🎙 The 10 biggest stories in audio in 2021
Podcasting turned 20 (email was 50, if anyone is looking for a comparison), the live audio hype with Clubhouse did not last long and tech platforms paved the way for paid podcasts.
👋 Welcome to FWIW by David Tvrdon, your weekly tech, media & audio digest.
This is part three of my end-of-year series on the biggest stories this newsletter covered in 2021 - tech, media, audio. In the previous two editions, I presented the top 10 stories of 2021 in tech and in media. The newsletter will get back to a regular weekly news schedule in the new year.
The list below is in no particular order of importance, I just thought it looks better with a number.
1. Podcasting turned 20
If you thought podcasts are younger or older, they are not, they are exactly 20 years old - which is in the case of digital media pretty old, unless you count email. (Email, as we know it today, was 50 years old this year. In 1971 the first ARPANET network email was sent, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the '@' symbol designating the user's system address).
Here is the story of the first podcast feed and how its creator Dave Winer looks back at it.
2. Podcast consumption is growing globally
Not really a surprise, nonetheless, podcasts have been growing globally and the growth accelerated in recent years as Spotify kept investing in podcasting, Apple has also made some advancements (more on that below).
3. Paid podcast push by Apple & Spotify
Spotify announced paid podcasts via Anchor.fm and the Spotify Open Access platform. The paid podcasts feature rolled out in the US and was later released internationally. With Spotify Open Access podcast networks can finally make their paid podcasts hosted elsewhere available on Spotify. Read more in Spotify’s blog.
Apple announced Apple Podcasts subscriptions. After a series of problems, which delayed the feature, subscriptions were finally launched in June. Podcasters using paid podcasts have to upload their tracks directly to Apple’s Podcasts Connect system and are able to group shows into channels and have the whole channel paid for.
Both moves are quite significant as they give podcasters easy to use tools for setting up paid podcasts.
4. Audio articles are coming
With the evolution of text-to-speech and its widespread availability, big news newsrooms have started adopting this technology more and more to provide website visitors with the option of listening to the articles.
The Washington Post rolled out Amazon Polly, a service to transform text into lifelike speech, across its articles in May. Today, you can listen to every article on Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes and others.
In Germany, you can listen to all articles from the national weekly publisher Die Zeit and Der Spiegel also provides audio versions of some of its articles.
Of course, some outlets are prioritizing their journalists reading their own articles, famously the Danish magazine Zetland transformed itself completely into audio. Its members listen far more than they read the articles of the day. 70 percent of the consumption is the audio version of the articles. The journalists read their own stories.
A recent example is Tortoise in UK, a slow-news outlet that embraced audio as a natural format for its long-form, narrative-led stories.
5. Live audio hype
The year started out with the Clubhouse hype, everyone wanted to be there and every social platform was quick to announce it is also building its own Clubhouse clone.
First, Clubhouse ended the year going from 10M downloads to 1M globally. Hype over. Meanwhile Facebook, Spotify and Twitter successfully copied the product. Spotify’s version called Greenroom is waiting to be integrated into the main app, Facebook’s audio rooms are not getting far and I feel Twitter Spaces have found its suitable home and audience.
From what I have seen, podcasters have been using live audio for community building and they later released the recording. Tried it myself, was an interesting experiment. All things considered, it is still early days for live audio networks.
6. Not without scandals
NYT dealt with the aftermath of the Caliphate podcast scandal. It was criticized for the way it handled the fallout over falsehoods unearthed in the paper’s 12-part award-winning podcast series about the Islamic State. It eventually led to the resignation of audio journalist Andy Mills, who helped make the Caliphate podcast.
Creators of the popular podcast Reply All by Gimlet worked on a new podcast on toxic and racist workplace culture at food magazine Bon Appétit. After the episodes aired a former colleague accused the podcast host and editor of creating a similar environment at Gimlet. That led to them both being suspended. The company was already owned by Spotify.
7. The Joe Rogan Experience
I think Joe Rogan deserves his own point in this listicle as there was constantly controversy around his show which is now exclusively streamed only on Spotify.
In July, The New York Times published a big profile on him with the title ‘Joe Rogan Is Too Big to Cancel‘ and saying he is one of the most consumed media products on the planet.
Several times in 2021, he was caught stating misinformation on the record like vaccination is not for the young and healthy, on which he later had to walk back.
Alex Paterson, a researcher at Media Matters, listened to over 350 hours of The Joe Rogan Experience this year and reported back on it. In his report, he described the podcast as a mix of toxic masculinity, mixed martial arts, anti-trans views, and harmful health information about the coronavirus pandemic.
8. The idea of social audio
Facebook, now Meta, announced a couple of social audio features in April (spoiler: most haven’t yet arrived).
First, Facebook said it was building a set of new audio creation tools with the ability to mix audio tracks, a growing collection of sound effects, voice effects and filters (not available at the time of writing this overview).
Next, Soundbites: a new social audio format (also not available at the time of writing this overview). Plus, podcasts on Facebook (not available for everyone at the time of writing this overview). And live audio rooms in Facebook and Messenger (available, but not widely used). All announcements.
What did happen, at least in US, was that Facebook and Spotify introduced an audio player for podcasts. Whenever you share a link to Spotify, it will turn into a playable post and if you are a premium subscriber, you can listen to the whole episode on Facebook.
All of the above is important if audio is to become a first-class citizen on social media, because it is not. I think to make audio mainstream you have to have a kind of social network where it can live natively or is part of an existing network.
This year I reported on Beams, a Berlin-based social audio startup that is building a platform for sharing and consuming short-form audio recordings. It just doubled its seed funding, added another $3m, has 40,000 unique users and over 5,000 groups.
It’s just one of the audio-first platforms being built now and has no immediate plans for monetization but it shows their investors that also believe the short-form audio space is not conquered yet.
9. Consolidation
Who owns who in podcasting, a useful overview of which company or startup got acquired by a bigger one, was published this year. It is being updated by Evo Terra and Anne Baird.
You can see from the snapshot below that the broadcasting company SiriusXM in the US, Spotify, another US-based audio broadcasting company iHeart Media, the publisher Vox Media, tech giant Amazon, Sony and podcasting company Libsyn are among the most active when it comes to aquisitions.
The super-popular 99% Invisible podcast was bought by SiriusXM and host Roman Mars and his team joined Stitcher (which is owned by SiriusXM).
I suspect we will see more moves in 2022 as the big players continue to scale up.
10. Audiobooks and audio courses
This year I was fascinated by what was happening in the audiobook market. As a market, audiobooks are at least 3 times bigger than podcasting. That doesn’t mean more people listen to audiobooks than podcasts. Because audiobooks are almost sold directly as regular books unlike podcasts with the ad-first revenue income source, that’s why that business is much bigger.
Spotify acquired leading audiobook platform Findaway. The company operates multiple businesses, including distributing audiobooks to various platforms and offering audiobook creation services under its business Findaway Voices. The acquisition makes Spotify both a commercial bookseller and a publisher of audiobooks.
Medium acquired Knowable, an audio-based learning platform featuring podcast-like courses from experts. Knowable charged $9.99 per month for access to more than 100 courses, the subscription price dropped to $25 annually through the end of the year “to celebrate” the acquisition.
Both are fairly big moves and signal an intention to bring long-form audio to audiences that are already listening to podcasts. They could be engaged for longer, which in effect means staying subscribed for longer.
Of course, this is a very subjective rundown of the biggest audio topics of 2021. I know a bunch of stuff is missing but that’s the thing with lists, the good ones only give you a finite number of points. If you think something should have been included and it’s not, just hit reply and let me know.
❓ Poll: What do you consider the biggest audio story of 2021?
🙌 Thanks. I used HandyPolls to create this poll (instructions).
Last poll results: What do you consider the biggest media story of 2021? 15% answered Nobel peace prize awarded to 2 journalists; 14% Paid podcasts and audio on the rise and 10% thought it was Media vs. Tech.
🙏 And big thanks to Celine Bijleveld who helped me edit this newsletter. You can follow her on Substack here.