This story was adapted from Age of Audio.

The history of podcasting has rarely been told. But in this episode, the brightest minds in podcasting reveal the inside story of this medium: from the invention of RSS feeds, through the Gold Rush era of corporate investments, to the bubble bursting, and the rise of celebrity podcasts. Along the way, Ira Glass explains the origins of This American Life and Serial, Marc Maron recounts Obama visiting his garage, Roman Mars lays out his vision for indie podcasts, and so much more. This story was adapted from the feature documentary Age of Audio.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

Arthur Benson - Figured Out
Wesley Slover - Just Facts 12
Wesley Slover - Infinity System

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View Transcript ▶︎

[dramatic sting]

[20K Sonic Logo]

Shaun Michael Colón: Well, Dallas, um, I've told this story before, but this is the first time I'm telling it to the person who is in the story.

Dallas Taylor: I would love to hear it.

[music in: Arthur Benson - Figured Out]

This is my friend Shaun.

Shaun Michael Colón: Hi, I'm Shaun Michael Colón. I am a director and a audio engineer and a filmmaker.

Shaun recently made a documentary about podcasting, called Age of Audio.

Dallas Taylor: How did Age of Audio come to be? Like, how'd you get the idea?

Shaun Michael Colón: 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.

[sfx: Wilhelm Scream]

Shaun Michael Colón: And anyone who's a long time fan of Twenty Thousand Hertz knows that there's an episode on the sound of Wilhelm Scream.

[UI boops]

Twenty Thousand Hertz: 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?

Shaun Michael Colón: 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.

This American Life: From WBEZ in Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in three acts…

Shaun Michael Colón: 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 my previous documentary.

99% Invisible: This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Shaun Michael Colón: 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?"

Dallas Taylor: Hopefully I did not ruin your life in that, but it's a very good documentary.

Shaun Michael Colón: Yeah, you did, but it's okay.

Shaun Michael Colón: 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…

Dallas Taylor: Me too.

Shaun Michael Colón: And I appreciate you, uh, and, and also scorn you for giving me that idea.

[music out]

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 Weight For It. After I saw the film, I asked Shaun 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.

Archival: 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.

[podcast montage begins]

Ronald Young Jr.: 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.

(podcast montage continues)

[music in: Wesley Slover - Just Facts 12]

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, then you're one of the world's five hundred and eighty four million regular podcast listeners. You might even know someone who's made a podcast.

Ronald Young Jr.: 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.

Ronald Young Jr.: 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.

Ronald Young Jr.: In many ways, the story of podcasting is a story about technology.

Adam Curry: Well, my name is Adam Curry.

Adam Curry got his break as a video DJ, or "VJ" on MTV in the late 1980s.

Archival: Morning everybody, it's Adam Curry here with you, and of course all your favorite music and more is on the way.

Adam Curry: I am known as the co-inventor of podcasting.

Adam Curry: Lemme go back to, 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 Winer.

Dave Winer is a software engineer who helped create the tools that made blogging possible.

Dave Winer: By the time we were getting to podcasting, we had already created blogging.

Adam Curry: And he had created this RSS syndication format.

"RSS" stands for Really Simple Syndication.

Ronald Young Jr.: 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 [sfx: UI ping] whenever a new post went up. This worked great for text-based sites like blogs and news sources, but audio and video were trickier.

Dave Winer: At that point in time, the uh, internet was much slower than it is today. Nobody's gonna sit there and wait for three seconds of audio for five minutes.

That's Dave Winer again, the inventor of RSS. Adam Curry came to Dave with an idea for how to tweak RSS to handle audio.

Dave Winer: 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 the morning your audio was ready to play.

Adam Curry: It knew to be looking for a new program, if it was there, it would say, "Ooh!" It would download it, put it on my hard drive, and then would say, "I have something new."

Dave Winer: You don't find out that the audio has been downloaded until it's already on your machine.

Ronald Young Jr.: 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.

Dave Winer: I thought we'd just put it out there, and then they would start doing the podcasts. It doesn't happen like that.

Ronald Young Jr.: Three and a half years go by. It's now summer 2004.

Dave Winer: I had been on Adam's case the whole time, "Adam, why aren't you doing one of these things?"

Ronald Young Jr.: And so he makes——

Adam Curry: It's the Daily Source Code.

Ronald Young Jr.: 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.

Dave Winer: And then there was Don and Drew, and Dave Slusher…

Evil Genius Chronicles: Hello, friends and neighbors. This is Dave Slusher, this is the Evil Genius Chronicles.

Dave Winer: On and on. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Ronald Young Jr.: And this newly created system was perfect for those early internet hosts. They would've never been picked up for broadcast radio shows. Their listening audiences were specific, small, but who needs a radio station anymore?

Chris Bannon: 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.

Chris Bannon: 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 Radiolab's creator Jad Abumrad.

Jad Abumrad: I remember On the Media

Archival: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone…

Jad Abumrad: …was 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.

Ben Hammersley: 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.

Ben Hammersley: 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.

Ben Hammersley: 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, um 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.

Ben Hammersley: 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.

Ronald Young Jr.: What happened next would seal the deal for the name and the medium.

Here's Adam Curry.

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.

Adam Curry: He invited me to D3 conference where he was on stage. And he sits down and he says, um, "I wanna put podcasting into iTunes. Is that okay?" I'm like, "Yeah!"

Ronald Young Jr.: 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.

Dave Winer: 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, you know, "Go listen to this at Apple." "Go listen to this at Google," whatever. They say, "Wherever you get your podcast."

Archival: Wherever you get your podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts, listen to podcast. Listen wherever you get podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.

Jesse Thorn: 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 Thorn, founder of the Maximum Fun podcast network.

Jesse Thorn: 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.

Ronald Young Jr.: 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.

Ricky Gervais: You're listening to Ricky Gervais. With me, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington. You're thinking, "Well, why are we doing a podcast? Why are we doing a podcast for, for, for no money?"

Archival: Is there no money?

Ricky Gervais: There's… no.

For comedians, the appeal of podcasting was the freedom to say whatever they wanted.

Ronald Young Jr.: 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 Jad Abumrad again.

Jad Abumrad: 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.

Lisa Simpson: I'm just gonna chill out with a little This American Life.

Stephen Colbert: Please welcome Ira Glass!

This American Life: From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

[music out]

Before This American Life, NPR shows tended to be dry and unemotional... just stating the facts.

NPR: 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.

This American Life: 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.

Joe Frank: An orchestra dressed in white tuxedos played on the proscenium stage at one end of the room, while above the dancefloor, 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.

Ira Glass: I was assigned as his production assistant, so I would sit in the studio as he would like record.

Joe Frank: 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.

Ira Glass: And I remember just standing there in the old like NPR office on M Street, recording on like reel to reel tape, and Joe's in the studio like performing his script.

Joe Frank: And as my hands began to tremble and my eyes welled up with tears, Dr. Reigart removed his stethoscope from his leather bag.

Ira Glass: 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.

Ira Glass: 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.

This American Life: From WBEZ in the glorious city of Chicago, Illinois. I'm uh... I'm your MC. I'm your MC, Ira Glass.

Here's Julie Snyder, who was This American Life's Editor and Senior Producer.

Julie Snyder: 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.

This American Life: 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.

Ira Glass: 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 audience is larger than the radio audience.

As This American Life became a hit podcast, Ira Glass became one of 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.

Avery Trufelman: 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 like hesitant like "mm" thoughtful way we ask our questions, the earnest, yet anxious tone…

Ronald Young Jr.: 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 Dzotsi, a co-host of Serial and Reply All.

Emmanuel Dzotsi: 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, for narrative podcasting, is Julie. Like Julie Snyder is the person that I feel like every editor I've met, like wants to be.

Ronald Young Jr.: Julie Snyder, she's a major character in the history of podcasting, got her start at This American Life.

Julie Snyder: 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.

Ronald Young Jr.: And Julie Snyder would be a driving force behind Serial.

[Serial theme in]

Ronald Young Jr.: Even if you know nothing about podcasts, you still probably heard about Serial. I think it's important to understand that Serial's success came 19 years after the first episode of This American Life.

[Serial intro up, then under]

Serial: From This American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial: one story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig.

Archival: Serial has become the most downloaded podcast in iTunes history.

Archival: I was up until four last night listening to this new podcast called Serial. Have you?

Archival: I did listen to Serial, and I loved it.

Ira Glass: 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.

Ira Glass: 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, like 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 eighty million times. And it helped kickstart the true crime podcast craze that's still huge today.

Stephen Colbert: My next guest is the host of the wildly popular Serial podcast. Please welcome Sarah Koenig.

Stephen Colbert: What is it like to be big time in podcasting? Is it all just golden microphones, and diamond-studded water bottles, and "Ira Glass, get my coffee!" What is it?

Sarah Koenig: My favorite thing is that my neighbor in Pennsylvania calls me "Big Time" now. My neighbor Bill. He'll be like "Hey, Big Time!"

Stephen Colbert: 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.

SNL: Maybe there are people out there who claim they've seen Kris leave lots of presents. Maybe they've written him letters. Maybe they've 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.

Ira Glass: To be fair, like it wasn't just Serial. 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 "Podcasts" and they could push it, and then it would just list the top podcast.

Ronald Young Jr.: 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.

[end music with a bubble pop]

MIDROLL

[music in]

From the beginning of Twenty Thousand Hertz, 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.

99% Invisible: This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

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 pledge 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 99pi's first full-time producers.

Avery Trufelman: There's this old world, right? Where the expectation I was raised with was like, "You'll toil an obscurity for years. You'll be paid nothing, and you won't matter. Maybe in a few years, you will help a very interesting host to make a show, if you're lucky to get a job at all."

Roman Mars: 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.

Avery Trufelman: 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 gonna party together."

Ronald Young Jr.: In 2014, independent producer Roman Mars officially launched Radiotopia.

(montage of Radiotopia shows)

Radio Diaries: From PRX's Radiotopia, this is Radio Diaries. I'm Joe Richmond.

Song Exploder: You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.

Criminal: We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best shows around.

Roman Mars: Fundamentally, the show in Radiotopia, they're just fun to listen to. But I think they also represent the best of podcasting as an art form.

Roman Mars: 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 Kaitlyn Prest, who launched The Heart podcast in 2014.

Kaitlyn Prest: Radiotopia gave us $25,000 as a starter bump. That's it.

Twenty five thousand dollars 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.

Kaitlyn Prest: Because of the association with the big shows on that network, our audience doubled. That allowed us to make money.

Roman Mars: 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.

Roman Mars: I'm really looking for the people 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've found. More and more people really want a job.

Ronald Young Jr.: 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.

Brendan McDonald: Marc 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.

Marc Maron: Like, I don't know. I don't even know what this is. Like, because podcasting was so weird. It was the Wild West.

WTF: Lock the gates! Alright, let's do this. How are you folks? It's me, Marc.

Brendan McDonald: 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.

Marc Maron: And I had no interest in it.

That's Marc.

Marc Maron: 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. This is a president of the United States. So, you know, there was some interest that came out of Obama's camp.

Brendan McDonald: We got this phone call saying, "We'd like to do your show." So that means have the president go to the garage.

Marc Maron: "Well, that's ridiculous. That's not gonna happen."

Ronald Young Jr.: But it did happen. At the time, it seemed both absolutely bonkers, and like a major turning point in the 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.

Marc Maron: I remember asking the president, you know, "Are you nervous?"

Obama: No, I wasn't.

Marc Maron: Okay. Well that's good.

Obama: That makes, that would be a problem.

Marc Maron: It would be a problem!

Obama: …if the president was feeling stressed about…

Marc Maron: …coming to my garage.

Obama: …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 Marc'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.

Brendan McDonald: It was a great moment, but after it, it was right back to work.

Marc Maron: We just kept doing the show, but we were aware of the impact on our profile, but also on podcasts.

Watershed moments like these helped convince advertisers to invest in podcasting. And the thing that podcast sponsors want most is a personal endorsement from the show's host. Here's Dan Granger, CEO of the podcast ad agency Oxford Road.

Dan Granger: 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 twelve 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.

Alec Baldwin: This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's The Thing.

Ronald Young Jr.: As audiences grew, one enterprising public radio journalist made a well-timed bet on the medium.

Alex Bloomberg: 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.

Ira Glass: He's a great producer and uh, 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."

Ira Glass: 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 a hit, and some of them you'll kill, and just treat it the way a movie studio would.

Ronald Young Jr.: 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.

Reply All: From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm PJ Vogt.

Reply All's success helped Gimlet fund shows like Crimetown, Heavyweight, Science Versus, and more. People started calling the studio, "the HBO of podcasts."

Ronald Young Jr.: Investors took notice, a bunch of networks and production companies sprung up, and Hollywood came calling.

Dan Granger: When iHeart Media 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 three hundred million, and Sirius XM bought the podcast app Stitcher for three hundred and twenty five million.

Ronald Young Jr.: Things were really heating up. Then it all came to a screeching halt.

NBC News: Illinois and Ohio closing all bars and restaurants beginning tonight. California shutting down bars and wineries, and asking those sixty five and older to self-isolate.

Dan Granger: 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 one point five billion dollars.

Ira Glass: 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.

Hernan Lopez: I think money is good for podcasting. That means more shows will get made, more voices will be heard.

That's Hernan Lopez, founder of one of the biggest podcast networks, Wondery.

Hernan Lopez: From money, usually you get more listeners, and more creators coming to any one 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.

Dialogue: There was a lot of big money flying, always flying over the heads of the people who actually made the stuff.

Dialogue: As things started to grow, like as the company started to grow, it felt that that growth was prioritized.

Dialogue: It's really hard to keep humanity at the center of it, I think, when you scale.

Dialogue: 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.

Dialogue: You're just like, "Okay, like we gotta hit like the next metric and the next metric."

Dialogue: The big companies with the big dollars say, "Hey, welcome. Keep doing what you're doing. We're gonna put a jet pack on your back, and blast you 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 Mars.

Roman Mars: It's not just that I have an ethic that's about independence. The offers aren't good enough for it to matter.

Roman Mars: 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.

Ronald Young Jr.: You remember Serial. How did they make that business model work?

Julie Snyder: People were saying to me, "They really wanna diversify. You guys might wanna think about doing subscriptions, or doing like a Patreon kind of thing." I dunno, just like every part of it really stressed me out.

Ronald Young Jr.: For many small podcasts...

Including ours!

Ronald Young Jr.: …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.

Julie Snyder: I don't have to run Serial anymore, which is very nice.

Ronald Young Jr.: And the folks who made Serial were not the only ones cashing in.

[music in]

Roman Mars: 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.

Roman Mars: So for the first time in my career, since I worked at WBEZ in Chicago in the early 2000s, I, I'm like an employee of a company.

Roman Mars: 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. And I still believe in all of it.

Roman Mars: 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 Hrishikesh Hirway, host of the Radiotopia show Song Exploder.

Hrishikesh Hirway: I think the thing that was hardest about that was that Roman was the person who brought me in to Radiotopia. And the fact was most of us were there because of a personal relationship that we had with him.

Hrishikesh Hirway: And I think his enthusiasm the idea of what the network was, was such an important part. It felt like, um, the hub of the wheel was gonna be going away. But that felt hard and, you know, maybe potentially destabilizing.

[music out]

Ronald Young Jr.: But things were about to change for the entire industry.

Pretty soon, these big corporations figured out what indie podcasters had always known... 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.

Ronald Young Jr.: 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.

Ronald Young Jr.: 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.

[montage: Good Hang with Amy Poehler, Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, Oprah Podcast]

Good Hang: Hey everyone, I'm Amy Poehler, and I'm launching a new podcast called Good Hang.

Conan: And uh, this is my new podcast Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend.

Oprah: 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.

Dan Granger: 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, 'cause everybody just wants to see on a screen if they're financing the deal.

Here's indie podcaster John Delore describing these changes.

John Delore: 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… the "Podcast Industrial Complex," as I call it.

John Delore: 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.

Ronald Young Jr.: So what does this all mean for folks trying to make it in podcasting today? With so many podcasts, what is success?

After collecting all of this material for Age of Audio, Shaun, 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 almost ten years, I have my own thoughts and strong feelings about it.

In my conversation with Shaun, we dove deep into our hopes, fears, and predictions for the podcast industry, and what all of this means for Twenty Thousand Hertz.

That's all coming up, next time.

[music out]

[music in: Wesley Slover - Infinity System]

That story was adapted from Age of Audio, a fantastic documentary about the history of podcasting. The full version is over ninety 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 Weight For It. The film isn't widely available just yet, so for updates, visit A-O-A movie dot com, or follow A-O-A movie on Instagram or Tiktok. All of the links are in the show notes.

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced by my sound agency, Defacto Sound. Hear more at defacto sound dot com, or by following Defacto Sound on Instagram.

Other Voices: This episode was adapted for audio by Nikolas Harter and Casey Emmerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Joel Boyter.

Thanks so much to Shaun Michael Colón for sharing this material with us. Follow Shaun 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 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, find me on Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram under the name Dallas Taylor dot mp3.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]