Jeremy Morris - Keeper of the Podcasts
Jeremy Morris is a professor in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches classes on the history of the Internet and on Podcasting. He focuses on new media used in everyday life and what’s happened to the music industry over the last twenty years as a result of digitization.
He’s particularly interested in what these “new” formats (e-Books, mp3’s, streaming video, apps, etc.) mean for the ways we make and use the media we love. His big project is to try and index/archive an enormous database of podcasts - in order to make them more searchable, researchable and preservable for anyone wanting to study all the great audio that’s taking place in podcasting.
Called PodcastRE (short for Podcast Research, but pronounced podcaster), the database has over half a million audio files and the metadata associated with them. Jeremy joined MTF Director and long-term podcaster Andrew Dubber on stage at MTF Stockholm to talk podcasts, archives and podcast archives.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
podcast, mtf, radio, people, rss, format, music, call, database, audio, technology, podcaster, jeremy, bus, subscribe, research, tim, produced, tech fest, golden ages
SPEAKERS
Andrew Dubber, Jeremy Morris
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest, and this is the MTF podcast. So let’s talk about podcasting. Today’s guest is the keeper of the podcasts, the podcast archivist from the showcase stage at MTF, Stockholm in September. This is a chat that I had with Jeremy Morris from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studies and curates an archive of podcasts. Now, this is something that’s Of particular interest to me, not just because I host this podcast, but because we’ll have a listen, you’ll get the picture. Jeremy Morris at MTF Stockholm, hope you enjoy my first foray into proper academia, I was working at a university in New Zealand, which is where I’m from. And I went there as somebody to teach radio production to students very, very kind of production orientated, not on the research side of things at all. But I got interested in the research side of things. And so I started researching about radio online or digital radio, I did an AMA while I was working as a lecturer at university and sort of how digital radio works and those sorts of things. And I kind of took it a little bit further on the first research simple International Research Symposium was my second Research Symposium, my first international one, I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where there was a radio conference or the radio conference, and I was on a panel with one of the organisers, there was Michele Hilmes, one of the organisers who I’m sure you all know very well. And Tim Wall, who was the editor of the radio general at the time, and Tim had, and Michele had organised this conference together. And of course, when you go to an academic conference, if you’ve ever been to one, basically, people come and read their paper to you for 20 minutes, and then somebody else reads their paper to you for 20 minutes, then a third person does the same thing. That’s called a panel. And then there are questions from people who stand up, say, Well, my mind’s not so much a question more, a presentation of more or less the same duration. That’s it. That’s That’s how academic conferences work. That’s why we don’t do them at Music Tech Fest. But so I was on a panel with Tim Wall, the organiser of the festival of the conference, and another couple of people had done some research, it was all on internet radio, Tim started with the Political Economy of internet radio, and I had to follow up with a paper called there’s no such thing as Internet radio. And that led me to an interesting argument over pizza and beer, and ultimately, a job in Britain working with Tim Wall as a researcher, and we still argue to this day about the same exact thing and still enjoy that conversation. But along that, and my arrival in Birmingham, working on this was at the time it was 2004, going into 2005, and it was the birth of podcasting. And to study podcasting, what we thought we would do is record a podcast and put it out in the internet. The easiest way to record a podcast, the other researcher, I was doing it with, we lived in the same neighbourhood, which was a bus ride away from the university, we got on the bus, we talked crap anyway, we thought, let’s just record that, stick it on the internet and call it a podcast. And so we came up with this thing, which for various reasons I won’t go into was called Dubber and Spoons Take The Bus. And what resulted from that was we were listed, it was actually supposed to be a top 10 Guardian podcasts of 2005. They could only find nine. But which just shows you how early it wasn’t that and the process of podcasting, but we were in there. And we were on television riding the bus during the podcast. And also we had somebody fly from Canada, to Birmingham to sit on a double decker bus with us and be on the show. We had guests, we had guests…
Jeremy Morris
that’s innovative for like international guests,
Andrew Dubber
international guests on two guys talking crap on a bus. But But of course that was 13 years ago now and I didn’t have copies of those things. And it turns out that James, the Spoons of Dubber and Spoons Take The Bus, kept them and and then I found out what you were doing. So what Jeremy does, Jeremy is a podcast archivist. And I didn’t know such things existed. But don’t know
Jeremy Morris
they officially do I just call it that so that my institution recognises something that I’m doing. That
Andrew Dubber
is an official designation then but Jeremy is coincidentally at this university of Madison Wisconsin and at the same place where my journey into podcasting started. And you you collect all of the podcasts
Jeremy Morris
Trying, yeah
Andrew Dubber
why?
Jeremy Morris
Well, so similar sort of story. You know, I got into podcasting early on early ish on. I was interested in music technologies through most of the late 90s and early 2000s. And a lot of those same technologies were the ones that all of a sudden you could repurpose and create a podcast with so I had been listening to podcasts in 2005. I didn’t come across your If I’d known there was a Canadian on the bus with you. Maybe I I would have tuned in, you know, now. But I listened to a bunch of those early podcasts, I created a podcast in Montreal for a while when I was doing my PhD work. And it was, again, the same sort of thing. You know, it was just for fun it was, it was a neat way to kind of figure out the music scene, there was a podcast about who was performing in Montreal at the time, and there was a lot of great music, this is like, just after Arcade Fire gets big just after wolf parade. So it was a way to sort of be embedded in the scene, and take part in that. So just had a long interest in podcasting, and then eventually started writing about it academically. But I would say the interest comes from a kind of hobby place before an academic interest. Flash forward to 2012 2013, when I get my job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and I want to start thinking about like how podcasting has changed since then, right? It’s, there are still instances of people like, Oh, I’m gonna get on a bus and talk. But now you have, you know, these incredibly, highly produced shows like radio lab, cereal, these things that are, so I kind of wanted to track this history of podcasting. And I realised, if you wanted to go back and listen to your show, you know, a lot of people don’t have copies of their own shows. But if you wanted to go back and find out other shows that were going on at the time, it’s just not possible. There weren’t any databases. The best database you probably have is iTunes, which is a kind of proprietary database that’s not really made for researchers are not really made for anything more than discovering, you know, what’s a really popular podcast to listen to. So I sort of just started as like a personal collection, really just trying to collect as many podcasts as I could, because I was worried that this was going to be a kind of format that was going to undergo a lot of changes. After it got popular, I thought it was going to get behind paywalls I thought it was going to be harder to access. And I said, What if we lost like all the great material that’s being produced in podcasts right now, all the amazing perspectives that are being expressed. We know from other media formats, like early radio, early cinema, silent films, you know, we lose this media, because we don’t realise at the time how important it is to keep track of so I started just a personal collection, like on an iTunes database in my computer, and all of a sudden, it got really large, like, you know, 20 gig or something it was starting, which was large back in 2012. And it started taking up too much space. So we started buying, like actual dedicated servers for it. And we’ve tried to build this thing that I call podcaster, which is spelled podcast, R E, instead of podcast, E R, for podcast research. And it’s supposed to be Yes, searchable, researchable database for podcasts. So for anybody who’s interested in studying audio culture, and all the kind of like exciting content that’s coming out of podcasts, we tried to create that, if you do go to that website, by the way, it’s majorly in beta right now. We’ve been working on it for the last year, and the site we have up now is basically a year old. So give us like another few months, and it’ll be a little bit more usable than it is now. But yeah, it really came out of this desire to like, I don’t know, just a real passion for the kinds of things that were being produced in podcasting, and wanting other people to be able to use that and find that content, study and research that content and explore this format a bit more. Sure.
Andrew Dubber
You said, audio culture and the singular, which I found really interesting. Yeah, there is an audio culture. Is that how you think of it? Is there a commonality?
Jeremy Morris
No, I would say I waffled between audio culture sometimes I’ll be like booming audio is booming, booming Sonic cultures are booming audio cultures. Sometimes I’ll say booming audio culture. I, I don’t think of the I think of the landscaping the landscape of podcasting as a kind of like, Sonic phenomenon. And within that, there’s obviously a whole bunch of different things going on, right? The Dubber and Spoons format is not the same format as the as the serial format, right? And the people who are producing those things are going to be different. And there’s a whole bunch of, again, different like perspectives, content, ideas, formats coming out and levels
Andrew Dubber
of competence. And so yeah, levels
Jeremy Morris
of competence. No, but I mean, that’s the fun. And I think that’s partly what I’m worried about, right? It’s like, as this medium becomes more professionalised. Are we going to lose some of this amateur stuff, right? Are you going to not be able to put out a podcast where you can just chat with your friend about a topic that’s of importance to you? Because the expectation of podcast is that it sounds like cereal is that it sounds like this highly edited, you know, everything has to be narrated just perfectly Right, right. Ideally, for me, this is a this is a format that allows for a whole bunch of Sonic expression. So I wouldn’t want I wouldn’t want just because, you know, like certain things have become popular and described as like the most popular formats. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t want that to take over?
Andrew Dubber
So that we can tell the difference? What’s a podcast? Yeah. Well, and more importantly, what isn’t a podcast?
Jeremy Morris
Yeah. So this is probably like the debate you are having about the internet radio, right? Like it could go on and on about what counts and what doesn’t count. I’ll take the easy way out and just say the things that we’re collecting, the big requirement is that they have an RSS feed attached to them. Because that’s literally how our database goes out and crawls for these things, right, we subscribe to the RSS feeds of certain shows. So for me, it’s audio that’s embedded in an RSS enclosure. I mean, I know people make podcasts now. And they, they put it on SoundCloud. And they don’t enable the RSS feed feature in in SoundCloud. So there’s certainly ways in which that definition falls way short. I know there’s people who do video blogs that they also call kind of video podcasts, we have files in our database that are actually video files as well, as well as audio files. So it gets really messy, when you start picking away at that definition. You can also think about like, is a radio show like this American life that also airs on the radio, a podcast just because they put it in the form of a podcast, I’d say it’s worth distinguishing between things that are like natively podcast and things that are rebroadcast. But I think they’re still making use of that technology, I’d say that show really took off as a result of their they’re releasing it in podcast format. So I think there’s arguments to be made. And in both cases,
Andrew Dubber
the scholarship around podcasting in the early days was pretty ropey. It was pretty poor, actually. And I was contributing to that, just to sort of cancel the table. But But one of the things that we tried, one of the first things you try to do with anything new as you try to capture it, define it, explain it and so on. This is one of the things about the there’s no such thing as Internet radio, we kind of figured out that it had no essential characteristics, there was nothing that as long as it has this, then it’s internet, radio, you know, we couldn’t find the thing that characterised it. And then almost the same with podcasting, but we sort of arrived more or less at the same place you did, which is that podcasting isn’t a type of content. It’s a method of distribution. And and so there was a lot of stuff around those early days and sort of the all the Dave Weiner stuff about RSS feeds, and, and how an RSS enclosure was a new way of distributing on the internet, rather than just a new type of thing that you can put on the internet. And that seemed to be like, Oh, my God, this is the new email. This is the new, you know, because if you can just subscribe to whatever it is, and just get it when the next one’s ready. We haven’t seen that before. But that seems as far as I can tell, it seems to have fallen out of the conversation around podcasting. Now, is there a reason that RSS isn’t part of the discussion anymore?
Jeremy Morris
I, I guess I’ll say a couple of things. So I think
Andrew Dubber
Sorry, can you start with what the hell is RSS anyway?
Jeremy Morris
Yeah, really simple syndication. It’s the the feature that allows you to go into iTunes and hit subscribe to this podcast. And it basically then will populate your your media player, instead of you having to go to a website every week, and then find that file and listen to it then right, it comes automatically to your device. And so it’s the same technology. It’s actually a technology that was developed for blogging, not for podcasting. So it’s the same kind of thing, if you ever had blog readers, when you were, you know, in the in the late 90s, and 2000s, if you subscribe to, to Newswire or things like that, it’d be the same principle. I’ll say so RSS, I think is important. And I think that like technological definition of podcasting helps, especially when you’re thinking about the distribution, but it’s also I think, a practice, right. It’s a it’s a podcasting is a way of thinking about what you’re doing, right. So some people identify as podcasters more than they identifies as radio producers. Right. So I think, also, I just wanted to sort of add that to that whole definition of podcasting, right, we can talk about its technologies, but we can also talk about like, the ways in which we do things as podcasting. Now, why has RSS fallen out of the conversation? I think it’s like, for some reason people find it’s not a user friendly technology, like it’s a barrier to tell, you know, my parents, here’s how you subscribe to a podcast, you have to get iTunes, then you have to go find the show, then you have to hit the subscribe button. And you have to have an a, you know, a device that you then listen to right. So I think a lot of people think that the reason why podcasting hasn’t taken off as much as it might have is that for some reason, it’s not. It’s not user friendly. So what you see now actually is a lot of things like Spotify, including podcasts in the in the content, just like everyday, so it’s just like you’re searching for song, except you’re searching for, you know, gimlet media’s latest show, and then you play it from there. From a research standpoint, I actually get a little worried about the format of podcast changes. Because like I said, our database relies on that heavily. But I also think that it’s switching to more closed and proprietary technologies. So you get a lot of streaming players that don’t let you then download the audio files anymore. You just stream everything right? Right from the right from the site, which means you have a little less flexibility with,
Andrew Dubber
right, as Spotify is doing podcasts, which has nothing to do with iPods or broadcasting. It’s it’s just other things that you can stream on Spotify, but it’s so the the word seems to have been grabbed and used in a different way and and in a way that nobody seems to have any problem with. And so why should we have any problem with that? But that there it is, that the thing that you said, I think that’s really interesting is that it’s a it’s a means of self identification. I am a podcaster. So how do you become a podcaster?
Jeremy Morris
Well, just grab a mic and start talking. No, I mean, it’s a again, I think it’s it. It’s an interesting thinking about, like, what is it that you want to create? And what is it that you want to say? What do you want to contribute to the sonic cultures around you? Right? What are the and then, you know, there’s, there’s the functional aspect of like, how do I become a podcaster, which is like, it takes time, like making music, like anything else, it’s a practice that requires a significant amount of energy. I mean, I was producing my show, it was once a week, and it would still take, you know, 24 hours, just to line up the music that we were going to play to correspond with the artists. And my show was relatively easy, I didn’t do a lot of talking, it was just like, here’s a band that’s playing here. They’re great. They’re from this place, you know, this is the kind of stuff they do. And here’s the song, you know, so like, most of the podcasts was actually music with a little bit of narration. So if you’re gonna be somebody who’s like editing to make a really nice soundscape and create a fictional story or something like that, the the amount of work that can go into it is quite a bit. So I don’t think it’s necessarily just as easy as pick up a mic and go, although it can be, which again, I think is, I think is great, right? It’s, there’s a lot of neat ways to experiment with ways to tell stories, ways to communicate ways to express yourself through audio, which is what I really love about the format.
Andrew Dubber
But we’ve got YouTube stars in the room here. And I kind of think about is the relationship between podcasting and YouTube kind of parallel to the rush of radio and television?
Jeremy Morris
That’s hard. I don’t know if I know the answer to that. I think they’re born of the same sort of technology in the same sort of mode, right? And you’re going to be using different tools to be expressing yourself through YouTube than you are through podcasting. But again, I think in terms of like content and and product, right, like, I think there’s people experimenting as much with visual techniques, as there are people experimenting with kind of audio techniques on in podcasting, and people are probably experimenting with audio techniques in YouTube as well. Not just video, obviously. But again, I think it’s a different sort of mode of storytelling when you’re when you’re mostly removing the visuals or relying on the visuals that you can create in somebody’s head, as opposed to the thing that that that’s being filmed and being created.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, that’s that’s what people always used to say about radio as well to most visual medium, which is clearly nonsense. But it’s useful to think about that when you’re when you’re making it. But so we hear now that podcasting is in a golden age, would you go along with that?
Jeremy Morris
I think podcasting has had like, and if you look at the press accounts of podcasting, over the last 15 years, there’s been multiple Golden Ages. So when you got listed in the Guardian, it was because podcasting was in this golden age, right, it was gonna be the end of radio, it was this brand new technology that was going to disrupt the entire radio business. And there was all this interesting and content that would never be out there before. And that’s why a lot of that scholarship in the early days was like go rah rah podcasting. Right. And so there was a lot of excitement about it, and then you know, it just sort of steadily gained steam. It wasn’t anything that was incredibly disruptive. I think it’s grown in terms of listenership, at least in the US, you know, adds another 2% of the population who’ve listened to podcasts in the last month, like every every year, so it’s a fairly stable growth. 2010 2009 when Mark Marin comes out with his podcast, and there’s some other kind of like, really influential shows that sort of start to make noise, there’s another round of press that’s like, oh, podcast is finally arrived, you know, and then cereal hits, at least in the US. And, and, and all of a sudden, it’s like, Whoa, listen to the amazing audio that’s being produced and the new ways you can tell stories and can’t believe you know, that everybody should tune into podcasts now. So I feel like we go through many Golden Ages of podcasting, but that that serial moment At least for me was a kind of like wake up call to say like, Okay, oh, if people are talking about what’s so great about this now, it’d be sad if we didn’t have copies of this stuff 10 15 years from now to listen back to, and to say, like, oh, what did people think was so great about this new format at this point in time? And like, why did they think about it right? And like, Okay, if 30 years from now, we want to go and look back and say, like, what did podcasts sound like in 2015? Well, that that’s a lot different than what it sounded like, you know, when Dubber and Spoons were on the bus. So I just keep using that example.
Andrew Dubber
I’m just gonna keep I’m fine with it. Yeah, I really am. Okay, other than Dubber and Spoons Take The Bus. Clearly. If somebody wants to dive into your archive, and you say you, whatever you do, check this one out, what would you recommend? Oh,
Jeremy Morris
hi, I always get asked for this. And it’s hard. There’s so so we have about right now about 600,000 audio files in the database. So and it’s growing at like, a terabyte or two per week now. So it’s a, it’s getting to be very large. Now, hopefully, you can find a lot of things that you like in there, but Who’s your favourite child I, I happen to really like a show called How to be a girl, which is a show about a woman raising her transgender child and the challenges she faces as a mother and the challenges her child faces when she’s going to new schools and things like that. But she’s, I think, comes from radio production world. So the soundscape of the thing is like, almost like home footage of her and her her kid talking or playing games, you know, like just background, incidental noise of the kid. And she’s sort of narrating overtop of it. It’s a really, it’s beautiful. It’s funny, it’s heart wrenching. It’s like all these things that I really love. And it’s not something I’m sure I would have found in any other way. So yeah, that would I guess that would be where I’d say, you should go. But I mean, there’s so much good stuff out there. So you go explore. Yeah, and if you do have if you are a podcaster, or you know, a network of podcasters. And people who want to have their stuff preserved in a way that’s better than like, oh, maybe I’ll check with my co host and see if he saved any of the files. Send me an email, or I think even on podcaster at some point, we’re going to have a submit a link. So you can just submit the the feed for your podcasts and we’ll we’ll be able to preserve that. We back it up onto tape, which will hopefully be saved with our Library at the University of Wisconsin Madison as well. So,
Andrew Dubber
Jeremy Morris, thank you.
Jeremy Morris
Thanks for having me. I’m sorry if it’s left out of left field for a music festival. Awesome.
Andrew Dubber
Perfect. Thanks audio culture. That’s podcast archivist Jeremy Morris. And that’s the MTF podcast for another week wrapped, labelled and permanently filed in the archives for future music taken innovation cultural archaeologists to go and dig out. If that’s you saying hello to the people of the future from us hope we helped to make it a little bit better along the way because that is the main reason that we do what we do. If you’re living in the present day you feel free to go back and dig through past episodes but also remember to subscribe, like rate review star or just say nice things to your friends about it. And if you are here in March 2019 with me then you’ll be interested to know that the MTF splice trackathon EP that came out of the 24 hour trackathon event at MTF stock calm and the online MTF producers challenge@splice.com. Well, we’re gonna be launching that at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. It’s going to be on all the major music platforms for March the 15th thanks to amuse.io and all of the proceeds will be donated to musicians without borders. You can think back to Episode 12 of the MTF podcast to learn lots more about the track athon. I’m going to be at South by Southwest with my podcasting setup. MTF founder Michela Magas, is going to be speaking at the Scandinavian pavilion all about gender equality, innovation and leadership. And I’m also going to be judging the South by Southwest hackathon, which should be really interesting. And if you’re going to be there, come and say hi. From there, we’re heading off to Frankfurt Musikmesse is the biggest music trade fair in Europe, and they’ve invited MTF to run labs and the track athon as a part of that, if you want to be part of that yourself. There’s lots of information about how you can get involved right on the front page of Music Tech fest.net. Go and have a look. It’s going to be really, really exciting. Be great to see you there. In the meantime, have a fantastic week, and I’ll catch you soon. Cheers.
