Podfest Scoop and subscriber questions

So I’ve just finished up my time at the LA Podcast Festival. It was a fascinating and excellent weekend, at the ridiculously pretty Millenium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

The second-last event of the festival was a talk given by the organisers about the difficulties involved in previous years.

Coming up to the festival there had been a lot of talk about the fact that it was likely to be the last LA Podfest. Last year’s Festival had turned out to be both a fantastic fun event and a brutal financial loss for the organisers, who had to put up a significant amount of their own money to get it over the line, with sponsors dropping out at the last minute and a more unpleasant bit of commercial skulduggery happening in the background.

In the panel they named names and numbers, which was fascinating and unusual. Normally, people in an industry are wary of alienating big game players. But Dave Anthony, certainly, has made a name (and some enemies) for himself over the years by being a brutally straight talker, and Graham Elwood and Chris Mancini were also willing to talk openly both about the financial and political backstory to the podcast festival’s rise, fall and potential future. I’m not sure if they’ll publish the recording of that panel, but the broad lines of the story they drew of last year ran thus:

Larger media conglomerates, smelling the success and reach of podcasts had moved in on the Festival game, playing the old Amazon/Starbucks trick of throwing money into a loss-leader. More commercial Festivals, run like traditional media events end up undercutting the smaller, more independent events.

This came with a perfect storm of all major sponsors tightening their belts in response to (among other things) America’s current financial and political climate.

But to put sponsors aside, I want to return to the competition element, the emergence of bigger (inorganic) festivals funded by larger old media conglomerates.

This is one of the interesting things about capitalism, because on one hand, that’s fair game. According to free market theory, competition leads to better outcomes for the consumer. If everyone were on an equal footing, it would definitely be fair game. But increasingly, (particularly in America) large corporations are merging into larger corporations, and in more and more markets, they squash or absorb smaller competitors until many border on market monopolies - or oligopolies, with only a few major players who can set their own standards and name their own price.

Podcasts have been immune to this for a long while, in part because they began as more or less profitless enterprises - individual relationships between listeners and creators, with no barrier to entry, and no real competition. There’s a camaraderie among podcasters of the “rising tide lifts all boats” type.

That looks like it’s in the process of changing, as money and audiences grow. The big ships have come to... port? (I’m not sure I should stay on board this metaphor). It’ll be interesting to see how it goes. Certainly the live events side of things is coming under increasing pressure to haul in big acts as money makers, and by definition, to bring in people with existing market share - celebrities, old media names and formats. Big money likes a sure thing. Which is to say, broad, bland or already established.

The more pressure there is to fit in with a larger market demographic, the less personal and intimate podcasting will become.

I hope podcasting remains at least in part immune to the lure of gatekeepers, curators and market-pleasing pasteurisation. I met a guy at the Podfest who is doing a fictional show about a small town with a weirdly large population of puppeteers and ventriloquists. That is definitely the kind of thing that no marketing maven, advertiser or focus group committee ought to have a say in. That should remain a pure stream of niche delight between them and their audience.

—

Speaking of focus groups, I also went to a really interesting panel on Patreon, as part of the Pro’s panel segment of the festival, and it reminded me of what a great thing this is - as a way around the need to please a middle-man or a projected potential audience.

I do what I think is good, and for some delightful reason, you exist, who also find it good. Thankyou for that, it means a lot. (I assume. If you’re hate-sponsoring me, I mean... okay? But I can imagine better revenges).

In commercial television writing in Australia, they call the imaginary audience member “Betty from Blacktown”, and according to the way most TV people write for her, she’s kind of an idiot. This is why a lot of mainstream Television is not hugely interesting.

This patreon thing lets me do my podcast, articles and other work without having to worry about what an imaginary audience wants.

I wanted to ask you guys what you’d like to see more or less of from me on here. What stuff would you like to get more of on the $1, $5, $15 levels? All that.

Let me know in the comments below and I’ll see what I can do.