Content For Ad's Sake
On the Podcast Medium
Morning car rides to middle school were an evocative experience - my eyes, ears, and hands still remember the details. I can recall the dry, biting morning cold hitting my face like a frying pan. The engine hum as I waited for the windshield to defrost and the car to warm. A Safeway bagel sliced and toasted, smeared with peanut butter, sitting on a paper towel square in my lap. The smell of my mom’s perfume on her sweater, dressed to head into work after dropping me off.
Our car rides were typically silent - 6:30 AM is too early for conversation. Some mornings - exam days and weeks ridden with friend drama - it felt like I was being driven to my execution, which the grey western Washington skies didn’t help with. I had much to mull over privately, as did my mom, preoccupied with thoughts of work and raising three pre-teens. However, the silence was broken as soon as the FM radio crackled on, top 40 blaring from the car speakers, along with the thunderous taglines of overcaffinated radio jockeys.
“Brooke and Jubal” of Brooke & Jubal in the Morning on MOViN 92.5 (“Seattle’s #1 Hit Music Station”) were our morning carpool companions. The radio volume was always slightly too loud, but we never bothered to change it. Between playing the same five pop songs, Brooke and Jubal had a series of comedy bits they would conduct at the same time every day, typically involving a listener calling in to express dating grievances or inquire about general life advice. “Awkward Tuesday Phone Calls” and “Second Date Updates” were popular segments. But the daily “Phone Tap” would always occur during my mom and I’s commute.
The Phone Tap involved Jubal prank calling a listener-submitted person live on the air, pretending to be an obnoxious customer service agent, an overly nosy neighbor, or an obsessive admirer who tracked down their number. Part of me assumed (and still assumes) that many of these prank calls are prearranged - I know few people who routinely answer the phone to an unknown number. I suspect my mom thought that too, but we would silently chuckle nonetheless. If the radio volume was turned down for whatever reason, it was promptly turned up for the Phone Tap, injecting some levity into our morning.
After enough car rides, we grew a bit attached to the hosts, especially as they divulged information about their personal lives. Should we ever meet them in real life, we felt like we would know what to say to make them laugh or spur an interesting conversation. Their voices were like a comforting kind of earworm. In this way, syndicated radio jockeys were the true predecessors to modern podcasters, with their unwavering reliability, their personability breeding parasociality, and their facelessness allowing space for the listener’s imagination.
While syndicated radio has been an entertainment fixture for over a hundred years, podcasting is modern, necessitated by the digital age. In the early aughts, people began experimenting with publishing video blogs and internet radio shows. In 2003, software engineer David Winer developed an audio RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed for NYT reporter and public radio host Christopher Lydon to add audio clips from interviews on his blog. A year later, Winer worked with MTV VJ Adam Curry to build iPodder, a program that could automatically download and transfer audio files to an iPod so radio broadcasts could be listened to on the device on the go. “Podcast” came from the combination of “iPod” and “broadcast.”
In 2014, podcasts ascended in popularity. The true crime show Serial became the fastest podcast to reach five million downloads in iTunes history. In the United States, podcast listeners jumped from 40 million in 2014 to 88 million five years later. Today, there are over 500 million podcast listeners. One in four internet users listens to podcasts, as do half of American 12 to 34-year-olds, approximately eight shows per week.
At the time of writing, the top ten shows on Spotify’s podcast charts are fairly well-distributed. There are self-help-oriented shows from former attorneys like Mel Robbins and Jefferson Fisher. There are daily news shows from trusted publications like The New York Times and NPR. Crime Junkie holds the number five spot, representing the Dateline-esque true crime genre that continues to draw people - specifically, straight women - to the medium. Three years after his ousting from Fox News, The Tucker Carlson Show holds spot number seven, in good company with fellow far-right shows dominating the medium. There are comedy shows and entrepreneurship shows, but there’s no question about who’s holding the top spot.
The Joe Rogan Experience, hosted by “comedian” Joe Rogan, was the most-listened to show on Spotify in 2024, for the fourth year running. Early last year, Rogan renewed his deal with Spotify for $250 million, giving up exclusive streaming rights with the platform in favor of broader distribution on competitor platforms. Rogan is a controversial cultural figure, mainly due to his platforming of far-right conservatives, his coziness with tech oligarchy heads like Musk and Zuckerberg, and his espousing of COVID-19 misinformation in 2022. He has come to represent a troubling brand of Trump-era hyper-masculinity. A cynical brand that is anti-trans and anti-vaxx, pro-conspiracy and pro-“independent thinking,” and strangely in favor of bodybuilding and eating solely animal products (Rogan is said to subscribe to the diarrhea-inducing “carnivore diet”).
Young women online joke that if a man they’re seeing listens to Joe Rogan, they should run for the hills. In 2021, The Verge interviewed a Media Matters researcher who painted a vivid picture of how casual Rogan listeners can become entrenched in far-right online communities quite quickly:
“Let’s say you’re a young man listening to The Joe Rogan Experience, and you want to get tips on bodybuilding or how to eat healthfully, and then Rogan starts discussing that vaccines are a form of gene therapy with Ben Shapiro, and then perhaps you go to Ben Shapiro’s website, The Daily Wire, and there, you fall into a cesspool of hatred and bigotry, and once you click on a Daily Wire article, if you share it on Facebook, you’re just going to be led further and further down the far-right rabbit hole.”
If Rogan is the final boss of Trump-era masculinity in the podcast sphere, I’d dub Alex Cooper his less-intense feminine counterpart. The Barbie to his Ken, so to speak. Men join the Rogan fraternity, and women join the Daddy Gang sorority. Currently holding spot number 14 on Spotify’s podcast chart, Cooper’s Call Her Daddy is the Sex and the City of podcasts. Cooper has been lauded for her candid discussions about relationships, mental health, and masturbation; her episodes are hyper-sex-positive and centered around a kind of Dump Him feminist ethos that feels typical of the TikTok generation. Very buzzwordy, very Girl, stand up. The Call Her Daddy set is sleepover-esque, featuring Cooper sitting cross-legged across from her guest in an armchair, donning an oversized hoodie with her perfect blonde locks in a claw clip. The cozy setting is effective in getting guests - like Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, and Megan Fox - to be forthright in their conversations.
Lately, the host has been leaning less Carrie Bradshaw and more Barbara Walters, dipping her toes into more “serious” interviewing. In October 2024, she interviewed Kamala Harris ahead of the presidential election, but made sure to preface the conversation with a disclaimer that she was not trying to change any listener’s political affiliation. Positionless positioning has typified many of Cooper’s interviews, and smells like journalistic transparency on the surface. But she doesn’t make much of an attempt to probe or challenge her guests. Several years ago, Cooper went on a spree of hosting culturally contentious guests like John Mayer and Jamie Lynn Spears, hearing their perspectives on their respective controversies with generous sympathy and little else.
It’s unsurprising that the podcast medium has roots in blogging, as a podcast is simply an audio version of a blog. Both mediums have a scrappier, DIY quality to them, especially compared to syndicated TV or radio shows. There is a sense that embarking on a blog or a podcast is a simple task. A “nice to have,” a tag-on to one’s main gig that they’re able to do in sweatpants and a grown-out beard. We should start a podcast is a phrase that’s been uttered by every friend group after a good volleying of conversation. For celebrities, “starting a podcast” fulfills the purpose that “writing a memoir” once did, generating a stream of low-hanging revenue. It’s a way for has-beens to reinvigorate themselves and for working artists to fill the gap between projects.
Many think that starting a podcast is as easy as recording yourself talking, just like starting a newsletter is as easy as writing your thoughts in an email. It’s quite easy to wind down a tangential pathway, filling the air space for an hour like filling the word count on a tweet. When I listen to many podcasts, particularly those started by celebrities known for other work, I get the sense that the podcast’s content is merely negative space around which the ad can exist. Packing peanuts to soften the blow of Better Help being peddled to you for the umpteenth time.
Podcasts - and TikToks and Instagram accounts, and LinkedIn posts, and YouTube channels, and yes, newsletters - are increasingly vehicles for brands to further architect their identities, and individuals to further craft their brand. Recently, many companies have joined Substack - The RealReal, Tory Burch, and even publications like New York Magazine, hoping to align themselves with the personability, coziness, and the markedness of a blogger voice. “my goal is now to be a nora ephron kind of mom” writes The RealReal on Substack notes, evoking the gregariousness of a ChatGPT tab geneating responses to “How to get over my fear of flying.” Eliza McLamb summed up the sentiment well in a recent essay about the end of manufactured “authenticity” in marketing: “Bold-faced advertising makes us feel poor. Brands had no choice but to become people.”
Podcasts and newsletters are ambivalent forms, but under current direct-to-consumerism conditions, often amount to the worst kind of entertainment - content for content’s sake, or rather, content for ad’s sake. We’re careening towards an era of indistinguishability - your mom can’t tell if that Facebook image is real or AI-generated, you can’t tell if you’re being sold to.
And yet, increasingly and evidently, my entertainment expectations are those of a direct-to-consumer - I want my shows and I want them now. At any cost.
I go through obsessive phases with my favorite podcasts (I’ve been going through a long phase with Las Culturistas right now), plugging the backlog into my ears when I need to get through mundane work - email filtering, dishwashing, toilet scrubbing. As opposed to Brooke & Jubal’s fifteen-minute slot on my morning commute, podcasts are the backdrop to many minutes of my everyday adult life, particularly when I’ve grown lethargic with what’s in my music library. The medium is readily available, bingeworthy, and has social media profiles to expand its universe.
I now wonder what it would have been like on those morning middle school commutes without the fifteen-minute Phone Tap. How my life would have been without Brooke & Jubal, and Alix Earle, and Alex Cooper, and Matt Rogers, and Bowen Yang. Would they have been mind-numbing? Miserable? Would my mom and I have broken out into a fight? A heart-to-heart? Who’s to know, really, what life would have looked like in the minutes absorbed by entertainment? What frustrations and pleasures were quelled? By listening to entertainment conceived to deliver an ad after. Minutes sucked into the ether. Dust in an invisible vacuum.
Loved this! I read something recently about teens who are deleting Spotify off their phones to really unplug and get comfortable being alone with their thoughts. It kind of inspired me because I'm constantly listening to something – music, podcasts – in the background of my life. Commuting, cleaning, working, exercise, etc. Audio content almost feels more all-encompassing than social media because it's always on.
I didn't think about the connection between those radio stations we listened to as children and podcasts we listen to as adults. Great article on breaking down the podcasts medium...