A Short Rant About 'Talent'

AKA 'things I got angry about at Podcast Show'

As some of you will know – either from meeting me there or from reading my incessant LinkedIn updates on the subject – I was at London’s Podcast Show last week. It is a unique event, at least in the British media ecosystem, bringing together thousands of industrial professionals and aspirant creators for a two-day expo at Islington’s Business Design Centre.

I wrote fairly extensively about my day there, and how much I enjoyed it, on this Medium blog. In order to not be totally boring, I won’t repeat myself other than to say that it was an experience that has opened my eyes, somewhat, to just how flush the rest of the industry is with cash. (I say ‘the rest’ in an obviously bitter way, because I don’t presently feel terribly flush). But the bit of that blog that’s going to be relevant to this newsletter is the following:

“My only concern is that the industry is becoming ever more talent led. There are very few production companies springing to life now that don’t have talent attached, either in senior roles or as part-owners. The BBC, who have lost a lot of talent in recent months, made it quite clear that the goal of their investment going forward is to recruit more top ‘talent’ to the service. They announced, on the day, that they were replacing Peter Crouch with Chris Kamara. Meanwhile Acast announced the signing of Marc Maron, and Global teased the launch of Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel’s new show. Where does the indie podcaster fit into all this? Is their job just to stump up £100 to go to glossy conferences, fill the cheap seats and walk away with nothing more than a handful of free pens and a belly full of soy macchiatos? All the monetisation mechanisms (who constituted a large percentage of exhibitors there) are playing a scale game: Acast would need to sign thousands of energy-intensive indie podders to meet the revenue they’ll get from Marc Maron and his garage. Even the hardware (which has usually exploited the consumer and prosumer markets hard) seems to be slipping away: the big launch of the conference was the Nomono sound capsule, which costs, apparently, thousands of dollars. But these are all concerns that existed already, and which can be tracked in pretty linear correlation with the professionalisation of the industry. And railing against the industry professionalising would be about as sensible as my dog snapping at passing cars.”

Talent: it’s one of the words that’s come up again and again in recent months in podcasting, as it does in every industry. One of the things laid bare at the Podcast Show was how ever facet of the industry seems to revolve around this elliptical notion. From creator focused services like Patreon to ad-revenue generators like Acast; from influencer platforms like Insanity to publications like PodBible. The talk is always about talent.