You already know and love the endless playlist options on SoundCloud, but the company also has a range of interesting non-music related affairs up their sleeve that, over the past year, has led the shift in reshaping auditory behavior. According to Edison Research, 2014 marks the first year that the majority of podcast listening happened on mobile devices. The shift, SoundCloud co-founder and CTO, Eric Wahlforss, divulges is due to listeners’ change in audio consumption.
“The numbers still show that listening on terrestrial radio is massive compared to the web, but that's changing rapidly," Wahlforss explains. "The same transition that we've seen with music is now happening with all audio as people become more habitual [listeners] on the web and realize they can get the same content (or better content) than terrestrial radio.”
The appeal in podcasts, he tells us, is due to creators taking more inventive and business risks, as well as the general listening audience developing a hunger for information, stories, and comedy. With the enormous response that podcasts like Serial, This American Life, and Slate received over the last year, SoundCloud’s non-music division launched their creator partner program—a program that not only helps expand podcasts' genres and styles, but also helps creators earn revenue.
“SoundCloud has a massive reach allowing audio the potential to not only come across a lot of ears online—but also engage with people—whereas before it was a silent experience and could only be downloaded,” says Wahlforss.
However, despite the huge library of audio options for their 175 million unique monthly listeners, including NASA’s trove of recordings, Wahlforss has his favorite podcasts:
- Serial
is the hot new podcast everyone is talking about—it’s a spinoff from This American Life about a murder committed 15 years ago, claiming that the wrong person is in jail.
- This American Life is the consistent iTunes charttopper. Hosted by Ira Glass, this is the online version of the radio heavyweight telling well-told stories around a theme.
- StartUp tells the meta story of the creation of a podcast network by its founder and host, Alex Blumberg, who left This American Life to go out on his own. They successfully raised $1.5m in seed funding at a $10m valuation.
- Slate is a roundup of the dozen or so podcasts produced by Slate magazine, e.g. the Daily News Show, The Gist and the Political and Culture Gab Fests.
- StarTalk consists of a radio discussion of space with celebrity astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson hosting.
- 99% Invisible Stories focuses on design and architecture, hosted by Roman Mars. It's the flagship show of the new "Radiotopia" podcast network, which is getting buzz for its successful $600k+ Kickstarter campaign.
- The Bugle is a weekly comical take on the news, cohosted by HBO's John Oliver. The series was dropped by The Time of London a couple years ago, and moved to SoundCloud.
- Korey Coleman / Double Toasted is not so much a podcast as a series of shows, covering movie reviews, conversation, and callins.
