What the Music Industry Can Learn from Podcasts
As podcasts continue to grow in popularity, the music industry must grapple with what podcasts offer that much of contemporary music does not: attention capture.
Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, hosts of my favorite podcast, Las Culturistas
Here’s a thought exercise:
What artist have you been listening to lately? What songs by them have you been replaying? What feelings, senses arise?
Now think about your favorite podcast.
When I go through this process, the music I remember is vague and ill defined. A fleeting moment from the new Weather Station record comes to mind. Maybe some Charli XCX melody floats somewhere in my brain. But it all feels nondescript. With the world’s entire music library always available, I feel like I’m drowning in music. There’s so much of it, but nothing really sticks.
Comparing these feelings to those that arise when I think about my favorite podcasts, it becomes clear to me that podcasts are offering something more enlivening to me in this moment. For example, when I think about my current favorite podcast, Las Culturistas, a pop culture podcast hosted by queer comedians and best friends Matt Rogers and Bowen Yangs, I remember jokes, gags, stories. Something clicks in my brain that feels difficult to find with music as of late.
The podcast industry is entering a sort of renaissance. There’s quite literally something for everyone. During the pandemic, but more broadly in our socially isolated culture, podcasts are helping to fill the social void in many of our lives. In lieu of being with friends in physical space and time, we can simply plug in our AirPods, listen to people we enjoy and imagine that we too have a social life. In a recent piece for the New York Times, TV critic Margaret Lyons, reflected similarly about her growing preference for podcasts:
To keep it together this year . . . required a state of emotional hibernation alongside the physical one, and podcasts are just small enough to get into my small little loser bear cave. There’s less emotional buy-in than with a scripted drama, but they possess a legitimacy and honesty largely absent in reality and unscripted television.
Podcasts are coming to us when we need companionship. When fictional television series or fabricated reality shows remind us, painfully, of a different time. When music is not serving its more joyous social function. When our brains are too zoom-fried to read. There podcasts are. Serving a role.
Music’s role in culture is much broader and harder to name. This is because music can serve a variety of functions, from transcendent and immersive emotional experiences to pleasantly benign background . Instead of highlighting music’s unique ability to traverse contexts, streaming platforms like Spotify have decided to highlight the background function of music. The more time you spend time listening on their platform, the more they can charge advertisers for using their ad space. In addition, the greater the volume of streams they accrue, the more those penny-percentiles they send to artists can turn into notable sums, helping them justify their vampiric business model to labels, artists and global consumers. They are perfectly content to have you play “chill beats” all day while working from home. And they don’t care if you can’t remember a single melody from a whole day of listening. Spotify, has even admitted to their prioritization of music that serves well as background. Liz Pelly, in a 2019 piece for The Baffler, reports:
Jorge Espinel, who was Head of Global Business Development at Spotify for five years, once said in an interview: ‘We love to be a background experience. You’re competing for consumer attention. Everyone is fighting for the foreground. We have the ability to fight for the background.’”
Podcasts, on the other hand, cannot be background; they are inherently gripping. Imagine trying to solve a crossword puzzle while listening to an instrumental dance track. Doable, no? Now try doing that while listening to the off-the-cuff tangents of Joe Rogan. The inherent implication of listening to a podcast is captured attention. Every word offers a new image, idea, inspires a new tangential thought in your own mind. That means that when you’re listening to a podcast, you’re in. Music, on the other hand, creates an emotional environment in which you can do other tasks. Even if a song has lyrics, your can easily abstract them into pure melody if your focus is elsewhere.
The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way for music. If musical artists realize that they are being relegated as background audio and are competing with a variety of audio formats, from podcasts, to the new app Clubhouse, to even phone calls with friends, for the active attention of consumers, maybe their work would sound less like forgettable indie pop fodder, and more like the work of the late electronic music producer SOPHIE. In a post I wrote a few weeks ago, I lauded SOPHIE for having a deep intentionality to their work, perfecting every moment of their music to ensure that it is engaging and dynamic. Other artists are maximizing the active attention of their listeners through lyrics and emotional connectivity. Memes aside, the singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers has had a breakthrough year in large part because her lyrics are so specific and captivating that her fans cannot help but to cry when listening. If more artists made their music with this same intentionality to immerse listeners and capture their attention, our music would be more gripping, more engaging and it would not merely be atmospheric background perfect for Spotify’s business model.
Artists are only one small factor here though. They are, above all, economic actors responding to incentives set by the dominant modes of listening technologies. If Spotify wants to step back from owning the background and step towards attenuating users to a more active engagement, they will have to start rewarding more challenging, curious and captivating music on its primetime playlist spots. They will also have to think creatively around design choices that push listeners towards active engagement and away from treating music as air conditioning.
In the end, prioritizing active attention to music may help the industry’s long term business model. Clubhouse, the social audio app that is essentially the combination of twitter and podcasts, allowing users to join rooms of listeners and speak aloud, was recently valued at 1 billion USD. Part of that valuation is rooted in the growing recognition that there is real hunger for talk-based audio entertainment, but also a recognition that the attention of audio consumers is much more actively engaged than television viewers, to use a familiar example. This dynamic makes an ad in this context especially powerful and thus immensely valuable.
What stops Spotify and artists from taking advantage of this very same dynamic? If they realized the precious value of engaged aural attention, then maybe whole new streams of revenue would pour into the famished music industry. The exact outcome of what the realization would lead to artistically and technologically is still a question to me. But I’d love to see artists, labels and creatives begin to retrain listeners to engage with music rather than treating it as forgettable atmosphere.