Where does the time go? Blink, and your baby turns 20. In the case of this stretched metaphor, the baby is podcasting, which was born, according to the annals of perceived wisdom and Wikipedia, to Dave Winer and Christopher Lydon in 2003. How quickly podcasting has grown. And grown. Yet, as happens to the best of us as we move into adulthood, that once ever-expanding media may have finally slowed its roll.
Slowed, yes. Stalled? Not so much. Podcasting is still growing, with global listenership up year-on-year, but the pace has decelerated, and a plethora of the entry-level pandemic-era podcasts have bowed out, in part because listeners have raised their expectations. Gone are the days when two friends chatting over a mic will garner you a rapt audience: nowadays listeners are looking for bells, whistles, videos and quality audio. Which is a lot of what we got in 2023.
It was also, however, a year of sad, bad news for many in the world of podcasting, with some audio behemoths making severe and devastating cuts as recession rumours spread. Back in March, NPR, the American public radio colossus, axed four of its beloved podcasts in a major belt-tightening, among them the stalwarts Invisibilia, which had been on the go since 2015, and Rough Translation, around since 2017.
As if that wasn’t hard enough to swallow, Spotify went for a “fundamental pivot” in June, essentially shutting down two esteemed studios, Parcast and Gimlet Media, laying off hundreds and ultimately “absorbing” the two independent studios into Spotify Studios. Sad listener face here, especially as Gimlet had just won a Pulitzer for Stolen, a gripping investigation by one journalist of her father’s life and experience as an indigenous child in Canada’s residential-school system. That podcast continued for a few months after the great “absorption”, but by the end of year Stolen too had been, ahem, stolen from us.
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Not two months later, someone else found themselves in a Spotify pivot: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, who had signed a sweet $20 million contract through their production company Archewell Audio, consciously uncoupled from the platform. Their one big joint project, Archetypes, an interview show hosted by Markle, didn’t return in 2023 after its 12-episode run in 2022.
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But if it seemed as if fame couldn’t buy audio gold, that wasn’t Spotify’s takeaway. The platform doubled down on big names this year, gathering two American giants into its enormous fold with Renegades: Born in the USA, where Barack Obama (he of that not-born-in-the-USA conspiracy theory, if you see what they did there) and Bruce Springsteen (of the 1980s Born in the USA hit) got together to examine where it all went wrong, talk about their fathers, make everyone believe in the great experiment all over again, and go delightfully rogue in a sports car.
Ah, the lives of the rich and famous. Which brings me to JK Rowling, the subject of one of the year’s big podcasting hits, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling. This cauldron-stirrer of an undertaking was hosted by Megan Phelps Roper, herself a former member of Westboro Baptist Church, famous for its bigotry. The idea, it seems, was to have a conversation about trans people and whether Rowling was being unfairly vilified by that community, or maybe whether trans women were being unfairly vilified by Rowling, though title and content pointed towards the former. The result was an uneven examination of a whole lot of issues with some interesting insights and context, plenty of good intentions and affecting revelations, but without the teeth to fully take on either the central issue or the interview subject herself.
Sticking with the celebrities and huge listenerships, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s raw and glorious Wiser Than Me and Louis Theroux’s eponymous podcast were standouts in the interview format, but we also had a big-name bonanza in the form of Strike Force Five, when the late-night TV hosts Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver came together to make a podcast when the writers’ strike put their shows on hold. The result was a mixed bag: a little blunter, a little blatherer than their interview shows, with some comedic moments and glimpses into the life of a thumb-twiddling television host, as well as a lot of hot air.
Far funnier was Amy Poehler’s foray into the world of podcasting, via her newest creation, Say More with Dr? Sheila, where Poehler played the eponymous and truly awful couples therapist Dr? Sheila. Still, the funniest podcast of the year to my mind came from out of nowhere, or technically, out of a boat in Amsterdam. It’s a true-crime investigation into the discovery of faecal matter on the floor at a wedding party, made snortingly droll by the deadpanned-ness of the internet detective Lauren Whitby and by the willingness of so many guests and even some outside “experts” to be interviewed. In fact, Who Shat on the Floor of my Wedding? wasn’t even a 2023 release, but a viral tweet in July brought a whole new listenership, almost like Twitter’s last benevolent act before it was fully and fatally rebranded as X.
Of course there was one 2023 trend we should have seen coming: the long-awaited, constantly heralded pivot to video. In truth, anyone in any form of media production knows we’ve been pivoting to video for decades, but an increasing number of podcasters this year are reconsidering their face-for-radio approach and bringing on the visuals. This was the year in which YouTube finally became the largest podcast-consumption platform in the US, according to a new study, with the company also bringing podcasts into the YouTube music app there first, followed in October by the same move for UK and Ireland users.
For video, the notable growth over here has been in shorter formats on TikTok and Instagram: many of our homegrown podders have been on the apps for years, but they doubled down this year, with the likes of the I’m Grand Mam duo – that one from PJ and Kevin about robots in their Jacquemus hats was worth the visuals – and Doireann Garrihy chopping up their pods into digestible 40-second social chunks and watching their views – and their brands – rocket.
Audio diehards need not panic just yet, however: quality storytelling stayed centre-stage in 2023, remaining a pillar of some cracking podcasts this year, including the gobsmacking The Retrievals, from the New York Times, Flipping the Bird, from Wondery, and the BBC’s World of Secrets, a reminder that platform, delivery methods, trends et al matter less than the hard work and craft of telling a meaningful truth. As podcasting moves into its roaring twenties, the grown-up medium has everything on offer from the silly to the serious to the sensational to the celebrity-drenched. To whom, as Shakespeare might have said were he into podcasts, are you gonna lend your ears?
