Age of Audio: The Future of Podcasting (and 20k)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:10)
I'm Dallas Taylor.
Our last episode was an adaptation of a documentary about podcasts called Age of Audio. It covered the creation of podcasting through the Gold Rush era of about five to 10 years ago, to the bubble bursting, and the mass layoffs that followed. It ended at the strange place the whole podcasting industry is in now, where there are more podcasts than ever, but it's much harder for narrative shows like ours to get the funding we need to survive. Age of Audio was directed by my friend Shaun Michael Colón, and after spending years interviewing many of the brightest minds in podcasting, Shaun has this unique front row seat into the state of the industry and where it might be headed. Meanwhile, I've been hosting this independent podcast for close to a decade now. So, I also have a lot to say about it, because these things have very real consequences for Twenty Thousand Hertz.
When I interviewed Shaun about his documentary, our conversation was so fascinating that I felt it deserved its own standalone episode. Let me just gush over the film. I don't think I've got this on tape. So, what Shaun made is incredibly important to everything that I've been experiencing since I started Twenty Thousand Hertz. He's documented it with all of my heroes and all of my inspiration. I've seen the cut many years, like early cuts, late cuts, and I've been able to watch this thing transform into the defining podcast movie in my mind. Like this will be the thing that people will study for decades to come about podcasting because it's just a fascinating look at this entire industry in a way that has never been visually documented before. So, thank you for making it.

**Shaun Michael Colón** (1:54)
Well, thank you for saying that. That's, as the person who was the seed of the idea, this is like a full circle moment. I'm on the show. Like, it started seven or eight years ago with me reaching out to you because of the show.
And now, I'm a guest on the show. All I had to do is take seven years to make a documentary. That's all it took.

**Dallas Taylor** (2:20)
Why did you feel that this story specifically needed to be told?

**Shaun Michael Colón** (2:27)
At the time, podcasting was becoming very popular.
And I felt there was a certain type of audio storytelling that wasn't being represented in a lot of the discussion about podcasting. And I always felt that the power of audio and audio storytelling was something that was very special from an artistic point of view and wasn't always just two people talking into microphones, which is very enjoyable. But there are people who were creating these works of art that use sound design and storytelling techniques and interviews and created these more or less masterpieces. And I thought that was being lost in the discussion. And I hope to elevate the idea of what a podcast could be through the film to people who may not know more about it, that hey, this is a medium that people can create all different kinds of things with something simple, something fun, or something that's moving and significant.

**Dallas Taylor** (3:29)
I feel like you also documented a very, very important moment in podcasting.
And it almost feels like podcasting has moved out of that gold rush era. And I'm curious how you would define the current era that we're in.

**Shaun Michael Colón** (3:44)
I think we're in the corporate era. The day that we landed in New York to begin filming with Ira Glass and a few other big podcast notables was the day that Gimlet sold to Spotify for $200 million.

**Dallas Taylor** (4:00)
Gimlet was the podcast studio behind shows like Reply All, Heavyweight, and Science Versus.

**Shaun Michael Colón** (4:06)
Which there had been previous purchases, but the numbers were never that big. So I feel like we were there at the very start of the gold rush.
And through the filming, which took about five to seven years, we were around documenting the up and the down of that particular gold rush in the industry. Where the top 10 podcasts on the Apple podcast lists were almost all narrative, where you had This American Life at the top. Not the very top. Joe Rogan has had that crown for a long time. But the majority of that top 10 lists were NPR shows, audio documentaries, and narrative podcasting. We've definitely shifted into an era where it's more celebrity podcasts. There's a lot more tech, for lack of a better term, tech bros. And the money that's being spent seems to be spent on not storytelling, but more easy to produce or slick celebrity driven type podcasts.