Are Podcasts the New Radio? Thresholds in the Macro-Environment
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 it