Podcasting isn’t On-Demand Radio and Here’s Why
It was World Radio Day a few weeks ago and, naturally, because I work in audio lots of people I follow on social media were sharing when their “love affair” with radio started.
It left me feeling a bit strange. My love affair with radio never started. I don’t love radio, in fact, I don’t even like a lot of it at all.
I’m not saying for a minute that I hate radio, or that you should. I know loads of people really do love it, but I’ve just never understood why.
I listen, usually over breakfast, sometimes in the car. I don’t listen while I’m working. One of the quandaries of writing and making audio for a living is that consuming media isn’t conducive to producing it. When I listen it always seems that I’m really searching for something that doesn’t make me want to switch over, or worse, switch off. According to the statistics I’m not alone.
One friend responded to my post by saying, “A podcast is just a radio show that you can listen to any time.” So why, especially as an audio professional, could I like one and not the other?
The answer is quite simple — they’re not the same at all, and here’s why:
Radio isn’t Podcasting
While I’ve still not figured out what it is that makes people love radio, there are a lot of design features that help it to fit into our lives. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that radio is far more heavily designed than podcasts. It needs to be because that’s what makes listeners buy-in.
Podcasts need consistency, they need structure, they need good characters or stories, they need information their listeners want or need, but they don’t necessarily need the same micro-structuring that radio does. As a listener, you’ll already be familiar with this, but you might not have thought about why the producers made the choices they did about those structures. (Incidentally, why we structure things the way we do is a really interesting topic, both for audience retention and storytelling, we’ll come back to that.)
In the UK it’s easy to confuse podcasts and radio, not least because so many are made by the same people with confused agendas.
Independent podcasts often (I’d go so far as to say almost always) follow the same basic format: Have a compelling host, interview an interesting person. They’ll be somewhere from 45 to 90 mins long and go out with a minimal edit, removing some pauses and background noises and adding a jingle or an intro, and that’s it.
Then there’s the rest. Often for high-profile podcasts in the UK, that means they’re produced by the BBC, by radio professionals. That gives them a radio flavour that you might not notice without it being pointed out. It also means that a lot of them were designed for radio and then happened to go out as a podcast. They’re cleverly disguised — they often look like US-style serialised podcasts, but under the surface, there are the hints of radio audience retention.
The thing is, in the UK radio is fairly homogenous in structure. Different stations might play a different mix or genre of music more readily, but the basic show structure is very common. In the morning you’ve got a 3-hour block with the main presenter and their sidekicks. You’ll have consistent sections to the show happening at exactly the same time every day. That’s important because your morning routine will be in-sync with it. If they’re 2 minutes out you’ll be late for work. You might not even realise how much you time your morning to this, but if it goes wrong you definitely will. Podcasts have no need for this structure, they start when you hit play and aren’t governed by the time in the real world.
Those microstructures crop up in most radio shows. Short Cuts is a great example, not least because it works well as a podcast too. It doesn’t need to follow the same strict timings of the breakfast show, because of the more artistic nature of the stories, but it is structured in short bursts deliberately. That’s because many listeners won’t get to hear the whole show. Why? Because it goes out at 3.30 pm — they’re on the school run. By structuring it in this way it means you’re not left frustrated halfway through a longer story. You can grab the kids, safe in the knowledge that there will be another section coming on the journey home.
Start looking for this in the shows you listen to and it will become very obvious that it’s happening all of the time. Radio has a retention problem. It’s quite rare to sit and listen intently to a whole show, those who listen all the way through will be coming and going with whatever they’re doing during their day. The goal of the radio structure is not to entice you into a listening addiction, it’s to recognise that this is the way the medium is consumed and work with you. They don’t want to give you a reason to switch off or change over.
Those choices come right down to the songs they choose to play, where they’re looking for a mix of recognition and good feeling towards the music. The research suggests that they don’t need to play the best songs all of the time and that playing new music can actually be a turn-off for listeners. We crave the security of the known. It’s comforting, and it’ll keep you with them.
Of course, radio wants to keep your ear for as long as possible, so while the morning show will be a collection of 3-minute sections split by songs you know, there’s also an overarching draw. It’ll be something like “Name the year these songs are from”, a simple task that will have you tuning in after the school run to find out.
The music question is somewhat moot for podcasts since it’s generally not possible to play full songs on shows and therefore music radio can’t be transplanted directly into a podcast. The best it can offer is streaming.
So What’s the Difference?
The beauty of podcasts, for me, is that they don’t have to go with this flow.
You’ve decided to hit play and they’ve got a couple of minutes to draw you in enough that you’ll listen to the whole episode, but they don’t need to play the same games as a radio show to retain you. What they do need to do is get you to listen again.
The real dilemma for a podcast is getting you to listen in the first place. Radio listeners are very loyal to their stations, to the point where, when star DJs leave, they don’t manage to take much of their audience with them. If you bring in a new presenter your station’s loyal listeners will give them a good go, as long as they don’t get a reason to change stations.
Podcasts can come into the game knowing that you’ve already hit play. You’re already somewhat invested in the story they want to tell, or the show they’re producing, and you’re joining them from the beginning. If they want to tell a big, complex story then they can do it with fewer caveats than the radio. They don’t need to keep covering the old ground unless it’s useful. A radio show needs to make sure that if you didn’t listen last week you stand a chance of listening this week — otherwise, you’ll turn over. At its worst, this can feel like those Channel 5 documentaries, where half of the show is telling you what’s coming after the break, and the other half is recapping what happened before it. They can feel content-light, but podcasts solve that problem. You can tell the story in the best way without worrying about someone tuning in halfway through.
In the UK though these podcasts are often produced by radio professionals. That’s good for production values, but not always good for storytelling. Particularly if the show is designed to go out on the radio and as a podcast: radio wins. The needs of the radio audience end up trumping the podcast structure. Those On-Demand listeners will manage with something structured for radio, but it won’t work so well the other way round.
For podcasting, this is something that still frustrates me, and something I think the BBC is struggling to get right. We are seeing more and more shows that are podcast-led, which is great. Unfortunately, they’re produced by people who are often radio-led, and old habits die hard. When you’ve been doing something for years successfully it’s not always easy to step back and ask if it should be done the same way in a new medium — and podcasting is a new medium.
Many of these shows have gone on to critical acclaim, and they’ve told great stories and listeners love them, but in my opinion, they’re still a work in progress. They could be a lot better. One that the BBC got it right with was The Crypto Queen, which achieved the sort of listener buy-in that I feel radio often misses.
Specialists and Generalists
A major attraction of any On-Demand media is the potential to cater to specialist audiences. Radio needs to be for the everyman, within reason. If your shows start targetting demographics too specifically then you’ll have an issue finding your audience. Specialist music shows will be a turn-off for many, which is why radio tends to stick to more mainstream offerings. It makes representation more difficult and, unfortunately, it makes radio-trained professionals harder to persuade when it comes to catering for audiences in the podcast space.
The fact that podcasts can cater to a specialist audience is one of the really appealing things about them. Those audiences don’t even need to be particularly specialist to be under catered for by radio. It means that audiences can be told stories with deeper trust and without being patronised. They can access complex storytelling and trust the host to guide them. The threat of switching over isn’t there. Your listeners might switch off, and that might be because you did a bad job, but it might just be that they weren’t your best audience, and that’s ok. For radio, it’s often not ok.
What Can Change?
At the moment, and in the UK in particular, I think the view that podcasts and radio are the same is very understandable. Most of the bigger shows are produced by radio professionals, so they have an inherently familiar feel and come from the same places you get your radio. Many of the others are shows fronted by celebrities who interview people, they follow the same basic, unchallenging format, and can often be good. Most of them are not shows that would get featured on the radio. Long-form, rambling interviews can be great, but not if you’ve got time cutoffs.
The thing is, while these shows might get the bulk of listening hours, they are a very small slice of the pie. There are literally thousands of inventive, funny, moving, and professionally produced independent shows out there. I don’t think we have a particularly strong culture of this in the UK at the moment, in part because these shows are often crowded out by the bigger players, but they are there and many of them are brilliant and would never get played on the radio and that’s just fine.
Because, you know what? They aren’t radio shows!
The big thing that needs to change is the method of curation. You can trust a radio station to keep supplying you with shows that meet your tastes, especially if you’re a loyal listener who meets a broad demographic requirement. The same isn’t true in podcasting. Discovery is an issue, algorithmic recommendations are an issue and, my biggest problem, the people who are reviewing podcasts, while doing a great job of it, are in the same position as the radio stations — they’re reviewing for a very broad demographic and often missing the small community magic that can happen in podcasting.
The Best
There are always shows that work well in both formats (although the radio and podcast versions aren’t necessarily the same). Then there are those that are just great. Here are a few of my favourites.
This American Life — easy to forget it’s a radio show, really.
The Infinite Monkey Cage — another that works well in both formats.
Wooden Overcoats — while this could be a Radio 4 comedy, it would really spoil it.
