Over seventy-five million Americans listen to podcasts every month, and the average weekly listener spends over six hours tuning into podcasts from the more than thirty million podcast episodes currently available. Yet despite the excitement over podcasting, the sounds of podcasting’s nascent history are vulnerable and they remain mystifyingly difficult to research and preserve. Podcast feeds end abruptly, cease to be maintained, or become housed in proprietary databases, which are difficult to search with any rigor. Podcasts might seem to be highly available everywhere, but it’s necessary to preserve and analyze these resources now, or scholars will find themselves writing, researching, and thinking about a past they can’t fully see or hear. This collection gathers the expertise of leading and emerging scholars in podcasting and digital audio in order to take stock of podcasting’s recent history and imagine future directions for the format. Essays trace some of the less amplified histories of the format and offer discussions of some of the hurdles podcasting faces nearly twenty years into its existence. Using their experiences building and using the PodcastRE database—one of the largest publicly accessible databases for searching and researching podcasts—the volume editors and contributors reflect on how they, as media historians and cultural researchers, can best preserve podcasting’s booming audio cultures and the countless voices and perspectives podcasting adds to our collective soundscape.

All kinds of modern music from minimalism to electronic jazz are described and discographies of each are provided.

Podcasting burst onto the media landscape in the early 2000s. At the time, there were hopes it might usher in a new wave of amateur and professional cultural production and represent an alternate model for how to produce, share, circulate and experience new voices and perspectives. Twenty years later, podcasting is at a critical juncture in its young history: a moment where the early ideals of open standards and platform-neutral distribution are giving way to services that prioritize lean-back listening and monetizable media experiences. This book provides an accessible and comprehensive account of one of digital media’s most vibrant formats. Focusing on the historical changes shaping podcasts as a media format, the book explores the industrial, technological and cultural components of podcasting alongside case studies of various podcasts, industry publications, and streaming audio platforms (e.g. Spotify, Google and Apple Podcasts). Jeremy Morris argues that as streaming platforms push to make podcasting more industrialized, accessible, user-friendly and similar to other audio media like music or audiobooks, they threaten podcasting’s early, though always unrealized, promises. This is the go-to introduction for students and researchers of media, communication and cultural studies, as well as readers who enjoy making and listening to podcasts.

Starting from the observation of the ubiquity of fan podcasts engaging in media commentary, this book explores three fan podcast genres in which commentary manifests as a structuring form: rewatch and reread podcasts, recap podcasts, and review podcasts. The author conducts a formalist genre analysis of these podcasts, close reading nine case studies to describe how the three genres function and how different fan labour manifests in podcasting. Each case study teases out the themes, style, and formal constellations of the three podcast genres, shows how different fans activate the affordances of podcasting and commentary, and reveals the distinct generic functions of the three podcast genres. This book will be of significant interest to scholars and students in podcast studies, fan studies, cultural studies and literary studies who are interested in fan podcasts, podcast genre analysis, and ways of close reading podcasts as texts.

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Their ever-evolving popularity notwithstanding, audiobooks remain a rather undertheorized phenomenon. The prevailing handful of existing studies seem to have adopted an inherently historicist approach, which fails to identify and scrutinize their aesthetic importance. Thus, rather than regarding them as mere recorded ‘versions’ of existing literary works, this book explores them as the unique products of a hitherto undefined artistic genre. As performance-based aural artefacts, the very act of listening to them is rendered an aesthetic experience in its own right. By effectively embracing an interdisciplinary approach and introducing a set of aesthetic questions and philosophical conundrums (ignited by a paradigmatic application of the New Institutional Theory of Art), this study establishes a new aesthetic category—which, in turn, not only classifies audiobooks as artworks to all intents and purposes, but also generates the criteria and parameters for evaluating their merit. Since the proof of the proverbial pudding is purportedly in the eating, in surveying a series of concrete case studies—each highlighting different degrees of complexities—this study mainly examines first-person narratives as the most natural medium for the aesthetics of the audiobook. As such, the investigation herein provides one with comparative close listenings, appropriately analyzing and debating their aesthetic properties. Finally, in exploring what this study identifies as one’s informed intuition and its role in the craft of casting audiobooks, this study also proposes a new understating of how aesthetic appreciation works in action.