We’ll be right back after this message. Or not.
Nobody — well, almost nobody — is launching a new podcast these days.
Back in 2020, more than a million new podcasts were trying to grab the world by its ears, according to the search engine Listen Notes, via Joshua Benton at NiemanLab.
But in 2021, that number dropped to 729,000. And in 2022, it fairly plummeted to 219,000.
Oof. As Benton adds:
Roughly everyone launched a podcast in the COVID-19 pandemic’s nadir, and a big part of the decline is an aftereffect of that fact. All that time stuck in your house had to be put to use somehow, after all. The 2020-21 spike in cognitive surplus was always destined to recede.
Truer words, etc. Even more so for those of us running a cognitive deficit. I launched Radio Free Dogpatch on Nov. 13, 2013, and churned out 46 episodes on a highly irregular schedule before calling it quits on March 1, 2021, when I finally lost the thread for good.*
I didn’t formally stop production; I just never started another episode. And apparently I had plenty of company. Again, from Benton:
There are 369,545 podcasts whose last episode was released between 2010 and 2019 — a full decade. But there are 1,318,646 whose last episode came out in either 2020 or 2021. Those two pandemic years featured a huge number of new podcasts launched, yes — but it also witnessed the death of an unprecedented number of shows.
To put it another way: Of all the podcasts that have stopped publishing since 2010, 78% of them stopped in either 2020 or 2021. The huge spike in creation coincided with a huge spike in destruction.
I managed only five episodes in 2021 before pulling the plug. But I had been wildly inconsistent since the get-go, never sticking to my goal of one per week for more than a few months and taking entire years off.
You can browse the entire Radio Free Dogpatch archive by clicking the image.
Radio Free Dogpatch was like a rocket that failed to achieve orbit. Three episodes in 2013, three more in 2016, nine in 2018, 10 in 2019. … Hang on, boys, we’re riding the lightning!
Or … not. RFD gained a little more altitude — I managed 16 episodes in 2020 — but that only meant it had further to fall once it flamed out.
If a podcast falls in the media wilderness and nobody’s listening, does it make a sound?
Not in this instance. Producing RFD involved a lot of hardware, software, and uninformed tinkering; writing and rewriting scripts, recording and editing audio, finding and adding effects and music. But it never attracted the volume of comments that attend a simple prose post with photo.
The podcast seemed to have all the traction of a 23mm slick in deep sand. When it finally augured in there wasn’t an audible thump.
I haven’t given it much thought over the past two years. But since reading Benton’s piece in late January I’ve been idly conducting a mental autopsy on RFD, and I think I’ve nailed down the cause(s) of death.
First, my best year, 2020, ran only from January through April. Finally, I was consistent, but only for four months. Why?
Well, in March 2020 we went on lockdown. So Herself had to start working from home, which drastically altered the sonic environment in the old home studio. Suddenly there was more than one of us hollering into a microphone, and only one of us was making any money doing it.
At one point I found myself reduced to jabbering into a portable recorder in our walk-in closet in hopes of getting some clean audio. I briefly felt some sympathy for Paul McCartney, who must have felt likewise bollixed when John Lennon abruptly became available only as a package deal, bundled with Yoko Ono.
Except I wasn’t Paul, or John, or George, or Ringo. Shit, I wasn’t even Yoko. They were all pros. I was just another amateur overequipped with technology he didn’t fully comprehend, all the chops of a Beatles wannabe singing into a hairbrush in front of the bathroom mirror, and not enough space — or drive, frankly — to get any better.
We’re living in what may be the most democratic age of communications the world has ever known. Publishing, broadcasting, exhibiting — if the spirit moves, you can create something and run it up the digital flagpole, see if anyone salutes (preferably with all five fingers).
But occasionally your baby gets that single-digit critique, or worse, a yawn, a blank stare. Not all babies are beautiful.
A laptop won’t make you a writer. A camera won’t make you a photographer. And a microphone won’t make you Ira Glass. It’s not a magic wand, though in the right hands it can be spellbinding.
I just wasn’t that good. But I had fun finding that out.
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* That bit up top about how “I finally lost the thread for good?” While I was banging out this blog post I kept thinking about how I could turn it into a podcast. Jesus H., etc. Some people are slow learners.
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