Serial podcast finale: Mania has propelled podcasts into the cultural mainstream

Simon Usborne finds out who's listening – and what to tune into now that Sarah Koenig has closed her case

A senior colleague of mine, whose age and identity will remain secret, did something telling on Tuesday. Holding out her iPhone a couple of desks away, she turned to a younger member of her team, and said quietly: "Um, can I ask a stupid question... how do I get a podcast?" As anyone who has grappled with the iPhone app and its complicated system of dots and clouds will know, this was not a stupid question. Nor is it a rare one at a time of feverish interest in a once-niche medium that is ending its 10th year on a huge high.
There will be no spoilers here, but it will be a revelation to few people that yesterday was a big one in podcasting – easily the biggest since the birth of the word in 2004. For more than three months, car journeys have been extended, treadmills paused and irons left to burn holes in shirts as millions of people – many of them podcast virgins – consumed Serial with a relish typically reserved for box-set binges. Launched quietly early in October, the gripping armchair investigation into a murder in Baltimore in 1999 ended with its 12th episode. Whether or not you downloaded it or listened on Radio 4 Extra last night (the BBC, itself the world's biggest producer of podcasts, snapped up the American series earlier this month when downloads topped five million), there are still plenty of reasons to be excited about a flourishing form – and plenty more podcasts out there to satisfy listeners with withdrawal symptoms.
But first, are we really streaming our way into a golden era? Is this a resurgence, a coming of age, or just a very successful show hyped by liberal media types who have been on first-name terms with Ira Glass for years? (The unlikely podcast god is the presenter and lifeblood of This American Life, the excellent show from which Serial sprung.) "I went to my cousin's wedding last weekend, and I will definitely let you know the aunts and uncles in my family are not super-familiar with podcasting," Julie Snyder, the producer who works with Serial presenter Sarah Koenig, admitted as the first episode went up.
"You have to be careful about thinking what's important to me and my mates is relevant to the universe at large," says Fiona Sturges, The Independent's radio columnist and a huge podcast consumer. "But the fact that millions of people have listened to Serial is astonishing because, while those numbers aren't that surprising when you look at how the arts are often consumed now [after viral promotion] in the realms of this supposedly marginalised form, it really is a big deal. Finally, people are getting it."
If you're still unsure about podcasts, they are pretty simple – just a way of distributing audio content that emerged shortly after the digital media player (namely the iPod) appeared. Ten years ago, radio shows began to become available to download and listen to anytime, anywhere. The BBC got in early, in 2004, releasing shows or chunks of shows such as In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg and, later, The Archers and Desert Island Discs. Elsewhere, download-only shows, Serial being the best recent example, skip radio entirely (even if they later end up on the BBC).
Be they five-minute word showers or hour-long ear baths, podcasts can be big budget and slick or made by a couple of football fans in a shed. They have brought democracy to the spoken word in the way that YouTube did for video over the same decade, appealing as much to the amateur producer as the global broadcasting corporation.
Simon Mayo is an accidental podcast star. The veteran BBC radio presenter admits that he "didn't really pay attention" when his and Mark Kermode's film-review show on Radio 5 Live first became available to download, in 2005. Now, he says, "we think about it a lot and increasingly people choose the podcast over the live show, or switch off on Friday afternoon so they can download later". Those who do are rewarded with "DVD extras", and none of the traffic updates that punctuate the radio programme. The weekly show now has 1.6 million monthly downloads, with far more younger and international listeners than can or would tune in to 5 Live.
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