Top podcasting tip: if you don’t want the sound of the room to colour tracks, don’t be in a room.
pesos
A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
An Indie Audio Maker’s Manifesto
Identifying strongly at the same time as feeling even more isolated.
People sometimes forget that podcasting, like blogging, started out as an egalitarian medium infused with the anti-hierarchical values of the open-source movement in software. If it is to retain a little of that democratic character in the face of rampant corporatization and Hollywoodization, it needs a flourishing middle class of independent makers who have the freedom to focus on their audio work, follow their creative instincts, and choose honesty over fake neutrality.
I see Jason using what looks like the AT 875 short shotgun mic as his desktop mic, possibly for podcasting and conferencing, and wonder how that compares to a less directional mic like my Electrovoice R50.
There's plenty that is interesting in @emilyjwils article, but given that podcasting is global in scope, I do think it is a pity that the focus is entirely on the US -- apart from one ex-pat thrillingly discovering banana biodiversity.
Podcasting's biggest mistake
I'm not sure I actually read about any biggest mistake, apart from maybe not being united, in the immensely parochial piece. But I can't disagree with this:
Podcasting didn’t start in control of the monied few and gradually become democratized. Podcasting started as a democracy, and now faces the incursion of the monied few.
And while I don't mind about the monied few taking over (well, not too much) I do mind that they are even called podcasts. They really are radio on demand, and we storied few shouldn't be judged by the same standards.
Very hard to believe that Tanner Campbell chose to put his very IndieWeb idea about podcasting on Medium rather than on his own domain. Of course, the idea will never work because the big players don't need it and the small ones won't hurt anyone by witholding their labour.
Episode 01 of my contribution to Dog Days of Podcasting is up. [The Abundance of Nature](https://www.eatthispodcast.com/our-daily-bread-01/)
I'm going to be exploring the history of wheat and bread every day in August.
Privacy notes from the latest Overcast
All interesting, useful and considerate. I expect nothing less. I suppose the only fly in the ointment is this gem:
Podcasting has thrived, grown, and made tons of money for tons of people
I'm not really seeing that.
Hot Pod: Anchor 3.0, The Sauce, On Preservation
The principle puzzle of podcasting lies in the fact that because it has an extremely low barrier to entry, it has an extremely high barrier to scale.
If it's interesting, I'll listen, regardless of audio quality
2 min read
Ah, . So I'll give my standard answer. If what you're saying is interesting, audio quality is less important. Asymcar is my goto example for that. And if what you say is not interesting, no level of production value will make me listen longer.
In between is a grey area. So, specifically addressing Henrik's question, that microcast was perfectly OK, except that once we had dealt with the weather and the question, I had had enough. On all outdoor recording wind noise, handling noise and bumps are the most distressing to me because they are always a shock to my ears. But if I know it is going to be over in three minutes, I can survive.
I've recorded outdoors and walking along myself, almost always with either the built-in microphone on the earbuds or else with an external Zoom iQ-6. The Zoom is actually worse, because it is so much more sensitive to wind and handling. A few times, when I was doing Dog Days of Podcasting, I cheated and recorded while walking along only to shadow myself with a decent mic when I got home. That's fun because you get the spontaneity of unscripted speech with much better sound quality.
And I say podcast discovery IS broken,
2 min read
Nick Quah's Hot Pod newsletter is a lode from which I occasionally extract a nugget. [Today](http://us12.campaign-archive1.com/?u=e7175619f87bd6b29429572aa&id=732cf5e4b1&e=07840946c7), in the wake of the latest Edison Report on podcast listening (in the US) he quotes a bloke from Audible who says:
> To me, the fact that 40% of US adults have tried podcasting, yet only half of them listen regularly, that's astounding. Show me any other medium that has that gap. None. When people sample and don't habituate, it speaks to interest that isn't being met by the content that's available today. There either isn't enough variety of things for people to listen to —or there isn't enough of what they like to meet their appetite. With 350,000 podcasts, that seems like a strange thing to say, but the simple truth is that potential listeners aren't sticking with it — and there are only two potential reasons: not enough good stuff — or they simply can't find it. Solving this could go as far as doubling the audience for podcasting.
I wonder why "Eric Nuzum, Audible’s SVP of Original Content," even bothers to raise the straw man of not enough content. And why he does not raise the question that discovery and subscription are two sides of the same coin. Right now, neither discovery nor subscription is easy.
Nick Quah himself doesn't think discovery is a problem, and that's a problem for me. He says:
> It has always occurred to me that discovery functions in the podcasting space along the same dynamics as the rest of the internet; there is simply so much stuff out there, and so the problem isn’t the discovering an experience in and of itself — it’s discovering a worthwhile or meaningful experience within a universe of deeply suboptimal experiences.
But to me that seems to miss the essential difference between audio and the other things on the internet.
It is hard to get audio at a glance. And the solution is not to make ever shorter bits of attention-grabbing audio. It is to find other ways to recommend and share audio in ways that make it easy to hear a piece, to sample a show and eventually, maybe, to subscribe.