Why Podcasting Is Different

The unique thing about podcasting is the flexibility it enables for both producers and the audience. Both producers and audiences enjoy immensely more freedom today than they did in the broadcast schedule. Creative people, whether voice talent, writers, or ordinary people with a passion — about almost anything, from their hobby to the history of their family or a project at work — can find an audience. Even small audiences are eminently reasonable in podcasting, because the costs of producing and delivering programs are so low that any niche interest can be served. We saw the same phenomenon in publishing with the advent of computer desktop publishing, when a flowering of small magazines suddenly appeared to serve incredibly focused markets and newsletters sprouted in every industry and at every company.

Listeners, too, are freed in an important way: The schedule they listen on is in their hands, not controlled by the broadcaster who delivers the shows. Podcasts allow the complete reordering of the listening day, providing users who download programs the ability to start and stop a program at will, to listen at their leisure to programs at any time of the day or night. The result of this bidirectional freedom is a media environment where programming is offered by producers and selected and listened to by people on a fluid schedule and under a far broader range of business models than were possible before. Add to this easy-to-distribute environment the element of portability — a podcast can be loaded onto a variety of portable devices, from MP3 players to wireless telephone handsets — and the location of the listener has been radically transformed. No longer does listening to a program on the Web mean having to be tethered to your computer. Just export the show to your iPod and go.

Thousands, if not millions, of different messages can be delivered through a podcast. What blogs are to the newspapers, podcasts are for radio, deconstructing the strict order of the mass-media marketplace. Where radio and audio production have been rarified professions in the mass media era, the relentless march of Moore's Law has brought the tools and distribution networks that made those mass media expensive to experiment with and compete in to a generation known as podcasters.

Voices make the podcast. For the past 85 years, since commercial radio first appeared, audiences have become accustomed to a narrow range of voices that are "professional," usually deeper than the ordinary speaker and paced like a race or a seduction, but decidedly not like everyone normally speaks. Podcasts break that monopoly. In less than a decade, commercial radio has descended into crisis as audiences flee to the Internet, in the form of streaming and downloadable programming, not to mention the allure of paid commercial-free radio broadcast from satellites in space. Podcasts burst on the scene in late 2004, claiming thousands of listeners in the first few months and millions within a year. Depending on which research firm you believe, between 30 million to 50 million people will be podcast listeners by the end of the decade. The monopoly that was radio is broken, dismantled, kaput.