Which innovations are taking podcasting into the future?

When pioneering podcasts such as Serial first launched, it signalled the dawn of an exciting new medium. Since then, podcasts have become a mainstay of popular culture and a booming industry firmly established within the global media landscape. Along with this progression came the establishment of the medium’s own conventions, standard formats, and narrative tropes.

The problem with the growing success and popularity of podcasting is that the adherence to convention and expectations can cause the medium to become stagnant and formulaic. Cultural theorist Mark Fisher called this “the cult of the minimal variation”. This means that instead of taking risks and innovating, companies start churning out cultural products that closely resemble those that have already proven to be successful. Most of us know exactly what to expect from a series by listening to the first few minutes, or even just looking at the cover art. But there are some producers, companies, and creators that are still pushing podcasting as a creative medium into exciting unexplored terrain.

Multi-media podcasting

Podcasting was born as ‘internet radio’. But the internet is not ‘audio-only’ — it is inherently multi-media. It’s no surprise then that podcasters have slowly started experimenting with different ways to embrace video, graphics, gifs, and more, as part of their production.

The most obvious early trend for podcasters was to publish or stream their shows to Youtube. The Joe Rogan Experience is perhaps the bastion of Youtube podcasting, and the reason why Spotify acquired the show as the new flagship of its video-streaming service. If anything, this signals the growing importance of video to the medium of podcasting.

Perhaps more interesting and innovative, however, is the trend of audiograms. These are animated images, usually with a rolling transcript and animated soundwave, that runs while the audio plays. It has become an increasingly popular way to share podcasts.

This trend opens up a new space fuelled by novel multi-media tools for creating podcasts that are different. Take a look at the creative video-versions of the podcast Brains Out!

As Wired Magazine already wrote in 2016: “To Attract New Listeners, Podcasts Need to Move Beyond Sound”.

Interactive podcasts

Along with multimedia capabilities, the internet brings interactivity with it due to its underlying computationality. This has already allowed video streaming services to experiment with interactivity, such as Netflix’s acclaimed Black Mirror: Bandersnatch interactive-episode, or the HBO murder-mystery Mosaic that allowed you to interact with the story via a mobile app.

Podcasters are also now starting to explore this possibility. The podcast Solve, for example, bill their show as “the world’s first interactive murder-mystery podcast that puts you at the center of the investigation”. Each week on Solve, the audience is assigned a new case based on a real crime, they are given clues and encouraged to solve it. There are also other experiments such as 3D Escape Room: Frequency, an interactive podcast where listeners play an audio-based escape room situation where they have to navigate a series of puzzles. Though these might sound like niche experiments now, the popularity of smart speakers, voice-enabled devices, natural language processing, and increasingly complex listening platforms, might open up new spaces for interactive audio.

If anything, dynamic ad insertion has at least shown that changing podcast content to fit the individual listener is technologically possible. But how can creators use such technology as a creative tool, rather than just a means for monetization?

Micro-podcasts

Just like we are accustomed to television dramas being 40–50 minutes, and sitcoms 20–30 minutes — we’ve come to expect all podcasts to fit into certain standard time formats. We hit play and expect either a 20–30 minute show or a 40–50 minute show.

Micro-podcasting has become a way to create shows that don’t adhere to those conventions, rather becoming quick bite-sized pieces of audio story-telling or reporting. This format isn’t just about time-constraints. Rather, think of how Twitter’s character-limit changes the kind of conversations, topics, or way of speaking we have as opposed to blogs or Facebook posts. Good examples of this are World Dispatch and Shortwave. Volume has also released a number of micro-podcasts — concentrating on how we can communicate a clear idea and content in a short sharp way that is compelling. These include Colourful Numbers as well as Read This!.

WhatsApp voice-note podcasts

While micro-podcasts are perfect for platforms such as Twitter (with Facebook even experimenting with Voice-Clip statuses), there is one platform on which we habitually listen to short audio-snippets: WhatsApp.

Since the arrival of WhatsApp’s voice-note feature, it has become a popular medium for sharing short self-recorded audio. Volume found a way to turn WhatsApp into a podcasting platform, by taking micro-podcasts and broadcasting them to subscribers as WhatsApp voice-notes.

The flagship show for this is What’s Crap on WhatsApp? , produced with fact-checking organisation Africa Check, and is the first of its kind. What’s more: this gives What’s Crap on WhatsApp? the ability to be an interactive show, as listeners can forward WhatsApp misinformation to us to get fact-checked.

Transmedia storytelling

Transmedia storytelling has existed at least since the 1960s in some shape or form. This is a form of storytelling that allows creators to use different media channels to tell different parts of a single story. An example of this is The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, an American web series adapted from Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice where characters had real Twitter and Tumblr accounts that formed part of the story.

Podcasting has become a powerful medium for similar transmedia storytelling. Netflix recently created a scripted podcast called The Only Podcast Left to accompany their post-apocalyptic comedy series Daybreak. The podcast is set in the world of Daybreak and focuses on a group of teens who decide to make a podcast during an apocalypse.

Likewise, HBO’s documentary series McMillion$ has a companion podcast that reveals untold stories not covered in the series, as well as discussions with the main characters.

Volume has always been interested in finding ways to innovate when it comes to new-media journalism. Leave a comment if you know of more ways podcasting can spark new ways of telling stories in our digital age!