On the Podcasting couch...

Podcasting is seeing a steady rise in popularity with listeners preferring quality content over inconsistent chatter. P S Nissim attempts to decipher the success formula behind this latest trend

Like thousands of others in Bengaluru's IT industry, Srivats groans at the thought of his long commute from home to the office. The jam-packed roads, the unruly traffic, the pollution,... even the comfort of driving his own car can’t solve all these. For the first few years, he relied on FM radio and music to entertain himself during the drive. But lately, he’s found a better way. Now he has some of the titans of the software industry give him their life stories at his command. Or sometimes he prefers to hear the latest from productivity gurus and bootstrapped startup founders. And every once in a while, he will tune into discussions on classical music, which is a secret passion for him. All this while he drives, pausing the discussion at his convenience. He’s discovered the wide world of podcasts which are independently produced serial audio programmes, distributed over the net and playable on phones or laptops.

Like radio shows, a specific podcast is owned by a person or an organisation, so the different episodes of a podcast “show” usually have a common theme. Like blog posts or streamed TV, there’s software for your phone or your laptop that lets you subscribe to a podcast series, so you know when a new episode is out. And somewhat like streaming music apps, podcast apps are optimised for quick access and listening - so they can be heard on a car commute, or during a gym session, or simply while taking a walk. But put together, all these advantages give the listener an experience and convenience that can’t be matched elsewhere. And now they’re the hot new trend in India.

Take Arnab Ray’s podcast, Attention Pliss, as an example. Ray will be a well-known figure to readers and bloggers in India. His popular blog, GreatBong, spoke of the experience of being a 90s kid in India, growing up on Sachin Tendulkar’s batting and Mithun Chakraborty films, seeing India grow through liberalisation and the software industry. He went on to write several popular books, the latest being a crime thriller, Sultan of Delhi. But his newest effort is this weekly podcast, which completes a year in August.

Varied topics

“Attention Pliss tries to cover topics that are current in the media, both Indian and international,” he explains. “Some episodes are like a news roundup, a summary of what’s happened in the past few days. In others, I do a deep dive on some topic. Similar to my blog, I take my experience of 90s India as a reference. For example, in a recent episode recorded during the cricket world cup, I went over the captaincy styles of the various Indian cricket captains since Sunil Gavaskar, and compared them to the typical managers you’d find in an office. The week after, I might be covering Trump, or Modi. Or take listener requests for topics.”

In the US, podcasts are seen as a natural evolution of Talk Radio - that is, radio shows and channels that feature interviews, discussions, reportage and opinion, instead of music. Several radio jockeys are stars in their own right. Arnab points to Dan Rather, a popular journalist and news anchor, who has been a cult figure on news channels. Rather has made the transition to talk radio, and is equally popular there - in fact, he has a Youtube show as well now. “There aren’t any such radio stars in India, who command their own following solely on the basis of radio shows.”

Even before dedicated spoken word radio channels came up, US radio had plays and radio dramas ranging from Superman to The War of the Worlds, that played to enthusiastic audiences in the 40s and 50s. So there’s a history of listeners sitting down to hear people talking, discussing the news and telling stories on the radio.

Resurgence

As internet technology and recording technology grew better, podcasts began to replace these radio shows. The first podcasts appeared in 2004, though adoption was niche. Since around 2014, the emergence of dedicated software to create podcasts, and podcast apps installed by default on smartphones, have helped their recent resurgence. Today, there are an estimated 7,50,000 different podcast shows worldwide.

What’s the history of spoken word content in India? All India Radio, once the primary radio channel in the country, did feature short programmes with plays and reportage, but public interest has moved in favour of private channels these days. Private radio in India is barred from broadcasting news, so it has gone to the other extreme and has focused on music (although some would say delivering advertisements were the main interest). Chat shows and interviews are sparse and shallow. Perhaps the only radio star of lasting fame is Ameen Sayani, who hosted a fill music countdown show for decades, and was known for his velvety voice and warm attitude. But there has been no one to take his place in India.

A few things have changed here recently, leading towards podcast adoption. At the infrastructure level, there has been a sharp rise in the usage of smartphones and apps in recent years. Along with the usual Whatsapp and TikTok apps, users have been moving to consume more multimedia content - on Youtube, on music streaming apps like Gaana and Prime Music, and lately video content on various streaming platforms. This is all bolstered by dramatically cheaper network bandwidth and more reliable connectivity.

Listen in

An increased commute time and more interest in fitness-related sports gives people time when they are looking for audio content, but not more mindless music. There’s also a change in the social fabric, at least in the cities. Unrelenting work pressures and splintering social connections leave us with less people to talk to. Perhaps because of the instinctive wish for conversation, more people in India are looking for people to talk to, or at least listen to.

Put these things together, and more and more people are moving towards spoken word audio programmes. Podcasts are the perfect antidote to the problem, and in response, more podcasts produced by Indians, for the Indian market, are showing up.

As Srivats’ choice of topics shows, the variety of shows available as podcasts is a major draw too. The topics a podcast covers are highly dependent on the creator. Often, in the case of bloggers or media personalities, the topics are an extension of their previous efforts (Arnab, for example). Book reviewers, movie makers and critics, current affairs analysts, sportsmen - all are taking to podcasting on their own subjects, and in fact their existing online presence is what sells the podcast to the initial audience. But there are other podcasts done by relative unknowns, focusing on newer topics that simply couldn’t have been possible earlier. Golgappa, a Marathi language podcast, is a combination of interviews and comedy, featuring a different guest each week. Binge On, a relatively new podcast, covers interesting releases on online streaming video platforms. And, in a cross between blogging and old timey radio programmes, Croc’s Tales is a podcast where a storyteller creates stories based on prompts from the audience.

It's unofficial

The rise of podcasts in India is special in another way: it’s strictly unofficial, without any support from large public organisations, unlike other countries. In the US, one of the largest podcast producers is NPR, the National Public Radio - comparable to our All India Radio. NPR has been producing podcasts since 2005, and its hundreds of podcasts routinely feature in ratings charts in terms of subscribers. The UK has podcasts produced by the BBC. Most newspapers in these countries also have podcasts to summarise the news, discuss current affairs, or showcase new artistic talent. In India, however, the space is populated by relatively small, independent producers who are following a passion rather than money. New podcasts are popularised purely by word of mouth.

Vikram Mohan is one of the upcoming podcast producers. He, too, started off being a podcast consumer. “At one time I used to listen to music on my commute. These days, it’s mostly all podcasts.” Not content with just listening to them, Vikram now produces podcasts as well - Arnab’s podcast is one of several that he produces as part of his company, Talking Stuff Network. “Our thought was that, we are missing the desi perspective in podcasts because they’re all produced in the west. There must be more like us who want to hear their own people. So we started producing these podcasts ourselves. It was the right move, because I’ve seen the interest in Indian podcasts go up in the last few years.”

Vikram and Arnab record Attention Pliss together - Vikram from Hyderabad and Arnab from the US. They use a web conferencing tool similar to Skype, which records as they talk. On the hardware side, the two need nothing more than dedicated recording microphones, easily available on online marketplaces. Once the initial recording is done, it takes Vikram about two to three hours to post-process, clean up the audio, add background music, and upload to the hosting service. But the quality of the final product is comparable to, say, Akashvani radio programmes, with clear audio and well-integrated music. Compare this process to the effort in starting a new TV channel or a radio station. Even a Youtube channel takes more equipment. No wonder the number of podcasts is increasing at a rapid clip.

Spontaneity counts

Once you listen to a few podcasts, another facet of difference becomes apparent: podcasts are by and large more spontaneous. Srivats agrees. “It feels like normal people talking. On the classical music podcasts I listen to, one episode was about the bloopers that orchestra musicians made while playing live - and apparently there are bootleg recordings available of these performances. The hosts were calm about it, instead pointing out such mistakes are a part of every musician’s life. It makes music more human, you know?”

Arnab works in the same spirit. “I don’t write down or rehearse the text. When we do news roundup episodes of Attention Pliss, we usually just have a list of topics that we want to cover, but no detailed script. We generally improvise the details.” Indeed, in a recent episode of his own podcast, Arnab forgot the name of Nixon’s Secretary of State and googled it live, while recording (it was Henry Kissinger, by the way). A formal radio programme would never have allowed this freedom.

Although there are close to 3,000 podcast series in India, these are still early days. The wide variety of podcasts worldwide indicates many directions we haven’t yet gone in.
The first that comes to mind is Indian language podcasts. Some of these have been coming up, such as the aforementioned Gol Gappa in Marathi, and a semi-regular Stories of Premchand podcast in Hindi. Most other languages have a couple of podcasts, but nothing close to what the demand can be.

One rather interesting use of the podcast medium is to further investigative journalism. In its first season, the American podcast Serial used interviews, narration, and old-fashioned reportage, to dig into the 1999 murder of a high school student in Baltimore, USA. The podcast was both popular and critically acclaimed, and went on to top all the downloads charts. Two further seasons, focusing on other crimes, have since been made. One could imagine the interest in such a series in the Indian market.

Although this article talks of the growth of podcasts in India, the growth is limited to urban, upper-middle-class folks for now. But with the continual increasing penetration of smartphones, apps and bandwidth, the next big growth spurt could be rural-targetted podcasts - and that could be the push that the medium needs, finally, to be the next big thing in social media for India. Apps like Facebook, Whatsapp, and now, Gaana and Youtube are providing content to one and all - why not an easy-to-use podcast player?

At their core, though, the simple mechanics of creating and listening to podcasts will remain their greatest strength. Technology has simplified every aspect of artistic expression - phone cameras now take videos, word processing software and self-publishing let you publish novels, and digital tools help you create music. But podcasts may be the mechanism that help you communicate with the world in the most natural and personal way possible: by talking.