Pod Save Podcasts

Saving and Studying Podcasting’s Booming Sonic Culture

We are, as many folks have noted, in the midst of a “Golden Age of Podcasts”: a moment where the choice for quality digital audio abounds, and where new voices and listeners connect daily through earbuds, car stereos, home speakers or office computers. Podcasting is just barely 15 years old, but it has ushered in an explosion of amateur and professional cultural production. There are now over 400,000 podcasts and 10 million episodes in over 100 languages, with new ones launching every day.

Yet this boom in audio culture isn’t necessarily being saved and preserved in ways that will allow us to look back on it and study it in the years to come. In fact, trying to find shows and episodes from the “early” days of podcasting is already a far too difficult task (and that’s only a dozen or so years ago!). I’m guessing most of the Bello writers and readers are probably more interested in saving podcasts than the average listener, but I want to make a few argument about why we should be making efforts now to preserve this ever-growing portion of contemporary culture, and how we might go about doing so.

We know from studying the histories of film, TV, and radio that the early productions of any medium are not only invaluable, but also usually at the greatest risk: roughly 90% of U.S. silent films and 75% of pre-1975 radio recordings have been lost or destroyed. Think of how much of our own history and culture we’ve learned about from what remains, but also how much more we could have learned from what’s been lost.

We might think that, given how ubiquitous and available podcasts are, podcasts wouldn’t face the same preservation risks as, say, old radio tape reels, transcription discs or celluloid film stock. With magnetic media, flakes of sound can literally fall off. With nitrate film, the material can literally catch fire. And those are almost harmless compared to the damage that can be done in poorly insulated Grandma’s attic.

…The explosion of creativity that podcasts represent is also shockingly vulnerable: podcast feeds end abruptly, cease to be maintained, or become housed in proprietary databases.

But the explosion of creativity that podcasts represent is also shockingly vulnerable: podcast feeds end abruptly, cease to be maintained, or become housed in proprietary databases, like iTunes, which are difficult to search with any depth or precision. As the podcast industry grows in popularity and becomes more professionalized and commercialized, paywalls, subscriptions and other exclusive content arrangements threaten to limit whatever current democratic diversity and accessibility podcasting has achieved.

There’s also the fact that many podcasters don’t realize that they should (or know how to), as Bello Collective’s co-founder and A/V archivist Dana Gerber-Margie so eloquently puts it, save their shit. Take Adam Curry, one of the early mainstream podcasters who hosted the Daily Source Code podcast from a classic iPod on his commute to work that ran from 2004 to 2013 (over 860 episodes!). 3 years ago, he sent a quick tweet out to his 40,000-plus followers that read: “Looking for a full archive of ‘Daily Source Code’ mp3s.”. Apparently, as he noted on his website: “For a number of [stupid and careless] reasons, I am not in posession of most of these.” [sic]

As people look back on how podcasting started, or how the format has grown since its earliest days, they’ll need evidence of that past. Whether it’s one of podcasting’s first breakout shows (like the Daily Source Code) or countless cases of independent podcasters like Curry, many podcasters simply don’t realize that just by virtue of the fact they are taking part in a format’s infancy, they are also making history. What today’s podcasters are producing will have value in the future, if not for its content, but for what it tells us about audio’s longer history, about who has the right to communicate and by what means. If we’re not making efforts to preserve podcasts now, we’ll likely find ourselves in the same sonic conundrum many radio historians now find themselves in: writing, researching and thinking about a past they can’t fully hear.

There are projects underway, thankfully, that are looking to help save some of this past and present. The Internet Archive — as with so much other media — has a growing audio database, including many podcasts. Audiosear.ch, before Apple came along and snapped the company up, had been offering a great tool for podcast analysis with their interactive transcripts, and PodDB has a highly useful database of information about podcast hosts, guests, producers and more. Perhaps most promisingly, Dana is part of a new grant, Preserve This Podcast!, with Molly Schwartz and Mary Kidd, which aims to teach podcasters how to properly save and archive their own work. The project will produce a podcast, a zine, and a workshop curriculum to help podcasters develop important basic digital preservation skills. (The project is coming soon to a podcast festival/conference near you!)

I’m also engaged with a small but devoted team in an effort to build a site we’re calling PodcastRE (short for Podcast Research) to preserve podcasts and make them more researchable for audio scholars and enthusiasts. So far we’ve logged over 600,000 audio files and their corresponding metadata from over 4500 different podcast feeds, all of which we’re trying to find ways to keep and preserve far into the future.

The site is — as they say in the tech biz — in beta right now, but you can still search through podcasts by keyword, play streams of many of the podcasts, find old shows you loved, and even read transcripts of some of them. Soon we hope to have more analytical tools to visualize the data on the site (Is podcast production going up or down? Were there more political podcasts in 2015 vs. 2016? What were the keywords in podcasts the day after the London attacks, or after the U.S. election?). Podcasting is still a young format and there are many unknowns — questions that might be answered if we take enough care to preserve and study them before they get lost in the digital content stream.

Luckily for Curry, he managed to track down copies of his show. It turns out that a “super friend of the show” had a copy of the entire Daily Source Code archive, and was uploading it and making to available to fans through Bit Torrent Sync. As a result, one of podcasting’s first big shows wasn’t lost to time. But this hardly seems like a systematic solution. If shows like Serial, Welcome to Night Vale, WTF with Marc Maron and others have prompted critics to proclaim we’re in a golden age of audio, you’d think we’d have a more comprehensive strategy for saving these new sounds than optimistically assuming podcast producers are keeping proper backup copies of their shows, and that those copies will last five, ten, fifty years into the future.

Jeremy Morris is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. PodcastRE is made possible through UW2020 Discovery Initiative, from the University of Wisconsin — Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education and a Digital Humanities Advancement grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Special thanks to Peter Sengstock for managing the site, Eric Hoyt for analytics assistance, and Samuel Hansen for the data model and more. If you want your podcast saved or know where to find old podcasts that would be good to have in PodcastRE, get in touch.

The Bello Collective is a publication + newsletter about podcasts and the audio industry. Our goal is to bring together writers, journalists, and other voices who share a passion for the world of audio storytelling.

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