I went to an event last week, Is Audio the Future?, which left me full of enthusiasm for podcasts as this pure, organic, guerrilla space, which nobody had yet figured out how to gatekeep and thereby homogenise. Chris Sweeney described how his podcast, Homo Sapiens, originally co-hosted with Will Young, came about in 2018: he was an avid fan of Woman’s Hour and thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to have an LGBT Woman’s Hour?” They started with no more equipment than an iPhone. Holly Cook, head of product at the Economist, described readers having a much richer relationship with the content when they became listeners, more intimate and proprietorial. It reminded me of publishing, in the old days, when there were low barriers to entry, a thousand flowers could bloom and not everyone in the business was in an unengaging steeplechase for the next Hogwarts.
But actually, that would have been publishing in the 17th century. A much better analogy for podcasts as they are now, or as I thought they were, would be the early days of the internet, without behemoths, advertisers or algorithms, before users were funnelled in one of four directions (violent misogynists, conspiracists and white-supremacists; mild lefties; consumers; people who like cats).
