The Expansion of Podcasting

A podcast is a digital audio file that someone can make about anything in the world and other people can listen to. People have made podcasts about many things, from telling a scary story, to reporting how a sports team did in the playoffs. Podcasting allows everyone to share experiences, and opportunities to listen to other people tell their own story.

For an English class I read the article, “6 Reasons Why Podcasting Is The Future of Storytelling'' by Chris Giliberti, and he writes about how podcasting is becoming the new big thing. Podcasting is a great way to share experiences and stories with other people; being able to listen to a podcast whenever and wherever is convenient. Giliberti gets into depth about how podcasting is making its way to the top from it’s investment increasing, to its distribution expanding. He writes about how podcasting can work for everyone, it doesn’t matter what the story is or how long it goes on.

While reading the article, I learned that there are more people that listen to podcasts than I thought. Giliberti wrote, “An estimated 57 million Americans, or 21% of the U.S. population, listen to podcasts regularly.” Giliberti also wrote about how in some cars people can actually listen to live streaming podcasts, “of the estimated 75 million new vehicles shipped in 2015, 13% were ‘connected’, or internet-enabled and will help provide easy access to streams.” Convenient, and could help people listen to podcasts more often because some people might not like to only listen to music.

The last thing Giliberti wrote about was how virtual reality can tie into podcasting, “...imagine sitting in Marc Maron’s garage as you listen to his interview with the President.” This makes it easier to get a sense of what the backdrop looks like in the story. Creating this picture would make it easier for me to listen to because it gives me an idea of what it would look like around the person telling the story. I would like to listen to the podcast with virtual reality but it is also becoming easier to listen off of your phone within various apps. Giliberti wrote, “Spotify, with an active user base over 75 million, has launched its podcasting service as well. Pandora, too, is getting on the game, having made Serial available to their 78 million active users.” There are many people who use Spotify and Pandora daily so making it a podcasting service should be a big hit.

My classmates Clayton, Emme, and I created our own podcast about how we went from saying the Pledge of Allegiance everyday in middle school to saying it only once a week in high school. In my opinion I think that we should definitely say it at least once a week because I see it as showing respect for our country.

Podcasting can be anything a person makes it out to be. It could be funny, sad, or serious, it could be a made up story or life experience. The podcasting world is only going to grow from here, there are people who find listening to others stories very interesting. It is becoming the main story telling medium because they are so easy and fun to listen to. If someone wants to make a podcast, make it.