“There are too many fucking podcasts right now,” Jad Abumrad confessed to Jason Reitman onstage at the 20th annual Tribeca Festival last weekend. “That said, I love it.”
Abumrad, the Radiolab host and MacArthur Genius Grant winner, is as responsible as anyone for our ongoing podcast boom. But if we needed any more proof of the audio medium’s dominance, the Tribeca Festival has expanded this year to include podcasts for the first time.
“I think it’s important to acknowledge [Tribeca’s] background of film, because it is kind of our way into a lot of these other mediums of storytelling,” says Leah Sarbib, manager of audio storytelling at Tribeca (until this year known as the Tribeca Film Festival). “There’s a level of attention that films get that I hope podcasting can achieve.”
Sarbib curated the 2021 Tribeca Podcast program alongside an advisory board of industry heavyweights, including Abumrad, Gimlet Media cofounder Alex Blumberg, Serial host and cocreator Sarah Koenig, Pulitzer Prize winner and “The 1619 Project” creator Nikole Hannah-Jones, Missing & Murdered host and journalist Connie Walker, iHeartMedia Digital Audio Group CEO Conal Byrne, NPR Code Switch’s Shereen Marisol Meraji, and chief content officer of Crooked Media Tanya Somanader.
According to Byrne, who spoke on a Tribeca panel about the future of podcasting last Sunday, the medium is poised for continued success, with 116 million Americans listening monthly. As a light drizzle beat down on the audience, Byrne rattled off the reasons for the industry’s exponential growth: It’s an on-demand, creative medium with quick production turnarounds and an audience at scale. “It’s worth it to slow down for a second and think about how rare that moment is that a new content type, and a new format comes along and actually takes hold,” he said.
For podcast creators and fans, the current saturation of content is somewhat of a double-edged sword, particularly as media giants like Spotify, SiriusXM, and iHeartRadio continue to expand their reach—some would say at the expense of independent voices. That’s where the Tribeca team feels uniquely positioned to help.
“The thing everyone’s talking about these days is discoverability,” said Sarbib. “It’s really hard for podcasts to find their audience. So we wanted to do for podcasts what we try to do for independent films, and help them find their audience, and help create opportunities for independent creators.”
Mimicking its juried competition for films, the 2021 Tribeca Podcasts program—the first of its kind—features 12 official podcast selections across fiction and narrative nonfiction categories. “We were looking for stories that push the boundaries of what a podcast can be,” said Sarbib, who stressed the immersive and innovative qualities of the inaugural roster.
This year’s official selections, which are eligible for juried fiction podcast and narrative nonfiction podcast awards, include Monster, a nonfiction “sonic memoir” by director Tommy Bertelsen that “feels like you’re being put inside someone’s memory”; Blind Guy Travels, which invites listeners to join host Matthew Shifrin as he experiences a life without sight; Vermont Ave, a fictional podcast that uses one take of 3D sound to place listeners directly in the shoes of a man making a life-changing decision; and I’ll Never Be Alone Anymore, a nonfiction podcast that eschews narration yet still effectively transports its audience to a lesbian community on the shores of Lesbos, Greece. Every podcast was given a world premiere at the festival, and episodes of each show are now available on the Audible or the Tribeca website.
AJ Churchill, Victor Lee, and Nicholas Prufer of The Lunar Company had already produced the first episode of their sci-fi podcast Earth Eclipsed when submissions opened, which proved to be ideal timing: After submitting their pilot to Tribeca, they were able to finish the rest of the season over several months while waiting to hear back. According to Prufer, the Tribeca premiere delivered on the festival’s promise to help independent creators like himself engage a wider audience: “It’s opening up doors for podcast creators to talk with large distributors in the industry,” he said. “So far, we’ve been getting great responses. It’s been just fantastic, the kind of traction that Tribeca has brought, especially since it’s something so new.”
Another important component of Tribeca’s new podcast programming are the live events, which include series previews and live recordings of shows from major podcast producers including Spotify, Gimlet, and Audible, as well as panels with creators and industry experts (Audible is also serving the festival’s first-ever exclusive entertainment sponsor).
The events kicked off on Thursday, June 10, with the series preview of Red Frontier, a Spotify Original fiction podcast from Gimlet starring GLOW’s Betty Gilpin. The preview, which was followed by a thoughtful panel with members of Red Frontier’s creative team, highlighted both the potential and challenges of translating the intimate, often private medium of audio to a public, group setting. As the first few minutes of audio rolled and dissipated into the air above 50 Varick Street, listeners appeared riveted, yet unsure exactly where to train their eyes.
A live recording of the Spotify show Resistance on June 12 proved to be another high point of the first weekend’s programming, with host Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr. serving as a magnetic emcee. Tejan-Thomas and his guests Elsa Waithe, Ivy Sole, and Dominique Christina wove together comedy, music, and spoken-word poetry as they inducted three unsung heroes into the Fuck Your Water Fountain hall of fame, a segment of the podcast that celebrates people in history who dared to look injustice directly in the eye. “Anything we can do to keep these names alive and keep them in people’s minds and make sure these stories don’t go untold—I’m glad we did that shit,” Tejan-Thomas said.
The first weekend also featured a long-awaited tête-à-tête between Abumrad and Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air, The Front Runner, Ghostbusters: Afterlife), the latter being a self-proclaimed Radiolab aficionado. The conversation was originally supposed to take place at the 2020 festival, but was canceled due to COVID-19; yet Reitman was so keen to still have the conversation that he was said to have insisted he’d have been happy to conduct it “in a Starbucks for the baristas.” The pair chatted about the similarities between audio and cinema—a common topic of discussion at the festival—and dug into Abumrad’s impressive oeuvre of shows, including Dolly Parton’s America and WNYC’s upcoming The Vanishing of Harry Pace, about the rise and fall of America’s first Black-owned record label.
Depending on who you speak to, the inclusion of podcasts by an institution like Tribeca is either the long-overdue recognition of audio storytelling as a sophisticated and innovative art form, or a heady endorsement of a medium that occasionally still struggles to shake off the perception of two men bro-ing out in front of a mic. And the programming itself, split evenly between the championing of original, independent content and collaborations with industry titans, reflected both the reality of the podcasting space, as well as a nod at the David and Goliath battle that continues to play out across RSS feeds.
One thing that’s clear? After years of boom after boom after boom, 2021 may just be the year we truly reach peak podcast.
— What Is Naomi Osaka’s Job, Really?
— Did Paying a Ransom for a Stolen Magritte Painting Inadvertently Fund Terrorism?
— Y.A. Author A.S. King Lost Her Child. Now She Hopes to Save Others
— First Comes the Pandemic Divorce, Then the “Tits Out” Summer
— After the BBC Apology, How Should We Think About That Bombshell Princess Diana Interview?— A Shipwreck, a Montauk Mystery, and the Class Divide That Still Defines the Hamptons
— The High Stakes of William and Kate’s Scotland Visit
— The Best Swimsuits, Just in Time for Summer
— From the Archive: Queen Elizabeth’s Most Loyal Subjects
— Sign up for the Royal Watch newsletter to receive all the chatter from Kensington Palace and beyond.