Filed under: advice, Creative Process, podcasting, writing | Tags: growing your audience, JoJo Siwa, podcasting, promotion, Social Media, spotify, videos
Since I have several podcasts that are now hosted by Spotify, I receive their newsletter (four copies, one for each podcast) which offers podcasting tips. I mostly ignore them, as I have read MANY tips previously and there’s rarely anything new. I clicked on the most recent one though, since it was about how to grow your audience. I’m in the middle of putting out a new podcast so I figured I could use some reminders of that kind of information.
Ultimately, there was nothing in it I hadn’t seen before but something about it made me think about what they were suggesting in a new way. So many tips involved making some other form of media alongside the podcast. It felt like they were saying that in order to have success as a podcaster, you had to make videos. To bring ears to your podcast, you should also write a newsletter. It struck me as absolutely absurd. In order to create one thing, you have to become expert at several others. Let me tell you, I didn’t get into audio to make video. If I wanted to make videos, I’d make videos! (And I have made a couple!)
And as annoyed as this advice made me, I acknowledge that it’s probably correct. I’m already doing it, honestly. For my latest audio drama, our producer has made multiple videos, some of which have done better than almost anything else we’ve put out in the world. I think they might help us bring people to the podcast. But I find the whole notion of having to do it infuriating. In order to create one thing, we have to now become masters of several other things to even be seen (or heard). We have to become advertisers, video makers, newsletter writers, copy writers, audio experts, etc. This is why podcasts that come from public radio stations do so much better than the rest of us. They have a staff for all those other aspects.
It didn’t use to be like this back in the early days of our theatre. If we put on a show, we put on a show. That’s pretty much it. We made postcards and posters, sure – but that’s about the extent of it. We did the art we were there to do.
I find it ridiculous that the way to “grow your audience” in one medium is to increase your presence in another. It feels like I wanted to get better at driving a car and instead of driving cars, someone advises me to start driving boats. It just very much feels like very different things. You might say, “Well, it’s all media” – but really? Driving a boat and driving a car are both driving but they are also VERY DIFFERENT. It also feels like this advice to grow a podcast by doing all these other things is essentially asking every podcaster to become a whole media studio. Make videos! Make ads! Make calculated social media posts! Interview famous people! And I see how these things help. I really do. But people do all those things for jobs these days, and I don’t love my chances in competing for social media eyeballs when everyone else has training and a salary. In that podcast I wrote about last time, Ezra Klein said that the middle is competing with the huge. That is, in the fight for attention, even things like the New York Times are the middle now and Facebook and Google are at the overwhelming top. The little guys down at the bottom of the attention economy don’t stand much of a chance when even the big guns aren’t the big guns anymore.
The thing is, it’s clear from everything I’ve read that no one knows how to grow an audience, especially for podcasts. It’s a crapshoot, like anything.
I was just reading an article about the girl group started by mega tween pop sensation, JoJo Siwa. You’d think the people who got Siwa’s career started (her mom, really) would know how to make a girl group a hit – but as the article said “The world did not pick this group…They’ve pulled every lever…It’s been almost two years. They’re not going to make it.” These people were making videos and social media content out the wazoo (and doing it mostly unpaid) and the world has mostly shrugged. Maybe instead of doing all that promotion, they could have made some more music, developed the songs a bit more (and maybe not behaved abominably to the girls, which is what the article was actually about). I don’t know. But I do know that that story highlights an arts and media landscape where everyone has to do everything, where there’s always another job to do, even for people who have already experienced some success.
But also, I’m not 100% convinced that a success in an adjacent media actually translates to success in the thing you’re trying to promote. We got 830 views on a TikTok video but that didn’t lead to any uptick in listens to the podcast or ticket sales to the live recordings. It was basically meaningless. 830 views is just 830 views on the platform it’s on. Likes on your promo material don’t necessarily lead to eyes or ears on the thing you’re promoting.
I think of novelists now who are required to be on social media, promoting their work. They can’t just write novels; They also have to create media followings and probably their publishers are telling them they should make videos, too. I doubt that most novelists are videographers at heart. Everyone’s a videographer these days. And sure, I’ll do it. I’ll make videos if I have to because I don’t make things for no one to see them and it somehow seems like the thing to do now. At least that’s what everyone says but the business around it all feels pretty dark and terrible.
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Songs for the Struggling Artist 