Audio series — the hidden gem in the world of audio entertainment
Pocket FM reinvents episodic form of storytelling in audio format to keep listeners hooked
Remember The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? That’s the first of the comedy science fiction ‘trilogy of five books’ written by Douglas Adams. Many of us have read it. For most, it took a few days to finish the 224 pages book.
It takes time to consume long-form content — be it a fiction, non-fiction or a drama. That’s specifically the reason why books have chapters. That’s also the reason why television channels telecast serials, and streaming apps webcast series in a sequential manner.
Over the years, it has been proven that consumers of long-form content want the content to be in episodic form — simply because it is convenient.
Why would audio be different?
Audio entertainment, however, was restricted to music in India until our founders — Rohan Nayak, Nishanth KS and Prateek Dixit — launched Pocket FM in 2018 with the aim of widening the scope of the market across languages.
Before founding Pocket FM, our founder had worked in the digital content space and had a good understanding of the consumer psyche. They knew consumer behaviour takes time to form, but it takes a lot more time to change.
Naturally, episodic content was a no-brainer. If people like watching web series so much, they are bound to like audio series. But will they fall in love?
Reinventing the wheel
It was BBC Radio 4 that brought the first episodic audio content. In 1978, BBC started broadcasting The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in serialised form. Over the years, radio stations across the world followed suit.
And, the storytelling was so compelling that people used to wait for a whole week to listen to the next episode.
Over the years, radio became a thing of the past while audio continued to strive — primarily music. In 2004, Apple tried to bring back the radio with the iPodder programme that gave people the option to download radio broadcasts to Apple iPods. With this, a new form of audio also made inroads — podcasts.
Soon, podcasts gained popularity, primarily in the US, and made their way to devices other than Apple’s iPods, before the App ecosystem flourished. But, podcasts usually deal with one topic at a time. The sense of curiosity, which leads to long-term engagement, was missing.
Surely, the market was waiting for a differentiated product — that’s more engaging and keeps people hooked.
Audio series finds its niche
The lockdown during the pandemic caused by Coronavirus did change a lot of things — both lifestyle and work. What was a compulsion during the lockdown became a preference afterwards — more and more people started working from home. More time at home resulted in more time on screen — on laptop and computer, on smartphone and on television. Consumption of digital content proliferated once again.
This, over a period, led to something we call ‘screen fatigue’. The need for an alternative instrument for entertainment, or infotainment became obvious. And, audio emerged as a people’s choice.
At Pocket FM, we conducted a study earlier this year on what our listeners have listened to in 2022. The idea was to understand the needs of our listeners better. Our internal study revealed audio series as the most preferred. On an average, people spent 110 minutes daily listening to audio series in 2022. That’s 2.4 times of the daily time spent on watching short videos, and 1.7 times of average daily time spent listening to music. For long-form videos on digital platforms, people spend around 70 minutes daily on an average.
According to the internal study, Pocket FM Rewind 2022, listeners across the world consumed more than 45 billion of streaming minutes on Pocket FM during the year 2022. Of this, 90 percent was episodic content.
That’s possibly because people are habituated to listening to audio-only entertainment content while doing other things, such as cooking, walking, running, exercising, driving, and most importantly, working. Audio-only content, unlike video, does not engage both eyes and ears simultaneously.
Findings from the ‘Pocket FM Digital Entertainment Insights also mirror this. Contrary to the common notion that audio content is primarily consumed during commutes, our survey revealed a different habit: individuals engage with non-music audio entertainment throughout their daily tasks. About 25% of people enjoy audio during work hours, while around 33% of respondents indicated audio (primarily audio series) as a means of relaxation.
The survey results also debunk another misconception. A significant 55% of respondents expressed a preference for consuming non-music audio entertainment content between 9 am and 6 pm — traditionally considered as work hours.
Finding the mojo
The success of a serialised content, irrespective of the medium, is defined by the number of episodes. The bigger the number, the more successful it is. But, what does it take to produce something like Guiding Light — the longest running TV show that went on for 72 years with 18,262 episodes?
No doubt, it has to have a gripping storyline and the narration has to be interesting enough to keep the audience hooked. But, questions remain. What should be the length of an episode? Will it be similar to what works on television or web series? Another key metric for a series to be successful is how an episode ends. That’s what brings back the audience. Every episode needs to end in a way that the audience is always wondering what happens next.
Besides, will people be okay with commercial breaks while listening to an audio series like they do while watching television serials? These are among many questions that we, at Pocket FM, needed to find answers to. We needed to understand the psychology of listeners.
The experiments started. Unlike television serials or web series or audio podcasts, we decided to keep an episode of an audio series limited to 10–15 minutes. The idea was simple — keep it short and leave the listeners curious.
Insta hit
The plan to shorten the duration of episodes presented in a sequential manner as an audio series worked. An example of the success is Insta Millionaire which has about 1,000 episodes making it the first audio series to generate more than $10 million revenue globally.
We, at Pocket FM, have discovered our secret sauce to bring back the listeners again and again, and again.
Audio series as a concept is still under the mode of experimentation. There will be a lot of innovations in the foreseeable future. That’s because listening habits change with language and location. The more we know our listeners, the better we’ll serve them. Over the next few years, we aim to establish audio series as one of the most preferable forms of entertainment globally.
