Audio is having a moment, says the cacophony about heavy wood transistor radios humming in the private spaces of a populace under a plague’s siege. In the end, it could only have been the scent of such beautiful desperation to finally lure the money in, followed single-file by the American story, as always. The Undisputed OG of Broadcast Media rises like a Tucson from the embers of ad tech’s Great Crusades not to seek revenge, but to comfort the only known complex verbal species amid their Biggest Babel Breakdown yet. All it requires, truthfully, is a decent approximation of a real two+-sided conversation. Well… An infinite list of such approximations, anyway, to leave playing in the background. To just hear two people taking turns speaking and then listening.
Honestly, I had absolutely zero intention of contributing any more to this Digital Audio Renaissance conversation. Though I have been stipulating about The Fateful Day when Apple might finally give in to its perception of competition and implement any sort of paid/premium content differentiation function in its directory of RSS feeds as the certain beginning of The End of the medium we recognize as “Podcasting,” I still didn’t consider the recent news of this day’s scheduled manifestation worthy of another meta-media post. Nay, it wasn’t until I overheard a Windows Weekly host describe podcasting as a “new medium” with apparent sincerity at some point within its seven hundred twenty-first episode that I truly lost my mind.
My third, fourth and fifth eyes all opened wide, and I realized he and I were definitely not attributing the same thing to that term, anymore. You probably shouldn’t already be aware that it’s long been produced by This Week in Tech (stylized popularly as TWiT) - which happens to be the oldest podcast-first, for profit media group I can remember - surviving or not. The live, compressed, fucky frame rate image of Leo Laporte sitting alone in a studio-lit room wearing the crown of studio headphones with a mic pointed vaguely at his face is darn near old enough to be considered a childhood memory of mine. I promise to eschew undue idealizing Really Simple Syndication as an open web end in and of itself, but it Really is important in this conversation. Don’t forget to mention just how little the RSS syntax standard has changed in the past twenty years, if it has at all.
https://twitter.com/ashleyrcarman/status/1384610439519158273
I am also not bringing up terminology to resist the extreme breadth of audio content which the label Podcast encompasses - this has been an indisputable truth since the very beginning.