Production and Distribution Don’t Mix

One of the earliest entries in this blog considered the pros and cons of different podcast distribution methods but just touched on the issue of paid versus free distribution. Since April 2016, Spotify and Pandora, discussed in depth in that entry, have remained distributors, but haven’t developed their own programming. Similarly, the Google Play service has remained a distribution utility rather than a producer – a me-too version of iTunes.

The point of this entry, however, is to examine streaming audio companies that are both producers and distributors, and to compare their approaches. There are not as many of these as you might think. Howl has merged into Stitcher, whose premium service is now $5 a month or $40 a year. That price point is either a little lower or a lot lower than SiriusXM satellite radio (depending what deal you can get out of SiriusXM for a subscription – the service can be receptive if you express interest but don’t want to pay their inflated “list price.”).

To illustrate, think of SiriusXM, especially at “list price,” as cable television. The news, talk and comedy programming offer a lot of variety, but it’s far more subjects and genres than most listeners want. Individually, however, the channels or individual shows on those channels would have a harder time sustaining themselves as standalone streaming offerings. Similarly, cable channels such as Spike, CNBC, Discovery and others provide value within a package but would have a harder time commanding a monthly subscription price streaming independently of a package distribution.

Stitcher delivers mostly comedy and informational talk programming – but most of it appeals to fans of extra dry and witty material, not even middle-of-the-road broad comedy like you might find on SiriusXM’s “LaughUSA” channel. Particularly from Stitcher’s Howl acquisition, Stitcher Premium offers podcasts that are deep dives into movies, TV shows and subcultures such as Juggalos and pro wrestling. Comedy personalities like Lauren Lapkus and Julian McCullough have their own shows.

So, thinking of SiriusXM as cable TV, think of Stitcher as an independent streaming service that you might subscribe to separately, like Filmstruck for classic, arthouse and independent cinema or the now-defunct Seeso venture from NBC for comedy nerds.

Since I’m discussing Stitcher as a key example, but not other podcasting companies such as Gimlet, Panoply and Radiotopia, which are ad-supported and go out over the aforementioned utilities, that illustrates how tough it is to be both a distributor and producer of streaming audio content. A strong value proposition is necessary to be behind a paywall or go behind a paywall for part of the offering. That means having an audience so motivated that they will pay for your content or providing information so valuable (as the Wall Street Journal does covering the financial markets) that the audience will pay for the service.

The paid and free models each have their pros and cons. To track where the podcasting field is going, it will be key to watch if new paid services emerge and if they last.

Podcast (and documentary) of the moment:

UCB Long-Form Conversations, “Palate Cleanser: #ByeChelsea Audio Tour,” November 25, 2017. In my other blog, I reminisced about the closing of the Upright Citizens Brigade theater’s longtime home for a move to a more professional, ADA-compliant location. This special episode of the UCB’s own podcast that normally features talk about the art of improvisation is an audio tour covering seemingly every inch of the old theater before it closed. The episode gives one an appreciation of a uniquely New York place – where great performances unfolded in a grimy and gritty venue in the same way they did at CBGB’s.

“C Rock” short film in “True New York” documentary anthology (released in 2016): This one isn’t a podcast, but I’m including it here because it captures a unique phenomenon in the way some of the best non-fiction podcasts do. It’s about cliffs along the Harlem River in the Bronx, where neighborhood boys jump and dive from great heights, as a summertime rite of passage. I found this on Kanopy, the library card-based streaming service, which I also highly recommend.

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.