Working Double Time On The Seduction Line

Even with songs that I’m a big fan of and listened to possibly thousands of times over the years, I can still discover out of the blue one day that I never heard specific lines of lyrics correctly. Take, for example, “You Shook Me All Night Long,” AC/DC’s biggest hit, and a track that is propelled at an even faster rate than most of their stuff.

The second verse starts “Working double time/On the seduction line.” At different points, I probably heard this in any number of ways, such as “Working double time/On the production line,” “Working double time/In the seduction room” or “Rocking double time/On the production line,” to name a few. [Also I’m sure I heard “Wanted no applause/Just another course” as “Wanted more applause/Just because” – right up until I actually read the lyrics to write this.]

I’m pretty exact in my listening to music and podcasts, I like to think, and I still mishear things like this example. So it caught my attention months ago when I heard that some avid podcast listeners will listen to shows at double speed to consume them more quickly. Doing this, I thought at the time, would make the familiar voices of favorite hosts sound too fast and distorted, so I never really tried it. Even some listeners who do this wouldn’t speed up shows that had more audio production value to tell fictional stories or to operate as audio documentaries, because the mood created by the audio is an important part of experiencing those shows.

Although podcast interview shows don’t have the extra dimension of dynamic music that can mask or confuse what the words are, I would wonder what I was losing or mishearing by listening to speech twice as quickly.

There are now apps to solve this problem, notably Overcast for Apple devices, that remove pauses from conversations without increasing the speed, to enable quicker consumption of a podcast without distorting the voices. Unfortunately, I can’t say I’ve been able to research these apps, but when I do, I’ll revisit this topic and give an opinion on whether they’re worthwhile.

Podcasts of the moment:

The Last Adopter, episode 1 “The Computer in the Driveway,” Sept. 22, 2017: This short mini-series (three episodes) is sponsored by CA Technologies, and features Lewis Black, taking a technophobe’s point of view, as counterpoint for speakers talking about technological innovations.

The Hidden Brain “You 2.0: Embrace The Chaos,” August 7, 2017: I’ve cited this show and its “You 2.0” series, once before (and probably will one more time, as I work through it). This episode’s guest, economist Tim Harford, relates how less than ideal conditions or live feedback from an audience, raised performances to a higher level – for jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, dealing with a broken piano that couldn’t be replaced in time for a show, and also for Martin Luther King Jr., in his “I Have A Dream” speech, some of which was improvised on the spot.

The Faults In Their Apps

Again, revisiting some topics from last year in this entry. (I promise, the blog will cover new ground going forward). Since May 2016, Pandora appears to have done very little to expand its first foray into podcast distribution (when it picked up NPR’s “This American Life” and “Serial” programs).

It’s surprising but not so surprising at the same time. Pandora has been thoroughly eclipsed by its competitors such as Spotify, even in its main reason for being – streaming music. If anything, in the year and a half since Pandora dipped its toe into podcasts in this manner, the script has flipped – Pandora has become the small fish, not even an equal to podcasting as a media force.

The previous leadership of Pandora recently departed, and apparently did not take the podcasting distribution initiative much further. The new CEO, Roger Lynch (see Variety’s coverage), comes from the satellite TV industry. While Lynch pledges in this story that he will re-commit Pandora to non-music programming, one wonders if that would be at odds with its newer backer, SiriusXM, which invested $480 million in the company after forcing out Tim Westergren, Pandora’s founder and previous CEO, in June 2017.

SiriusXM, as mentioned in the previous blog entry here, is now experimenting with social media sharing of audio, non-music programming, with its new Spoke app. Pairing an interest in Pandora with Spoke illuminates SiriusXM’s pursuit of a new strategy of mixing free content with samples of content that is normally behind paywalls.

The clarity of this strategy is suspect, however. Arbitrarily distributing some content for free and some for subscription fees, without carefully curating the content or assessing its value, seems too scattershot – like SiriusXM, overall, with Pandora and Spoke, is throwing different business model approaches at audiences to see what sticks or what works.

Editor’s Note: As an aside, the Spoke app I raved about in the previous entry does have some glitches, I’ve since discovered. The audio player can tend to pause repeatedly on its own, making it frustrating to get through clips that are only three to five minutes in all. The feature that lets one flag clips is useless because there doesn’t appear to be any place in the app that then compiles whatever clips are flagged to browse later.

Podcast of the moment:

The Carson Podcast, June 22, 2017. Host Mark Malkoff, who devotes his show to all things Johnny Carson related, speaks with legendary TV director Hal Gurnee, who had worked with both Jack Paar and David Letterman, about his experiences shaping late night legends. The interview is both a window into old show business and a source of insight about Letterman’s innovation of the late-night talk show format.

The Blog Gets Spoke.

I’m resuming this blog that I had written for a limited time last year. A good place to begin again is with “Spoke,” a new social audio app developed by SiriusXM satellite radio. Spoke comes a little closer to being a single place to find podcasting content – something that did not seem as possible when writing this blog about podcasting last year (see July 24, 2016 entry).

Spoke also does two important things for the podcasting medium. The app makes it possible to share insightful bits from podcasts or streaming audio programs through social media. It also pairs, possibly for the first time, content from satellite radio with content from podcasts. These are key advances that I think I also identified in this blog last year – or if I didn’t explicitly do so, at least skirted doing so in some entries.

Of course, a new app or service isn’t going to be perfect overnight. Aside from SiriusXM show clips, on first glance, it’s pulling from Vox Media, Recode, Midroll (on a limited basis), and small independent unaffiliated podcasts. Spoke probably is, naturally, walled off from getting clips from the shows on Amazon’s Audible Channels. Spoke also does not appear to have clips from Gimlet, Howl, Panoply, Earwolf or Wondery.

All that said, though, Spoke has the architecture to add more sources of streaming audio content as it works out permissions and licensing. Spoke has the potential to get stronger as an aggregator, overall. It’s already married satellite and free content. On top of that, making social sharing of clips from programs spreads seeds that can grow podcasting well beyond the 2% share of all audio entertainment listeners that Edison Research reported as of August 2016.

Editor’s Note: Watch this space for shorter, but more frequent insights on the podcasting industry and its development as a medium. And, again, recommendations for full episodes of shows (footnote – the point of podcasting, even with greater availability of clips, is their ability to go in-depth), starting with:

Podcast of the week:

Hidden Brain, July 25, 2017 “You 2.0: Deep Work.” A good, old friend I reconnected with recently turned me on to this NPR podcast. It’s the first of several episodes in its “You 2.0” series. This episode tackles how one can be more productive by enforced disconnection from constant streams of emails and messages in a work environment – in order to devote more hours and more sustained attention to thinking through work challenges and producing output, whatever the product or industry.