What’s the Deal With Podcasts?

As an enthusiast of fiction podcasts (or, more formally, audio dramas; I’ll use the terms interchangeably here), both my to-listen list and my list of recommendations for others are constantly growing. However, I also keep a third list: those that I have listened to, but don’t recommend. Obviously, any form of media can give rise to instances that fall short of a given (subjective) standard, but I believe many issues with podcasts I’ve encountered can be traced back to two main factors that are largely unique to the audio medium.

The first of these is accessibility. Making a podcast is vastly faster, easier, and cheaper than almost any other method of putting a story out into the world. The medium might be the most comparable to TV, but there’s a well-established TV industry that is driven by a handful of major production companies, making it difficult to break in without a background there even if you’re able to bear the financial burden. On the other hand, writing books might be more analogous to the process of creating a podcast, as it can easily be achieved by a single person, but there’s still an established industry to contend with, which means making your story marketable for a publisher.

The simplicity of the basic podcast-making process cannot be overstated. If you have a laptop with a built-in microphone, you can create an audio drama, from initial concept to publishing online, at zero cost and in less than a week, and most of that time would be waiting for approval from distributors like Spotify. If you want to upgrade your production, no one aspect comes with a substantial investment: a microphone for less than $50 on Amazon, an upgrade to your hosting capacity for a few dollars a month, editing software for free. The only equivalent to this low-cost, free-range production process is probably YouTube series, but podcasts only require half the battle of recording and editing, not to mention, decades of radio broadcasts and newer organizations like Radiolab lend a few more shades of respectability to the medium. On top of all this, the popularity of podcasts is growing and has been for the past several years; on Spotify, the number of podcasts offered has exploded from around seven hundred thousand in 2019 to almost five million in 2023. On Apple Music, an average of over 500 podcasts have been added per day over the past three months. The audience is growing as well, with the number of regular listeners in the United States alone having quintupled over the last ten years.

Overall, this means that not only are people likely to gravitate towards podcasting due to the low barrier to entry, they’re also more likely than ever to be aware of podcasts in the first place and to expect that if they make one, it will be successful. This creates fantastic opportunities for diverse creators with unconventional stories to put their ideas out into the world, but it also means those ideas may come out with very little polish. Dialogue, for example, is one area I’ve noticed many shows fall short, as is story pacing. Both are aspects of writing that are difficult to learn without experience, and both are rarely notable when done well but obvious and possibly immersion-breaking when not executed skillfully. I frequently find myself trying a show with an excellent elevator-pitch concept, but dropping it after a handful of episodes because I simply don’t want to follow the story in the state it’s in. Most shows do admittedly improve given time, but meanwhile the entire first season might be barely listenable, which hampers engagement that might otherwise drive further progress, not to mention income from crowdfunding or platforms like Patreon that makes acquiring better equipment and hiring additional cast and crew possible.

The other aspect that hobbles many audio dramas I’ve encountered is much more specific and somewhat more based on personal experience and conjecture, but it’s cropped up often enough that I consider it worth discussing. This is the tendency for audio dramas to justify their existence through use of a framing device such as a radio show or recordings of some sort of documents. The popularity of frame narratives in a given genre or medium is sometimes linked to its emergence, such as the prevalence of the ‘found manuscript’ device in early Gothic fiction; a new format being soft-launched, so to speak, with a diegetic reason for its idiosyncrasies. This certainly makes sense considering audio drama’s relatively recent emergence (or re-emergence, after television eclipsed the radio plays of the 40s and 50s).

I suspect an additional reason for the popularity of frame narratives in audio drama, or rather two: Welcome to Night Vale and The Magnus Archives. These are two powerhouses in the audio drama scene: WTNV has aired consistently since 2012 and was described by Vulture in 2021 as “the foundational institution of the fiction-podcast genre.” The Magnus Archives reached over four million downloads per month during its final season in 2020, and both shows have earned multiple Audio Verse Awards over the years.

Another thing they have in common is premises that are used to great effect not just as framing devices, but as elements that actively contribute to the story. WTNV is a local radio broadcast in a friendly desert community, events in which directly impact its host, while TMA is a collection of recordings made to preserve statements from victims of supernatural phenomena, with which the archivist is more familiar than he would like to admit. Because of the two shows’ immense popularity, they have naturally influenced the audio drama scene, and I believe the excellent execution of their respective frame narratives magnified their apparent relevance to the shows’ overall quality and success when in reality, a frame narrative does nothing to improve baseline poor writing and can hinder plot development if the scope expands, especially in shows that do not have an anthology structure. I have even seen examples of a framing device paradoxically requiring more justification in the story than it provides, such as characters repeatedly debating reading the documents that form the bulk of each episode. A frame narrative should support the story, but when treated as a prerequisite, it is more likely to become restrictive.

I say all of this not to condemn audio drama in general or discourage anyone new to the scene, nor do I expect my opinion to convey much authority, given that I rarely write fiction myself and have never tried my hand at audio drama. Rather, I hope that this might push hopeful audio drama writers and producers to recognize and play to their own strengths and weaknesses: if dialogue isn’t a strong suit, perhaps a limited cast or just a single voiced character would be ideal to start with. If you find yourself searching for ways to get around a framing device, don’t feel obligated to include it. Audio drama has, as mentioned above, a huge variety of styles and more being developed all the time.