Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper considers the podcast and the current status of its disruptive relationship to traditional forms of audio entertainment. The tremendous growth of podcast adoption has yet to develop into substantial growth in revenues as the billion dollar profits of linear radio broadcasters continue to grossly dwarf the monetization structures of even the most frequently downloaded podcasts. While the self-organization and immaterial labour driving the podcast moment could be described as a challenge to the capacities of capital, this paper follows political economist Vincent Mosco’s lead of moving beyond discontinuities between old and new communication technologies to evenly attend to their continuities as well. I argue that while the unpaid labour collected into most podcasts seems to locate these cultural products outside of capitalist relations, the uniquely intimate affect podcasts generate represents a continuity between digital and linear audio media as it is captured by capital in the form of both targeted- and influencer-marketing from merchants and brand building social strategies of established broadcasters. Tracing continuities and discontinuities between podcasts and radio, this paper concludes that podcasts should not be considered an over-the-top disrupter to terrestrial radio. It is too soon to predict the degree to which they will enter this role in the future. KEYWORDS: podcast; communication technology; radio; disruption; immaterial labour
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".