Did podcast kill the video star? How spoken words are stealing the show
After the influx of visual media in the last decades, a new era of audio has begun. The passion for podcasts, audio messaging and audiobooks is growing, and talk-based social network platforms are exploding in usership and popularity.
Are images altered through filters and “camera ready” lighting (most readily seen during the pandemic) finally coming to an end?
According to a survey by the French-Chinese tele-media brand Wiko, younger people love audio and find the medium to be more democratic, inclusive, and cross-generational.
In fact, 42% of interviewees who use Instagram agree that voice is a more powerful medium than image, because compared to the eye, the ear seems to be less susceptible to prejudice, aesthetic stereotypes, and rigid beauty canons associated with visual appearance.
We listen to what intrigues us, interests us, and fascinates us, regardless of the physical appearance of the speaker.
Numbers speak for themselves: podcast downloads are showing double-digit increases annually and are quickly dominating public preference within entertainment content. Audiobooks have won the hearts of even the most sceptical paperback lover, far exceeding the popularity of e-books (a format that has never won over even the most tech-savvy readers), and the number of audio-based social network platforms is growing.
The latest and most striking case is Clubhouse, which is (literally) on the lips of millions of global users and on the radar of poweful US investors. The app is organized into “chat rooms" inside of which users can listen into audio-only exchanges between hosts. The intriguing presence of Clubhouse was to give ordinary people the ability to become a “fly on the wall” to conversations between some of the world’s most powerful and famous elite, directly accessing conversations between the likes of Elon Musk, Kanye West, and others. Once the room closes, everything vanishes, leaving no trace of the content discussed.
The success of Clubhouse is due to a confluence of communication trends in the world of social media: ephemeral, real-time content, attention to privacy, and the use of voice. The concept is likened to being in private conversation-based “salon” that feels intimate, rather than being a visual spectator absorbing sights on a busy street.
Clubhouse, created by Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, acted as a disruptor within social media apps triggering offers from Twitter to buy it for $4 billion USD, as well as the development of copycat apps to piggyback off of its success. For example, Facebook launched Hotline and Microsoft invested in Nuance, a company that develops and uses artificial intelligence to transcribe conversations.
Spotify has also gone on the attack: in addition to purchasing Gimlet and Ringer (two podcast companies) it invested $100 million USD to buy the popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience -- with the caveat that nearly 42 explicit and controversial episodes be removed from the podcast’s library.