THE 1ST PODCAST
PRX and Radio Public co-founder Jake Shapiro takes us through revolutionary Russia, marketing Two Ton Shoe, and the founding of the podcast format itself.
ALLSTON MA
Right now I’m parked down the street from the PRX Podcast Garage in Allston Mass, which is perfect because today I’m talking with Jake Shapiro, the co-founder, of PRX and RadioPublic.
PRX, that’s the Public Radio Exchange. Jake’s gonna tell you what that is, but let’s talk about what life was like before PRX. Imagine you want to make a radio program. You do all the brainstorming, you schedule and record interviews, you research opposing views, you edit that down from maybe 20 hours to just 20 minutes, you write a storyboard, you weave in music, you get licensing rights to that music, you get permissions from everyone. And now it airs once - just once - and in only a 50 mile radius and nobody else gets to hear it. That’s what it was like!
Jake knows everything about podcasting. His adventure into that began with his band Two Ton Shoe, and creating some of the first MP3s to let his fans reach his music outside the traditional label system. He was there at MIT, when they first started writing the white papers on what a shareable music file format could and would be. A strange crossroads that had implications on the radio industry not just in terms of music, but in news and journalism which would evolve into “podcasts”.
Jake knows everything it seems… so I need to preface this interview by saying that Jake is definitely not a spy. He spent time in revolutionary Russia, watching the troops defend the which he says was the perfect introduction to the power of public media.
- Lucas Spivey, October 1, 2017
PODCAST
DISCUSSION
Andrea’s question to Jake is “How do you grow your (podcast) audience?” Jake has a two part answers. He says “Start with creating an amazing product. A huge amount of the opportunity to grow an audience really rests on the distinctiveness and quality of the show itself.” We did this work in lesson plans on “Identity” and “Vision & Values”, where we focused on your distinct voice. Now we need to know who that loves your distinctive creations the most. He says the next step is “Thinking about a target audience. Try to define in a phrase who the audience is.” (28:00)
Q: Who loves your distinctiveness the most?
Jake’s band Two Ton Show was his first taste of independent distribution (8:00) and inspired a lifetime of learning how independent creators make a go of it. Jake says one of the seminal pieces of literature for independent creators is “1,000 True Fans” by Kevin Kelly, which says that if you create something distinctive and can reach the 1,000 true fans who truly love what you do, then you have a viable business model. For example: 1,000 fans spending $100 each year is a $100,000.
Q: How could you use 1,000 true fans to build a business?