How big can digital audio get?
Exploring unprecedented ways to navigate recorded sound at Pop Up Archive
You might have heard recently that digital audio is having a moment.
Perhaps it’s not virally inclined, but audio storytelling is crossing over from niche to mainstream. In 2012, 40 percent of Americans listened to digital audio. That number is projected to double by 2015.
PRX’s podcast collective, Radiotopia, just raised over $600,000 on Kickstarter. Planet Money creator Alex Blumberg and his business partner Matt Lieber announced last week that they secured $1.5M of investor capital for a podcast network startup. (And Pop Up Archive had a strong showing at 500 Startups Demo Day in July — more news on that soon). Over a million people, many first-time podcast listeners, consume each episode of “Serial,” the investigative reporting podcast from producers of “This American Life.” If Buzzfeed is parodying it, they must be doing something right. As audio finally takes off, there’s an abundance of high quality content and an untapped audience just beginning to discover it.
In an Internet that has traditionally catered to text and video, how can we better navigate audio?
Since we launched Pop Up Archive in 2013, we’ve made almost 1 million minutes of sound searchable.
In the past year, we've helped hundreds of radio producers log tape, get audio stories online faster, and optimize stations’ sites for search engines. We're working with digital media properties to make sure that audio and video content gets indexed by Google and shared on the Web as easily as text. Anyone can search over 10,000 public audio items at Pop Up Archive.
We’ve spent the past year perfecting audio search tools for journalists, producers, media companies, and distributors.
We’ve worked with the Hoover Institute at Stanford to index interviews with founders of the Communist Party, processed thousands of hours of sermons for the Princeton Theological Seminary, and helped WFMT and the Studs Terkel Digital Archive catalog Terkel’s 40 years of radio interviews with everyone from Janis Joplin to Shel Silverstein. We’re continually transcribing everything from 1950s broadcasts to recent election coverage from KQED in San Francisco to the 99% Invisible podcast.
The possibilities are even bigger than that. We're beginning to analyze all the data we capture about the spoken word — whether to compare the speech of Oakland mayoral candidates or measure changes in the vocabulary used by news media to discuss climate change over the past decade.
We want to help journalists log dozens more hours of tape than they could ever hope to transcribe themselves. We want to help audiences find the best moments in their favorite podcasts. Most importantly, we want to share the best moments in podcasts they have yet to discover.
A version of this post was originally written for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation blog on November 19, 2014.
