Radio Journal:International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media - Podcasting and Popular Music, Apr 2022

Popular music and pop song-dissection podcasts often compete for top 40 listeners’ attention, but podcasts interject hosts’ opinions of songs that listeners may not share. This article introduces a phenomenon I call ‘ride-along listening’, where podcast hosts play isolated musical features to closely examine a song’s production and reception. Hosts’ instantaneous explanations of musical terms have the potential to make pop podcasts more inclusive for non-musically trained listeners. As I show, Switched on Pop’s Episode 80 dissects Janelle Monáe’s ‘Make Me Feel’ by playing the single’s harmonies and rhythms back-to-back with those of the blues, Michael Jackson and Prince. But guest host Lizzo – a classically trained flutist, songwriter, singer and rapper – especially makes Monáe’s social message of fluid sexuality palpable for specialist and non-specialist listeners alike. By foregrounding performing musicians’ embodied listening and knowledge, ride-along listening can provide inclusive ways of dissecting the medium and the message of pop music.

This article positions Hrishikesh Hirway’s Song Exploder as an archetypical example of how musical exploration, examination and education can come together in podcast form. Song Exploder’s combination of content and format allows audiences with a range of musical experience and interest to gain insight into how popular music is created at the level of individual songs, and more broadly in terms of genre and industry reception and delivery processes. Originally conceived as an audio-only podcast, versions of Song Exploder have also been staged ‘live in concert’, and in audio-visual format for Netflix. To demonstrate Song Exploder’s success, I situate it alongside similar music/media crossovers in print, radio and film and television, while also presenting findings from my five years experience of using Song Exploder as a teaching tool for undergraduate students in Australia.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to unique restrictions on human sociability. In response, exceptional initiatives using a range of existing technologies and platforms have emerged to mitigate lockdown isolation. Basement Traxx, a kind of hybrid DJ set streamed from a Glasgow basement, was one of these initiatives. As the lockdown was extended, it became a virtual gathering space, with unexpectedly powerful impacts on its audience. This research seeks to define and describe this phenomenon. In this study, we find new permutations of engagement in space, in time and in presence. We find expressions of joy in the show’s particular sociability. In the isolation of lockdown, here is an experience in which participants felt affirmed, validated and re-constituted as subjects and actors. In their response, we find an enthusiastic push-back in favour of communal musical spaces and against a political economy of music that has pressed relentlessly towards isolation, individuation and commodification.

This article examines three dimensions of Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett’s practices for producing, sharing and listening to audio in collective and social ways for The World According to Sound’s Outside In: the sonic strategies and soundscape design used to engage communal and collective listening, how Outside In adapts and transforms traditional paradigms using the broadcast medium of the podcast to aesthetically engage with liveness and the corporeality of sound, and how the COVID-19 pandemic afforded space for ‘unpopular’ soundwork based on everyday aural architectures (e.g., field recordings, ambient music, experimental music based on everyday sounds, soundscape collages) that are popular, as in, of the community. Using varied examples drawn from The World According to Sound’s soundwork, I illustrate a particular set of sonic strategies to imagine sonic space, listen relationally to sound events, and enact a sociality of collective listening.

The aim of this article is to analyse the synergies established between the podcast industry and the music industry (mainly labels and publishers). To this end, it examined the strategies of majors and indies in the development of specific series and services, the acquisition of production companies and the establishment of agreements with the large platforms and advertisers and developed a taxonomy of the content generated by these companies. These strategies have several objectives that will be studied from the political economy of cultural and media industries point of view: the promotion of artists, the exploitation of the historical catalogue in a transmedia development that puts songs into circulation generating income from reproduction and public communication rights and, of course, the opening of new businesses that generate profits from the two fundamental income channels: data and advertising. Consequently, the music companies managing audio objects and generating contents that compete in the new paradigm.