Welcome to “The Overwhelm”
Have we reached the point where podcasts are no longer fun?
Lately, we’re beginning to see a pattern: this has become all too much for our listeners. “This” being podcast queues overflowing with hours of incredible stories and headline news. They want to listen, they want to learn, but they just can’t keep up.
So it was not surprising when two recent essays, “Friends of the Pod” from the editors of n+1, and “Damn You, Ira Glass and Your Perfect Male Vocal Fry” by Joseph Osmundson at McSweeney’s, offered the pointed opinion that this listener exhaustion means we may have, in fact, reached peak podcast.
This idea isn’t totally new — Bello has been covering podcast burnout since 2016, and Caroline Crampton recently devoted an issue to burnout in Hot Pod — but these two articles rankled some members of our community who felt their authors may have missed some bigger points about we’re now calling “the overwhelm.”
In the conversation below, Bello Collective members Wade Roush (host and creator of Soonish) and Ma’ayan Plaut (content strategist and podcast librarian at RadioPublic) discuss these pieces, and how our industry should respond to the very real problem of listener fatigue.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Wade: I happened to find both of the articles at the same time, and reading them together, it struck me that, hey, this feels like a moment. You have a group of editors at n+1, and a podcaster/listener in the form of Osmundson, who are protesting, in their own ways, that we’ve reached some kind of saturation point: podcasts don’t feel fun or new anymore. It’s like there’s a weight to the enterprise, an overwhelm that people weren’t writing about before.
Ma’ayan: I’m fascinated that, in the span of a few weeks, there were been two articles calling for a “too much podcast, please stop” sort of action. It’s a plea to podcasters, it seems, and it’s one that I’m cautiously behind as an overbooked listener. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing, even if that good thing brings me overwhelming joy, company, and thought-provoking stuff.
It made me wonder: Is this really about podcasts, or is this about the proliferation of content creation on the internet? And how we as humans are both making things all the time and expected to keep up, but we really, really never will?
“Are they feeling waterlogged, or can we help them find a comfortable toehold somewhere?”
Wade: I wonder about those things too. Who actually wrote the n+1 piece? What do they listen to? Which episode of which show was the tipping point for them?
At times, I felt that piece bordered on being mean and unconstructive:
“Podcasts are second-order cultural productions, records of reactions, consumption in real time. Most of them expand on existing mass-culture obsessions: sports, TV, gossip, crime. They create more culture by attending to culture, but without ever lapsing into criticism.”
Ouch! Where’s that coming from? It’s definitely got some of that flavor of the guy on the couch complaining about how Netflix auto-play rules his life. But there’s also a note of disappointment or resignation, like sameness and banality is all listeners can hope for.
But the real question can’t be about quantity, can it? There is always going to be more audio than we can listen to, just like there are always more books in the library than we could ever read. It’s got to be more about how listeners feel situated in the river of content. Are they feeling waterlogged, or can we help them find a comfortable toehold somewhere?
Ma’ayan: I couldn’t overlook that when they were pleading for a pause (because everything looked or sounded the same to them) they didn’t seem to be looking very far to see what else was out there. But even knowing more of what’s out there doesn’t mean that there are good ways to navigate it.
I frequently revisit this 2011 piece from Pop Culture Happy Hour host Linda Holmes: “The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything.” It feels relevant here.
Wade: Oh, I can already tell it’s going to break my heart.
[Conversation pauses for Wade to read the article]
Ma’ayan: The reason why I love Linda’s article is that it is relevant for all media and all consumers: We prioritize stuff. We miss things. People haven’t stopped making things and people haven’t stopped enjoying those things.
“Maybe the n+1 and McSweeney’s pieces are more like half-processed howls of despair over the sadness of surrender.”
From a listener’s perspective, I appreciate this article a lot. It gives us permission to make choices, to find our own spaces, to expand or stay put and be okay with that decision.
Wade: What a lovely and truthful essay. I think she’s right that you can choose “culling” or “surrender” and that “surrender” is okay. I have surrendered on pop music, sports, and network TV, and it opens up space for other stuff. It’s harder to surrender podcasts, because there are so many I know I would love, and so many producers I still want to learn from, but I just can’t. Not if I still want to make my show and earn a living.
Maybe the n+1 and McSweeney’s pieces are more like half-processed howls of despair over the sadness of surrender.
Ma’ayan: Though their surrender also feels like a “It’s YOUR fault” sort of attitude that shifts the blame away from a listener to a creator.
From a maker’s perspective, though, this is where I start to think about what this “Stoooooppppp” feeling from listeners means for the creative process. To me, that means finding spaces that aren’t carved out yet in podcast-land, about figuring out what you bring and what you make that is a special combination of you and your interests, and finding the audience that will love that thing.
Wade: That’s what it comes back to for me as well. How do you rise above “the overwhelm”? And if you find the niche audience who does prioritize your stuff, is it still a meaningfully large audience?
Ma’ayan: Not everything is for everyone, and that’s a tough pill to swallow when the model people have is This American Life, “a weekly public radio show, heard by 2.2 million people on more than 500 stations. Another 2.5 million people download the weekly podcast.”
That’s a flex that’s hard to ignore, you know? That metric of success feels both so limiting to me, and so overwhelming.
Wade: I know that the audience-size question is a treadmill, or an escalator, or whatever — no matter how many people are listening, it will never feel like enough. I know I should be grateful for an eager audience of *any* size. But I still feel like the “natural” audience for my show — the group of people who would enjoy it if they knew about it — is much larger than the actual audience. (But I guess now we’re psychoanalyzing me, not these essays.)
Ma’ayan: You’re also the podcaster in this conversation, so hearing how you are confronted by the questions of audience overwhelm is valuable.
Wade: Well, Joe Osmundson’s letter captures some of how I feel. This part, specifically:
“Hey everyone, this doesn’t feel sustainable. This feels just like everything that’s wrong with everything else. People who have been doing this forever are making more podcasts, and they mostly sound the same, and everyone’s listening, and they’re getting rich. The rest of us are making podcasts that basically no one is listening to, not even our friends, not even our mothers.”
That last part doesn’t apply to me, thankfully. Basically a few thousand people are listening to my show, which is great, but I would like it to be a few hundred thousand. (Insert slurping greedy sound FX.) But if you’re an indie podcaster, all of these things are swirling around you all of the time: Audience, eagerness, metrics, conversion, revenue, attention, time, money, reviews, ratings, promotions, swag, conferences, envy for the big guys alternating with deep gratitude for even getting to be part of this amazing community. It’s hard to unswirl them.
“Humans make stuff, and that is so super cool.”
Ma’ayan:As a maker, that’s a different kind of overwhelm! And that’s all on top of making your podcast.
Wade: Maybe this is the key thing: These pieces complaining about or poking fun at the overwhelm arrive at a time when indy podcasters are already feeling a little raw and vulnerable. The VC/monetization monster is here, and we can’t keep pretending that we’re all living on this beautiful commune where everyone is equal.
Ma’ayan: It’s the chasm between the haves and have nots that feels like it’s widening significantly this year.
To me, it illuminates that there are different strategies for big podcasters and indies. A takeaway for indie podcasters is to take more creative risks, because that’s something that they can do more easily than big shows. In my mind, that also makes for more versatile creators who also prime their audience to grow and change with them.
I see that as a huge opportunity that also manages at least a little bit of the podcast creator overwhelm: if you are trying to do something no one else is, you are creating your own measure of success because there’s no one quite like you. And for a listener, they don’t get anything quite like your show, so they continue to come back.
“We’re not making static, dammit.”
Wade: Yeah, that feels true, about taking more creative risks — that’s not something we have to put off until we have big shows. I mean, Jad Abumrad waited a long time before he started More Perfect, and Roman Mars didn’t start What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law until…well, until Trump started trying to shred the Constitution. [With my show,] I am, unapologetically, trying to satisfy my own curiosity, and hoping that a few other people have these overlapping questions too.
This goes back to one thing in the Osmundson piece that still rankles.
He said:
“Can we all just please, for now, not make any more podcasts, not any at all, none. A radio silence that we can fill with our own stories, for now, sharing our own stories with our lovers, past and present, speaking into the silences we too often, now, try to fill with making, and listening to, static.”
Well, no, we can’t do that, and we’re not making static, dammit.
Ma’ayan:
Silence is okay — you can do that thing. Don’t tell people to stop doing the thing that’s bringing them a creative outlet and clarity and connections.
I love that we live in a time that anyone can make anything! And they should! Humans make stuff, that is so super cool.
The Bello Collective is a publication + newsletter about podcasts and the audio industry. Our goal is to bring together writers, journalists, and other voices who share a passion for the world of audio storytelling.
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