And in the end i podcasts they also exploded in Italy. After years of "apprenticeship" our country also seems to have finally become passionate about the increasingly flourishing fashion of popular audio files that can be listened to on demand and streamed. With an ever-growing number of listening systems and an inexorably high quality and variety of content, it was only a matter of time before the podcast became a flourishing reality also for us.
According to recent research by Nielsen, in fact, in just under three years, podcast listeners in Italy have gone from 850 thousand to over 2 million 700 thousand people. Everyone loves podcasts and many, from companies to influencers, from experts to technicians, use them as a powerful form of communication. But how was this particular form of communication born and developed?
What it is
The podcast is nothing more than a technology that allows listening to audio files via internet connection: these files are periodically updated and distributed in episodes. The address where the file is placed, a sort of database, is the famous "RSS feed", a list with which to classify the audio file and which is updated every time a new file is inserted. Once you reach the address where the file was uploaded, you can download it to your device and listen to it. A process that has remained unchanged for several years, at least until the diffusion of streaming services, which have "eliminated" the download procedure and, through their internal database, allow you to listen to the file directly on the platform, without having to download it.
Its intrinsic nature therefore makes it very similar to a song, an audio track inserted in a larger "album", which the user decides to listen to: even the creatorstherefore, they strive to create files that are as well-made and cared for down to the smallest detail as possible, with a certain script that differs well from the classic live broadcasts we have been used to for years.
iPodCast
On a literal level the term is nothing but a combination of the English words "pod" is "cast". Cast simply means to spread and spread, while pod, literally pod, mainly refers to the famous support with which these contents have spread and have been listened to for a long time, theiPod. In 2004 the journalist of The Guardian coined the term Ben Hammersley, who tried to classify the phenomenon that in those years was increasingly successful in the United States. These small and easily accessible audio files did what the radios were unable to do at the time: with the absence of a national coverage radio, with small local broadcasters which shared equally small segments of the market, it was really difficult that valid programs managed to spread widely.
The Internet allowed content creators and speakers to cross narrow state borders and target virtually the whole nation. It was technology that helped all this, first with the most classic peer to peer services and then with the official investiture by Apple and Steve Jobs which gave an important boost to the spread of the phenomenon throughout the territory.
A "serial" success
The arrival of the new iPods in 2005 was accompanied by an interesting novelty that crowned podcasts as a rising star of portable listening. The new apple devices had been equipped with a specific function for listening and cataloging podcasts and iTunes it was almost immediately equipped with an entire subcategory dedicated precisely to this type of content.
The success became total two years later with the arrival of the iPhone, the first smartphone par excellence, capable of integrating the functions of the iPod inside, including, of course, that of listening and downloading podcasts. The diffusion potential reached its maximum but to start talking about mass phenomenon the wait lasted several years, until 2014. The launch of Serial, a podcast structured like a TV series, with interconnected and compelling episodes, became a real case across the country, capable of going further 250 million plays.
The very nature of the product, a fictitious investigation into a murder conducted by a fake journalist, showed everyone the real potential and the profound "malleability" of podcasts, capable of capturing everyone's attention with very few means. A success that after years of launch no one expected so strong and massive.
Podcasts around the world
In the rest of the world, however, podcasts have really struggled. More tied to traditional methods of diffusion, European markets have always looked with a lot distrust the phenomenon. National radios, much stronger, have always snubbed this technology, strong of their dominance on more traditional frequencies. The podcast was more of a way to spread their traditional content. Just look at the Italian reality of a few years ago, where the podcast lists in Italian were nothing more than recordings of popular radio programs already aired, which gave the opportunity to be affected on-demand the programs that had not been able to follow live.
Until a few years ago podcasts were seen only as an extra method of transmission and not an opportunity to offer original content designed for the intrinsic nature of the new medium. The Serial model, however, somehow changed things, opening a new road and showing that a new path, albeit dangerous, could be traveled. All this while the "independent" content creators, those far from the traditional radio circuit, began to understand that they had in their hands a simple and immediate method to give vent to their creativity.
And in Italy?
In our country, podcasting has found it very difficult to emerge. Initially, in its early days, it was used by some famous artists such as Max Pezzali, Fiorello or Jovanotti to have a more direct relationship with their fans, with the creation of personal content in which to talk about their passions and their private sphere. These have almost always been experiences of very short duration, gradually replaced by the increasing spread of social networks and new contexts in which to build relationships with their fans.
The spread of podcasts, as in the rest of Europe, was initially built on the success of specific traditional radio broadcasts. There Rai he began to offer almost all his radio broadcasts via podcast, for an example that was gradually followed by all the other most important private radio broadcasters. Radical Radio, with its social and political contents, was one of the most vivid examples of total application of the issuer to the new method of diffusion.
In the early days they were also public institutions and university to use this technology, albeit not continuously, but still useful for the dissemination of this method of transmission among young people. All of this gave slowly lifeblood to the development of an increasingly thriving independent circuit made of creatives far from the world of great publishing.
Great growth
The spread of streaming in all its forms and the birth of services for listening and reading have given way to the spread of the phenomenon also in our country. It takes very little to listen to these contents, which can now be used in any way and simultaneously with many other activities. All this, combined with the diffusion of smartphones, did the rest: the last three years have seen growth in the 217%. Italian listeners are almost all concentrated in the age group between 18 and 40 with a rather positive trend among young people between 18 and 25 years.
The 66% of them prefer to listen to their files at home, the 28% in the car, like any radio program, while the 18% while traveling with public transport. It seems that, especially among the new generations, this method of listening and fruition is becoming quite common. The creators are creating an ever wider library capable of covering many tastes and the listeners are getting used to a freedom of listening that they had never had before: and perhaps this is precisely the key to a success probably destined, over the years, to grow even more.
