end of 2014, an email came in to the site that was from the White House WhiteHouse.gov email address. And the pitch was to have Vice President Joe Biden on the show. And I had no interest in it. That's Mark. You know, we had very carefully put politics aside, so we were not a political show. And in my mind, to bring the vice president on was like, why would we do that? But a sitting president's a different thing. He's a president of the United States. So, you know, there was some interest that came out of Obama's camp. We got this phone call saying, we'd like to do your show. So that means have the president go to the garage. Well, that's ridiculous. That's not gonna happen. But it did happen. At the time, it seemed both absolutely bonkers and like a major turning point in that medium. Sure, today a president on a podcast might not sound so odd, but you have to understand, this was almost a decade before the podcast election. I remember asking the president, you know, are you nervous? No, I wasn't. Okay, well, that's good. That makes sense. That would be a problem. It would be a problem if the president was feeling stressed about coming to my garage. Coming to your garage? If serial was the breakout moment for narrative podcasts, then this was the breakout moment for interview podcasts. The president had decided that Mark's audience was worth talking to. And for other public figures, it showed that appearing on a hit podcast could be just as valuable as going on 60 minutes or a late night show. It was a great moment, but after it, it was right back to work. He just kept doing the show. But we were aware of the impact on our profile, but also on podcasting, watershed moments like these helped convince advertisers to invest in podcasting. And the thing that podcast sponsors want the most is a personal endorsement from the show's host. Here's Dan Granger, CEO of the podcast ad agency Oxford Road. When I worked in terrestrial radio, if you wanted a celebrity to endorse your company, even if they were a local radio host, you might sign a half a million dollar contract and pay a talent fee and be locked in for six to 12 months. Podcasting meant you could get an endorsement from Alec Baldwin for free as part of your $10,000 ad buy. That's because Alec Baldwin hosts his own podcast that you can buy ads on. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing. As audiences grew, one enterprising public radio journalist made a well timed bet on the medium. I'm Alex Bloomberg and for a long time I was a producer at the public radio show this American Life and also the co creator of a podcast called Planet Money. I decided to take what I learned from reporting on other people's businesses and start my own business. Here's Ira Glass, he's a great producer and he started here. You know, our show runs like a boutique. Like we only do stuff that we're like super invested in and very excited about. Whereas his idea was like, let's make a mass market product. The idea of Gimlet is, you know, basically create an army of people who know how to do this and then make a ton of shows and then some of them will be hit and some of them you'll kill. And just treat it the way a movie studio would. In fall of 2014, the Startup Podcast documented the creation of the podcast studio Gimlet. A month later, Serial came out. Podcasting had broken through. Then Gimlet launched the hit show Reply all, which was created by P.J. vogt and Alex Goldman from Gimlet. This is reply all. I'm PJVote. Reply All's success helped Gimlet fund shows like Crimetown, Heavyweight, Science Versus and more. People started calling the studio the HBO of podcasts. Investors took notice, a bunch of networks and production companies sprung up and Hollywood came calling. When iHeartMedia spent $55 million in 2018 to purchase stuff Media, the How Stuff Works network. That was the first domino. You started seeing deal after deal where large media companies started purchasing these podcast upstarts. In the span of a year, Spotify bought three podcast networks, Gimlet, Parcast and the Ringer, for a combined price of about half a billion dollars. In 2020, Amazon bought Wondery Studios for 300 million, and Sirius XM bought the podcast app Stitcher for 325 million. Things were really heating up. Then it all came to a screeching halt. Illinois and Ohio closing all bars and restaurants. Beginning tonight, California shutting down bars and wineries and asking those 65 and older to self isolate. At first, when the pandemic hit, everybody froze. A few months go by, and all of a sudden they look at the ratings and they see, hey, wait a minute, we're up. People have more time on their hands and they're listening more. And you literally had millions of amateurs creating their own shows. Everybody became a podcaster. So these corporations started investing even more. By 2021, the ad revenue made by podcasts was around $1.5 billion. The fact that there's money there is, like, having all these, like, weird people stepping into the space just trying stuff. And so for me, like, I feel very amused by the money that's there. There's like a bunch that were, like, really amazing. Just like there's a bunch of TV shows that are really amazing. And then most of it's like, okay or bad. I think money's good for podcasting. That means more shows will get made, more voices will be heard. That's Ernan Lopez, founder of one of the biggest podcast networks, Wondery from Money. Usually you get more listeners and more creators coming to anyone media. I think that can only be a good thing. It really raises the stakes for everyone in the industry, both the platforms as well as the publishers. But there were side effects to this injection of cash, particularly for the employees at these networks who now had corporate bosses. Here are a few of them. There was a lot of big money flying, always flying over the heads of the people who actually made the stuff. As things started to grow, like, as the company started to grow, it felt that that growth was prioritized. It's really hard to keep humanity at the center of it, I think when you scale. So you start to notice that, and you start to notice. There's promises to help build audience, there's promises to help sell your show, there's promises for marketing resources. You're just like, okay, we gotta hit the next metric. And the next metric, the big companies with the big dollars say, hey, welcome. Keep doing what you're doing. We're gonna put a jetpack on your back and blast you to the moon. Just keep doing what you're doing. We're gonna grow it. And then it never came. People were starting to see cracks in the podcasting boom. And some creators started thinking that it might have been better to stay independent. Here's Roman. It's not just that I have an ethic that's about independence. The offers aren't good enough for it to matter. When a company with money is interested in you, they're not interested in you, and they're not even interested in what you create. They're interested in your audience, and you can sell that audience Exactly. Once you remember cereal, how did they make that business model work? People were saying to me, they really want to diversify. You guys might want to think about doing subscriptions or doing, like, a Patreon kind of thing. I don't know. Just, like, every part of it really stressed me out. For many small podcasts, including ours, direct listener support is a real lifeline. But In July of 2020, the serial team had decided to exchange independence for $25 million from the new York Times. I don't have to run cereal anymore, which is very nice. And the folks who made cereal were not the only ones cashing in. I'm Roman Mars. I'm still the creator and host of 99% invisible. It's just that I don't own 99% invisible anymore. That's right. Even 99% invisible went corporate in 2021, Roman left Radiotopia behind and sold his show to Stitcher, which is owned by Sirius xm. So for the first time in my career since I worked at WBEZ in Chicago in the early 2000s, I'm like an employee of a company. My thinking hasn't evolved all that much. And I know that might sound surprising. The part of independence that I value is the ability to do what you want, how you want to do it. I still believe in all of it. It just so happened that for me personally, as a person who ran a single show called 99% invisible, I was done with figuring out how to make money in podcasting. It didn't give me joy anymore. Here's Rishikesh Hirway, host of the Radiotopia show song Exploder. I think the thing that was hardest about that was that Roman was the person who had brought me in to Radiotopia. And the fact was, most of us were there because of a personal relationship that we had with him. And I think his enthusiasm for the idea of what the network was was such an important part. It felt like the hub of the wheel was going to be going away, but that felt hard and, you know, maybe potentially destabilizing, but things were about to change for the entire industry. Pretty soon, these big corporations figured out what indie podcasters had always making a hit podcast is really hard. These shows weren't growing the way they expected them to. And once they crunched the numbers, they realized they weren't seeing a return on their investments. And suddenly this thriving business opportunity came to an abrupt end. It was like someone switched on the overhead lights at the club. The party was over. What came next were mass layoffs. Spotify laid off over 400 podcast employees and dissolved the Gimlet network, absorbing it into Spotify Studios. SiriusXM laid off 475 workers and shut down the Stitcher app. Amazon cut 110 jobs from its wondery network and folded their narrative shows into Audible. And NPR cut 10% of its staff, citing a slowdown in advertising and corporate sponsorship. After years of podcasting being the hottest new thing, investors sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into it, Sobering up was painful. In the years since, most of the ad money has been funneled into chit chat podcasts hosted by celebrities because they're cheap to produce and they come with some degree of built in audience. Hey everyone, I'm Amy Poehler and I'm launching a new podcast called Good Hang and this is my new podcast, Conan o'. Brien. Ryan needs a friend. Hi everyone. Welcome to the Oprah Podcast. I'm so glad to be here with you. And these days, shows like these all include video. Here's Dan Granger again. All anybody talks about in podcasting today is video. It's YouTube, YouTube, YouTube. And things that you used to see. Long form audio driven content, the theater of the mind that's been totally deprioritized. Big investigative pieces like they used to do, those aren't getting the same capital that they were because everybody just wants to see you on a screen if they're financing the deal. Here's indie podcaster John Delore describing these changes. They call it a correction, the bubble bursting, whatever. There's always been problems of how to monetize and there's always been the issue of like the big show gets the attention, gets the ad sales. The younger show has to fight to get resources. And so that predates big podcast, that problem, you know, so you can't put all of that at the feet of the podcast industrial complex, as I call it. But then when you have a misalignment of creative vision on top of that, that's when things start to feel really, really not good. It just got too big too fast. So what does this all mean for folks trying to make it impressive. Podcasting Today with so many podcasts, what is success? After collecting all of this material for Age of Audio, Sean, the documentary's director, has a unique insight into the present and possible future of podcasting. And of course, as someone who's been making this podcast for nearly 10 years, I have my own thoughts and strong feelings about it. In my conversation with Sean, we dove deep into our hopes, fears and predictions for the podcast industry and what all of this means for 20,000 hertz. That's all coming up next time. That story was adapted from Age of Audio, a fantastic documentary about the history of podcasting. The full version is over 90 minutes long, so there are lots of great story threads that we didn't have time for, including the personal journey of the narrator, Ronald Young Jr. And his podcast. Wait for it. The film isn't widely available just yet, so for updates visit AOAMovie.com or follow AOAMovie on Instagram or TikTok. All of the links are in the show notes. 20,000 Hz is produced by my sound agency, Defacto Sound. Hear more@DefactoSound.com or by following Defacto Sound on Instagram. This episode was adapted for audio by Nicholas Harder and Casey Emerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Joel Boyter. Thanks so much to Sean Michael Colon for sharing this material with us. Follow Sean on Instagram under the name of his company, Open Ended Films. Now. My video channel does not involve two people at a table talking into microphones. Instead, I go behind the the scenes with audio professionals in their creative spaces, like going backstage at late night shows or going into the pit at a Broadway musical. There's also sports, music and more. To see all of that, you can find me on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok under the name Dallas Taylor MP3. Thanks for listening. As you heard in this episode, funding a highly produced indie podcast like ours is really, really difficult. 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