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The Promises of Podcasting's Technologies

Podcasting since 2004 . !

The Dawn and Drew Show website (www.thedawnanddrewshow.com) proudly proclaims "Podcasting since 2004, bitches!" In September of that year, on the couple's 10th anniversary, Dawn Miceli and Drew Domkus started a podcast from the living room of their renovated 1800s-era farmhouse in Wisconsin, USA. Like other podcasts of the time, the show was mostly interpersonal chat: a husband and wife talking about whatever was going on in their lives, with a healthy dose of frank talk about sex. They would eventually settle on the tagline "Always profane, rarely profound," and they created a Dawn and Drew phone line, with a number that spelled out an expletive that I'll leave to your imagination, where viewers could send messages. The show would likely not have been allowed on many radio stations at the time, nor would it have been clear to people making radio in the early 2000s that there would be an audience of people excited and willing to tune in every few days to hear from Dawn and Drew. But for anyone following weblogs or LiveJournal or plenty of other off-color web content, the show would have simply seemed like an audio version of material available elsewhere in the ether. In terms of form and content, it was nothing particularly out of the ordinary: just Dawn and Drew talking, sometimes with a guest, interspersed with some music and sound effects. Still, the show caught the attention of audiences - many of its episodes were getting close to 9,000 downloads (a lot for the time) - and it was frequently written about in newspapers covering the then-emerging trend of podcasting (della Cava 2005).

In this chapter, we'll look at how the meaning of podcasting today, as it was when Dawn and Drew began, is bound up in an assemblage of different technologies, including audio production software/hardware, metadata technologies, distribution protocols and services, audio consumption software and hardware, and the digital file itself. The technologies Dawn and Drew were using have changed since they recorded their first shows, but the general process of making and sharing a podcast remains similar. Although it's possible (and, I'll argue, useful) to reflect on specific components of podcasting (e.g., the MP3 file or the RSS feed), it's worth remembering that the various technologies that make up podcasting go far beyond just a single digital file. Think of the variety of apps listeners can use to listen to podcasts and the features they enable (e.g., variable speed playback, clipping and sharing key moments, transcripts, etc.), the various places podcasts can now exist (e.g., in the car, in the kitchen, on a walk, during a workout, in a live theater, in the background at work, etc.), and the multiplicity of choices podcasters have for creating and sharing their ideas (e.g., via an app on their phone, via portable computers set up as makeshift studios, via more professional recording spaces, distributed through a wide range of platforms and hosting services, etc.). This chapter argues that all these technologies shape how podcast creators and podcast users experience and understand podcasts, and thus podcasting. I explore the technical origins of podcasting as a format, and how this helped build the vibrant and vast podcasting ecosystem that exists today.

Along the way, we'll reflect on the impact that the technologies of podcasting have had on the ways podcasting has been talked about and positioned. This chapter shows that podcasting's technologies are intimately tied to what people thought and hoped podcasting might do. Relatedly, as these technologies have changed over the years, their influence on how podcasts are produced, encoded, distributed, and experienced raises larger questions about what podcasting is, and means, as a media experience. By surveying the history of the technologies that shaped podcasting's early years and comparing it with the ways podcasting is conceptualized on today's platforms, I consider how podcasts may seem just as available today as ever, and perhaps even easier to access in some instances than they were 10 years ago. But, I argue, this has come at the expense of a new technological infrastructure that prizes streaming over downloads, ephemeral interactions over intentional subscriptions, and centralized distribution over distributed availability. Exploring the specific cases of The Dawn and Drew Show and a more contemporary example, Here's a Thought with the Makhs, this chapter explores how shifts in podcasting's technologies shape the affordances and meanings of the format. I find that the importance of technologies like RSS feeds and MP3 files to the original definitions of podcasting helped it coalesce as a "format." This format is at once a set of technical specifications but also a normative statement about how audio files should move: freely, and in a way that allows all kinds of users, companies, and industrial actors to make use of the technology and build on it. Although RSS and MP3s are still essential to podcasting today, their importance has shifted over the years, and is currently being downplayed as platforms like Spotify become larger players in podcasting distribution. As this chapter shows, this shift is not simply a technical shift to update outmoded technological standards. It is also a shift in values about what the future of podcasting should look and sound like.

Format History

I was visiting Dawn and Drew's website in 2022 in the hopes of listening to old episodes of the show so I could hear for myself why it garnered national and international attention as podcasting started to take off in the mid-2000s. I was also curious as to how the couple were discussing the new technology, and how the very technologies of podcasting might make it possible or impossible for me to even track down the show in the first place.

On their current website, a photo shows the couple holding an award from their induction into the Podcast Hall of Fame. Below that, users can access over 100 previous episodes of their show through a streaming player. Episode 1093, "17 Years Later," is a retrospective episode they launched on September 24, 2021, the 17th anniversary of the show. I also scrolled through past episodes dating back to about episode 896, released in November 2009. Digging into the first five years of the show, from 2004 to 2009, requires significantly more effort, and produces a lot of dead ends. Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, I can find evidence of shows from these years, but many of the links to MP3 files are expired or unplayable. I am hardly the first podcast researcher to run into these challenges. Andrew Bottomley (2021), for one, details at length the challenges involved with "podcast archaeology" and how finding early podcasts involves a frustrating process of triangulating between screen grabs from a show's website buried in the Wayback Machine, news articles about the show, and any materials the individuals or institutions involved with the show kept or made public.

Luckily, in 2018, Dawn and Drew republished their first four episodes, under the titles "Dawn & Drew Redo." The description of "Dawn & Drew Redo: 0001 - Back to the Beginning" reads:

Happy May Day! We've decided to republish our entire catalog. Podcasting is so different now compared to when we started in 2004 and so it'll be interesting to see how many of our rambling topics hold up. The evolution of advertising within the show as well. (Domkus and Miceli 2018)

In their first episode, they have an extended conversation about what podcasting is, and how audiences should play it, including this snippet:

Dawn: Wait, what is podcasting?

Drew: Broadcasting to pod devices, which an iPod would be, an MP3 player.

Dawn: But we don't have an iPod?

Drew: Well that's why we're PODcasting. The term has been coined.

Dawn: Is someone going to give us one for free?

Beyond the centrality of iPods and the general confusion about whether podcasting required one or not, they also discuss why podcasting as a form of expression might matter. As the show closes out, Dawn announces she's enjoyed the show so much, she's taking it over:

Dawn: I like the idea. It's like pirate radio. It's like, take this, Big Brother. I don't need you. I don't need your frickin' contract. I got my own radio show.

Drew: Ain't nobody gonna censor us.

Dawn: Yeah! Fuck shit fuck!

Drew: Ahhh, here come the cops! [laughing].

The comparisons to radio, the liberal use of profanity, and the winking nod that no one was coming to stop them are all embedded in their understanding of podcasts, even after just a few minutes.

There are, of course, other ways a researcher can piece together how an early podcast might have looked and sounded beyond hoping individual podcasters might one day republish their old episodes. As fellow Wisconsinites, I could probably just contact them and see which archives they've kept of their show. While that might work for this one individual podcast, however, the strategy falls apart when thinking of a more comprehensive history of podcasting. Since most early podcasters had a website for their shows and evidence of these sites still...