In what is now a randomly celebrated tradition it’s time to talk about what my current podcast rotation.
Regular Features - They’re almost at episode 600 and it still cracks me up all the time. Easily the longest time I’ve been actively following a pod. Their Discord is great too.
BudPod - A new entry to the rotation. Phil and Pierre are very funny and have a good vibe. This has replaced the gone but not forgotten Enjoy An Album in the rotation.
Elis and John Show - I’ve talked about these lads ad nauseam. 2024 was the year of Elis and John for me. The Great Reset brought some changes that I don’t like but they’re as funny as ever. The Cymru Connection is one of the best features in all of radio.
Socially Distant Sports Bar - I included them in the last list but I love them even more now. I even enjoy the sports chat now.
Shield Up - The patreon exclusive pod for the RKG lads. I’m a fairly recent patron but their chat is very entertaining.
Triforce - I got back into Triforce recently after a long break. I’m not sure why I stopped. I’ve been following Yogs and PyrionFlax for a terrifyingly long time now. Their dad chat is good.
Total Playtime - This is the RPS Electronic Wireless Show born anew! It’s Alice Bell, Nate Crowley, and Jon(ty) Hicks predominantly talking about video games. I’m not really into games coverage any more but their friendship and good chat that have me coming back for more.
AvTalk - The world of commercial aviation is still faceting. It intersects with so many aspects of life and the world. There’s always something happening in aviation.
Two Star Podcast - Their release schedule is absolutely wild but this is podcasting as Apple intended. A couple of lads talking nonsense and releasing it when they feel like.
So as you can see I’m still a huge fan of the Friends Chatting genre. It’s an unbeatable format.
Now I’ve got you here I’d like to moan about the “state” of the “industry”. Ready yourself for an old man to yell at the cloud.
As a listener, podcasts as a medium look to be pretty fucked right now. The average production quality is higher than ever but the rot of business is eroding some of the fundamental things that I’ve always loved about the medium.
Advertising. Pods have always, to some extent, had ad-reads to fund the production and hosting. Unless you had sponsor like Bytemark to give you free hosting you had to pay the bills somehow. There was a time where donations seemed common. These days it’s adverts. It’s adverts from big brands and you hear the same ads across multiple different pods/networks. I will never use NordVPN, Manscaped, join the army, or buy adverts on a podcast network. I do not see how this is a viable long term strategy. I’ve got really good at fast forwarding through the ads but when they catch me out it brings a crushing a realisation that we’re back at commercial TV and Radio, the very thing podcasts were a break from. Dynamic adverts annoy me too. It turns out that I’d had this base assumption that if you and I listened to a podcast we’d each be listening to the same MP3, alas no. Targeted ads are injected into the eps which is itself cursed but it’s shown to be nonsense and hilarious when you download over a VPN and they’re suddenly all in Swedish. Great work.
Patreon. It’s the other way to fund a podcast. It feels more ideologically sound to do it this way. The problem is that the natural path is to give exclusive or longer episodes to patrons. This is fine I guess. This is business. What it’s not is the idyllic idea of the Open Web that I fell in love with. I back a few podcasts so I guess I’m part of the problem too.
The pivot to socials and KPIs sucks. This is going to sound like a dig at The Elis & John Show and that’s because… it is[0]. When they did The Great Reset last year they moved away from a live radio show that was then released as a podcast to a podcast first show where they record two short episodes and release them twice as often. That’s fine I guess but it’s difficult to see that as anything other than gaming a Total Downloads KPI. I’m a big boy, I can handle one big ep a week and listen to it how I see fit. The format change also sees them in a studio for the purposes of creating vertical video shorts for hellish social media platforms. Platforms that the hosts call out as a blight. My final issues is with the BBC Sounds exclusive episodes. The Bureau De Change of the Mind episodes are only available on BBC Sounds. Obviously the BBC wants to push their platform but if the eps aren’t MP3s (or .oggs, for the OG enjoyers) in an RSS feed that I can put in my catcher of choice then it’s no longer a podcast.
All of these these issues leave me feeling that the medium is shifting ever further away from the user, just like everything else in the world. Paving paradise to put up a vertically integrated social media friendly parking lot for “content”.
[0] - In the unlikely event that someone involved in the show reads this: Hi! Love the chat, it’s a shame that your work is tainted by incentives and factors.
