The Problems and the Promise of the Audio Industry

There’s a snapshot in my mind of the moment I fell in love with audio storytelling. 

It was the fall of 2008. A few weeks earlier, a tornado had torn a gash 30 miles long through eastern New Hampshire, a freak storm in a place that doesn’t see tornadoes. It killed one grandmother as she huddled over her baby grandchild, saving him. Nearby, the tornado decimated a wholesale nursery, uprooting trees and launching a worker driving a golf cart high in the air before landing him 30 feet away, shaken and bruised but alive. 

Photo by @annemarieschaepman on Unsplash

Equipped with a digital recorder I barely knew how to use, I visited. A freelance journalist, I was producing my first feature for New Hampshire Public Radio. At that point, I’d been a magazine writer and editor for 20 years, but my words had been confined to the printed — and the digital — page.

Inside a steamy warehouse, two women sat at a table, tiny pots piled in front of them. “Tink, tink, tink,” I heard. It was the sound of the forks they held hitting pot edges as they planted seedling after seedling, attempting to rescue a business in danger of overnight failure. As we talked, they continued working to the music of their tools: “Tink, tink, tink.” 

Fifteen years later, the memory of those sounds captured on digital tape sends me back to that nursery, to the shock of a tornado where one doesn’t belong. They transported listeners into the effects on one group of people of something far larger and abstract: climate change. Listeners could feel how climate change literally upended a human being and put a business and livelihoods at risk.

Yesterday I was speaking with a longtime TV news anchor who is making the transition into public radio. Before TV, she’d fallen in love with journalism, she said, because she “wanted to use words to help people care about things they wouldn’t have known mattered before.” 

Audio, in my opinion, does this better than any other medium — except, perhaps, the novel. It gives writers a 3D world of tools with which to paint pictures and evoke characters and emotion. We audio storytellers have no literal images or video on which to rely: the only way for us to make stories visual is through descriptions and sound.

The effect is often to evoke empathy. If the cliché is that storytelling is powerful, high-quality audio is storytelling on steroids. Listeners to great audio storytelling — whether longform radio features, interview shows like Fresh Air, or podcasts, have learned how to negotiate conflict and compensation. They’ve learned how to navigate life with Glennon Doyle and how to grieve with Anderson Cooper. They’ve made best friends with hosts they’ll never actually meet. They’ve gone along for the ride with reams of amateur sleuths who’ve solved 30-year-old cold cases. They’ve found a sense of community at Latino USA and a sense of belonging by listening along with fellow enthusiasts to podcasts about indoor plants, hunting, and medieval history.

They have felt less alone.

And, like Snap Judgment’s Glynn Washington told me on my podcast, Sound Judgment, they have been the beneficiaries of storytelling “used as a weapon for good” instead of one used for propaganda.

Listeners affected by human stories change their perspectives. 

StoryCorps has the evidence. Their One Small Step initiative, which brings people from opposite sides of the political divide together to share their personal stories, appears to be having a significant effect. "In an initial survey of 2,000 Americans, 42% of respondents said they would like to engage in a conversation with someone with opposing views to help lessen political divides. After being exposed to One Small Step content, that percentage increased to 62%," reported Lily Sweeting in Current, the public media trade paper.

She’d fallen in love with journalism because she “wanted to use words to help people care about things they wouldn’t have known mattered before.” Audio, in my opinion, does this better than any other medium.

Audio stories have also started movements, like the millions of fans inspired to action by The 1619 Project. And like thousands of listeners to Degrees, the Environmental Defense Fund’s green careers podcast. Degrees’ mission is to inspire young people to use their careers to fight climate change, and to fill a predicted green workforce gap in the tens of millions. 

It works. Listeners regularly email host Yesh Pavlik Slenk, thanking her for helping them change careers. As one reviewer notes, “It’s no exaggeration to say that this podcast changed my life.”  

I’ve been making podcasts and helping others do so since 2016, when the podcast industry was rising and everything felt heady and optimistic. Now, I’m sad and worried. This week, the New York Times named Heavyweight, a storytelling podcast hosted by Jonathan Goldstein, one of the best podcasts of 2023. The same day, Spotify announced plans to lay off 17% of its workforce, about 1500 people, and canceled the show.

Spotify is profitable. In a memo to employees, CEO Daniel Ek wrote that Spotify had invested heavily in hiring more people in 2020 and 2021. But now, he wrote, “Economic growth has slowed dramatically and capital has become more expensive. Spotify is not an exception to these realities.” The company’s share price jumped 7% a day after the announcement. 

It’s notable, among wave after wave of layoffs, that both podcast listenership and ad dollars are rising, not falling. The U.S. podcast listener base has grown 40% over the last three years, according to research firm Nielsen. And Nielsen reports that podcast consumption is predicted to grow faster than any other medium. Gloom and doom aside, Deloitte predicts global podcast ad revenues to grow to an estimated $3.5 billion over the next year—a roughly 30% hike. 

In an imagined world in which podcasts were considered an art form on the level of books and movies — a cultural status people like Davy Gardner of the Tribeca Audio Festival are arguing for — perhaps this industry correction wouldn’t be happening. Or perhaps it would, if we consider the long struggle of artists making indie films. The “blockbuster” mentality is taking over the podcast industry — perhaps destroying it — before, as artists, we have even left the toddler stage. There is so much further we can take this art form. 

We have to find a different way to fund this valuable, magical medium of storytelling, connection and community. It is too valuable a form to lose shows that move and change us, like WNYC’s Death, Sex and Money, NPR’s Rough Translation, and Spotify’s Heavyweight. It is too valuable to lose thousands of gifted audio storytellers to more lucrative, but less influential fields. 

Perhaps it is time for a cooperatively owned model for funding audio storytelling, like Mia Lobel, formerly of Pushkin Industries, is calling for. Perhaps it is time to look to a different kind of nonprofit model, like that of the Institute for Nonprofit News, the Colorado News Collaborative, or Press Forward are all doing, trying to bolster both independent journalism and our fragile democracy.

I don’t know the answer. But it is time that anyone who cares deeply about audio storytelling put our heads together and figure out a way forward that does not rely solely on advertising dollars — one that cares less about data and downloads and more about understanding and transformation. 

Elaine Appleton Grant is the host of Sound Judgment, a podcast that goes inside the studios — and the minds — of today’s best audio storytellers, and the CEO of Podcast Allies, LLC, a podcast production and training company in Denver.