这是The Verge上的一篇文章，美国全新播客节目Serial最近创造了超过500万次下载和收听的记录，苹果公司为此都专门发布了一篇新闻通稿，而本文更深入的分析了当下蓬勃发展的播客市场。因为The
Verge被墙，所以我把原文复制到长微博分享给大家。
Alex Blumberg in real life sounds just like Alex Blumberg on the
radio.
If you've ever listened to This American
Life, the
massively popular weekly radio show, or Planet
Money, NPR's excellent
economy-explaining podcast, you know Alex Blumberg's voice. I
certainly did. Today, as he stands in front of the laptop he's
perched on a wooden chair atop a long table (a brilliant hack of a
standing desk), it's hard not to close my eyes and just listen.
That is, of course, exactly what Blumberg is hoping for. Here in
the brand-new offices of Gimlet Media, on the
fifth floor of a downtown Brooklyn co-working building, amid piles
of old furniture and terrifying art, Blumberg and his colleagues
are attempting to build a big business out of podcasts. They've
been chronicling their adventures in — what else? — a podcast,
called StartUp. It offers an
intimate, funny, and occasionally deeply awkward look at what it
takes to start a company. The podcast quickly became popular, and
so did Gimlet: Blumberg and his co-founder Matt Lieber raised $1.5
million in venture capital, hired a team, and honed their pitch.
That pitch, in a nutshell: we're entering a golden age of audio,
the first since we all sat around radio cabinets and listened
to The War of
the Worlds. The future of radio is here.
PODCASTS ARE A DECADE OLD, BUT
THEY'RE JUST STARTING TO MAKE NOISE
Podcasts aren't new, of course. Even the term has been around for a
decade or so, and now feels hilariously dated. (What is a pod
anymore? Or, for that matter, a cast?) They have traditionally been
thought of as two people sitting at a table with microphones,
chatting aimlessly about… whatever. ESPN, for one, has built a huge
podcast network on the shoulders of Bill Simmons chatting with his
friends on The BS Report and its
many other shows focused deeply on a single topic or a single host.
Yet Gimlet Media and others are betting that there's room for more.
More production, more storytelling, more narrative. So far, it
seems like they're right.
http://ww2/large/537f2ff8jw1emwirv4bdgj20jg0yltfs.jpgnew
radio stars: welcome to the podcast age" TITLE="The new radio stars: welcome to the podcast age" />Serial,
the remarkable murder mystery told by Sarah Koenig
(another This
American Lifealum),
is the fastest-growing podcast in history. It's spawned discussion
boards, truthers, deniers, other podcasts, and a level of
fanaticism rarely seen this side of Lost.Radiotopia,
a new network of shows anchored by the popular 99%
Invisible,
raised more than $600,000 on Kickstarter in an effort to create
essentially an indie label for podcasters. The audience is growing
larger and more dedicated, spending hours per day listening to
shows about everything from fantasy football to
terraforming.
As the shows and audience expand, the technology and infrastructure
for podcasts is picking up as well. iTunes remains the behemoth of
the podcasting industry, the place where most people find things to
listen to. Apple now bakes a podcast app — and a decent one at that
— into the iPhone, which has gone a long way toward making people
aware of the fact that podcasts even exist in the first place.
There are other great apps, too,
like Overcast and Pocket
Casts.
http://ww2/large/537f2ff8jw1emwisih8u1j20jg0ay3z0.jpgnew
radio stars: welcome to the podcast age" TITLE="The new radio stars: welcome to the podcast age" />TuneIn and Deezer have
both made commitments to podcasts, placing them among their more
traditional radio offerings. Spotify, Pandora, and others are
rumored to be doing the same. SoundCloud has done wonders for the
podcast industry; more than one person told me that uploading and
sharing audio online was an awful experience before SoundCloud made
something universally embeddable. Apple's CarPlay and Google's
Android Auto are poised to finally teach us how to connect our
phones to our cars, meaning the hours a day we spend driving can be
spent listening to what we want, not aimlessly scanning through FM
frequencies.
LISTENING TO PODCASTS IS FINALLY AS EASY AS IT
SHOULD BE
The opportunity for audio, at least according to Alex Blumberg, is
huge. There's far more room for audio in our lives than even video;
we can listen to podcasts while we do dishes, mow the lawn, ride
the subway, even while we work. The tech is there, in our pockets.
All we need now is something to listen to.
So Blumberg clears his throat and starts talking. He reads his part
of the script he's written, then hits space on his computer and
plays audio. Sometimes it's Blumberg's wife who begins to talk,
other times it's Matt Lieber, who sits in the room taking notes
while his voice comes from Blumberg's laptop. Blumberg soon stops
the audio and speaks again, occasionally stopping and typing,
editing his script on the fly. He apologizes every time he stumbles
in his reading, which isn't often. He says things like
"establishing sound here that I haven't pulled yet," and sneaks
bites of his lunch while others' sound bites play.
After 20 minutes or so, he's gone through a rough cut of episode
seven of StartUp, which the whole of Gimlet Media is nervous about.
In it, Blumberg asks listeners for money. Money to make up the last
$200,000 of the $1.5 million. He's offering a few lucky listeners a
stake in the company, while warning them of the risks and the many,
many regulatory hurdles to investing. (After the episode aired,
Gimlet raised the money in less than an hour.) He finishes reading,
makes a face at his team, and says, "Well, there you go." Everyone
else furiously shares their Google docs with each other, and edits
begin.
Making a podcast, even one about making a podcast, is hard work.
But more than ever before, this is the right time to try. Podcasts
won't kill AM and FM as we know it, at least not anytime soon, but
they're on the precipice of becoming totally and utterly
mainstream. They offer what we want, when we want, wherever we
want. They're our own personalized radio, with every topic, every
show, and every host you love on exactly your own schedule.
Everything podcasts were named for might now be dead, but podcasts
are just starting to come alive. The future of radio is here, and
it's awesome.
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