RadioPublic wants to break the tyranny of your podcast feed
NOVEMBER 25TH, 2016 — POST 319
This somehow didn’t get published in time, somehow just sat in ‘Drafts’. The delay was Medium’s (or a poor internet connection’s) fault.
Podcasts are a weird thing. We read every week about their rising popularity or creators seeking to capitalise on an audience that is soon sure to balloon. But for all the buzz around podcasts as a burgeoning medium, ingratiating a willing neophyte into the world of podcasts — when onboarding to any other media experience today is basically as easy as “download this app” — still feels surprisingly fiddly.
I’ve had to do it a few times with coworkers or with my partner and it basically goes the same. I tell them to download one or two shows on the stock Podcasts app that ships on iOS devices. It’s easy to rattle off all the things someone “should” listen to, but I’ve learnt restraint to be more appropriate. Telling someone who might never have heard a podcast to not only download 10–12 hours worth of shows but also subscribe to receive 10–12 hours a week is the easiest way to turn them off.
Introducing a better experience through something like the podcast app of choice for many Overcast and you’re very quickly no longer giving them the possibility of enjoyment, but you’re giving them homework. Being into podcasts — almost unlike any other media experience — requires a rather detailed body of knowledge, not just in the setup and maintenance of a podcast app but also in knowing where to even begin finding shows.
RadioPublic is a new app that hopes to minimise the body of knowledge needed just to enjoy podcasts. Released by a company headed by PRX (Public Radio Exchange) cofounder Jake Shapiro, RadioPublic’s most visible goal is to build out a robust recommendation and suggestion engine for podcast discovery. As Shapiro said when speaking with Fast Company, “Our mission is to help listeners discover and reward creators.”
In playing around with the app, it’s immediately apparent that the app is largely a success on this front. In just five minutes of use, this is the app I’d recommend to anyone wanting to jump on board. Whilst other apps like Tung have tried to be inviting to new users by building a social network that allows the recommending of episodes and commenting on user-created snippets, RadioPublic success as a first foothold into podcasts stems from the fact it doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel.
RadioPublic’s approach ought to be instantly familiar to anyone who uses a music streaming service like Apple or Spotify. The notion of a playlist around a theme — instead of “Music For Working Out” we’ve got “Best of 2016 so far” — is present, but with a critical difference. Where a music playlist compels the user to hit play and listen to the whole thing, RadioPublic’s playlists are more thematic groupings of single episodes, with each entry having to be opted in to play — allowing the user to just pop into whichever they wish.
It is this core functionality that does two things for RadioPublic. In cleaving single episodes from the massive feeds which they inhabit, RadioPublic allows dip-in-dip-out listening, something that Overcast and Podcasts just can’t facilitate, the former’s curated recommendations existing at the level of an entire show. The single episode structure is not only attractive to someone coming to podcasts for the first time, but also to those like me who have and Overcast feed stocked to the gills.
Increasingly I find myself having to delete more podcasts than I listen to. I subscribe to around 50 shows, most of which produce somewhere between 20mins and 1hour’s worth of content every week. So I simply can’t listen to it all. Take WTF with Marc Maron as an example. I almost never listen to him because I’ll only jump in on an interview I simply don’t want to miss. But my phone still downloads every episode only for me to delete them because I don’t want to let something good — like Maron’s recent interview with Michael Shannon — getting by if I were simply to unsubscribe. To some degree or another — and especially now when I’m kind of done listening to anything about the election — I have to do this manual screening process to weed out episodes from a stream of almost everything I’m subscribed to.
This does get at a broader point. As podcasts begin to expand the I-listen-to-everything position is just untenable. When I first got into them with Ricky Gervais, Steven Merchant & Karl Pilkington back in the mid-2000s, you were only “into it” if you listened to everything. And that attitude is one that has largely guided my listening habits since getting on board with Gimlet Media’s properties and Serial. You have to listen to all of them, I thought. In its seemingly exclusive focus on single episodes, RadioPublic instantly does away with this thinking. Even though I’ve got literal hours of Criminal backed up in Overcast, it’s perfectly fine to just rip out a episode (that, by curation, could be one of the better ones) through RadioPublic.
RadioPublic is well positioned as it ought to be able to appeal to both newcomers and power users alike. Admittedly, I hope that their able to bring robust player features — speed and sleep timer would be great — as they exist in something like Overcast as I and I think a lot of others won’t be able to jump across completely just yet. But by rebalancing the scales away from feeds and onto single episodes, RadioPublic is the kind of thing a swelling podcast landscape needs.
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