“The 2018 way of making a new friend is by asking them to be a guest on your podcast.” This tweet that made the rounds on the Internet a few months ago, is not far off the mark. From Ellen de Generes to Neha Dhupia to your investment banker neighbour who records with an iPhone in his garage, it really does feel like everyone has, at some point last year, dabbled with the medium.
But the podcast, experts believe, is yet to have its Indian boom — that “one big explosion”, as Mae Thomas, host of the popular indie music show, Maed in India , describes it. But boom it will, in 2019. Following counterparts in the West, Indian news outlets are now delving into audio output, and the number of content platforms creating original audio shows for a local, multilingual audience is growing. Advertisers are taking note, while some loyal fans might even fork out a subscription fee to listen to their favourite storytellers and public intellectuals.
Want to create your original show, but do not know how to? Coaches and consultants specialising (sometimes exclusively) in the medium have got you covered.
Apple’s recent rankings of the top Indian podcasts (which includes Maed in India ) reveals the growing diversity in the local industry. Food and restaurants with Pooja Dhingra ( NoSugarCoat ), Premchand’s stories by Sameer Goswami, and a quirky take on the etymology of words by Rachel Lopez ( Wordy Wordpecker ), are just some examples.
In its ‘State of the Podcast Universe Report’, Voxnest, a podcasting solutions company, ranked India as the country with the fastest growth rate (over 30%) in creation. Significant revenue, it said, is yet to come, as business models are still playing catch up. But, if you are considering taking a leap into, or experimenting with, the exciting world of audio, here is what you need to know.
With inputs from Varun Senthil Nathan
The India story Bengaluru-based Saif Omar (pictured), co-host of the travel podcast, The Musafir Stories (that he runs with his wife Faiza), believes that the podcast renaissance of the West occurred in 2014 thanks to the wildly popular true crime show, Serial, and because of lower barriers to entry, like cheaper equipment. Gautam Raj Anand, founder of the podcast discovery app (and now original content creator), hubhopper says, “High commuting time, more time spent at home, lower elasticity with data consumption (people are stingy with data and audio consumes less), varying Internet speeds — we are the only country that operates on 4G, 3G, 2G and no G at the same time — and linguistic diversity have created a recipe for audio content to explode in India. The coming of platforms like Jio has also made it easier.”
Hope for our time Lawrence Lessig (pictured), a professor at Harvard Law School, believes that the “architecture of the podcast is the precise antidote” to the present times. “It is a chance for thinking and reflection; it has an attention span an order of magnitude greater than the Tweet,” he wrote in a recent essay. Audio personality Jake Shapiro also wrote that “podcasting is the slow food movement of the media world. [It] offers hope for a heathy ecosystem that treats listeners with respect… and gives voice to new talent and communities long missing from the airwaves.”
Human curation matters “Podcasts are booming everywhere right now, but there isn’t really a very good mechanism for discovery,” says Malia Politzer, executive editor of piqd.com, a platform that provides recommendations by curators from across the world. “The iTunes Top 100 list tends to highlight podcasts that are already quite popular, which means that really high quality content is being produced, but is hard for people to find. That is a good niche for a human curation platform.”
On the pidq website, over 70 curators (with five from India, including journalists Raksha Kumar and Chhavi Sachdev) provide podcast recommendations based on their areas of expertise. As Kavita Rajwade (pictured), co-founder of India-based podcast company, Indus Vox Media says, “Discovery is our biggest challenge right now. People don’t even know that there is Indian content available.”
Getting hooked Gautam Raj Anand of hubhopper, the podcast discovery platform, deconstructs user behaviour: Indians come to the platform for the first time for some form of globalised content (shows like Serial or TED talks). Then they automatically gravitate towards localised content, with themes like self-improvement and storytelling (Panchtantra, for instance), and business acumen. The best performing are spiritual and religious shows.
Conference alert Anders Held, the co-founder of Radiodays Europe, an annual audio industry conference, believes that we are currently in the golden age of audio. “The companies that are now investing in audio as a future media are the digital giants like Google and Apple. It will change the audio world,” says Held. The first edition of Radiodays Asia, organised in Kuala Lumpur from August 27 to 29, will also address podcasting, as well as competition with other audio mediums and channels. Details: radiodaysasia.com
How to join the tribe Bijay Gautam, 26, has, for the past six years, been an avid consumer of self-help podcasts (think The Tim Feriss Show). “But these shows are produced outside India, and targeted at audiences from other parts of the world,” says Gautam. “We need to have our own stories.” In August 2017, the Gurgaon-based research scientist (he quit his job at a pharmaceutical company last month) launched his own audio show, The Inspiring Talk, where he conducts remote interviews of personalities like YouTube sensation Vidya Vox and nutritionist Nidhi Mohan Kamal.
But the real business opportunity (that allows Gautam to make a living) was in the area of podcast coaching. He now runs a six-week, remote programme where he works with clients to come up with their own topics, formulate a plan, and discern who their target audience is. Plans for monetising and scaling are also included. The programme costs ₹8,000 and Gautam has trained over 50 clients since May 2018, including 15 who have launched their own podcast.
