![]() There’s also the growing awareness around the economic prominence of the games industry, which is only going to become more central to the health of global entertainment conglomerates. What’s particularly interesting is the video of it all, reflecting a push by some corners of podcasting to integrate more fully with the digital video ecosystem - and tap into that industry’s more established wealth.Ģ023 was a particularly interesting year in the relationship between video games and what we could perhaps blithely call “mainstream culture.” Consider, for starters, all those video-game adaptations that achieved success in more traditional forms of media ( The Super Mario Bros. The second is a shot of innovation: The show recently introduced the delicious Popcast (Deluxe), a spinoff video podcast series where Caramanica and music reporter Joe Coscarelli regularly convene for a roundtable discussion on culture writ large. The first is just how busy a year it’s been for cultural narratives around music, between Taylor Swift’s juggernaut Eras tour, the various controversies and curiosities around modern country music, and, uh, The Idol, among other things. Two factors inform Popcast’s appearance on this list. Popcast has been around for eons, but these days, the show has evolved into a sharper weekly operation, routinely delivering interesting conversations about a slice of whatever’s happening in the music world at any given moment. What if I told you that the best New York Times podcast wasn’t The Daily, but a show in which the critic Jon Caramanica grapples with the perpetually shifting youth cultures of the pop-music world despite his own climbing age? It’s true. Even if you don’t care a lick about Vanderpump Rules or Sandoval’s ’stache, the Scandoval Podcast-Industrial Complex is nevertheless illustrative of something very real about the way culture exists right now: There is no such thing as metatext any more. Among those ranks in the Affair of the Lightning Bolt Necklace: Scheananigans With Scheana Shay, Give Them Lala, Straight Up With Stassi, and, of course, Howie Mandel’s pod, which inexplicably served as Tom Sandoval’s platform of choice to air out his side of the breakup with longtime partner Ariana Madix. And a great deal of the experience played out beyond the confines of Vanderpump Rules, not just through warring social-media tête-à-têtes but also by way of a cottage industry of podcasts that helped blur the line between reality and reality-television performance. ![]() ![]() The messy, sprawling, and spectacular reality-television drama that was #Scandoval was undoubtedly one of the year’s largest and undeniably pervasive pop-culture moments - somewhere below Kelce-Swift but above the Gwyneth Ski Trial. Yes, this is a weird pick, but we must embrace the truth. Here, I’ve tried to build a list that reflects that. We used to think that was supposed to mean Hollywood-size fiction podcasts, but what it really turned out to be was podcast-size reality television.īrutal as 2023 has been, the podcast ecosystem remains vast in its values and pleasures. And of course, there is the increasing intersection between podcasting and the greater entertainment ecosystem. We continue to enjoy an independent space that never fails to be endlessly interesting. We saw the full return of a veteran, and a long-running operation rising to meet the cultural moment. This year welcomed strong narrative releases from established teams and newer voices alike. In any case, no matter how long that takes, there’s always great, interesting, fun, impactful, and memorable stuff being made by all sorts of people in the meantime. The podcast market may or may not have hit rock bottom at this writing, but once it finally does, the rebuilding will begin. People want this stuff, people want to make this stuff, and the only real question is how best to construct an ecosystem that fairly harnesses the energy of both those things. The economic turbulence that rocked the broader media industry was felt especially hard by the young podcast medium: successive waves of layoffs and cancellations, celebrity-talent megadeals that exploded in very public fashion, and the bill came due for all the exorbitant speculative spending that defined the business over the past few years.īut it would be misguided to think that this sustained downturn is ultimately anything existential. Let’s not sugarcoat this: 2023 has been a bad year for the podcast world. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |