Tuesday, October 15, 2024, marks the twentieth anniversary of my first podcast episode.

Blogging About Podcasting

Let’s get the odd bit squared away before I get into anything else: Why am I marking this milestone with a Scribtotum blog post, and not an episode of Sonitotum with Matthew Wayne Selznick, my current podcast?

Every day, I fire up the computer in the lush and lavish studios of MWS Media and, there in the left corner of the left-most monitor, I see a countdown and the words, “Are you doing what matters?”

The countdown is derived from insurance company actuary data. It represents an estimate of the number of days I have left to be alive.

Recording, editing, producing, and releasing a solo podcast episode might take anywhere from six to eight hours, depending on how long I yammer on in the raw audio.

Writing these two thousand words, giving them a light edit, adding any applicable hyperlinks, customizing the meta description and title and schema, and so on, will probably take about three hours.

Both stand an equal chance of being heard / read by about the same number of people in the days following publication. A blog post, however, has a much better chance of being indexed by search engines and found by others perpetually.

It just makes sense that I write this thing, rather than record it. It’s Something That Matters, but / and, how it’s realized, and its potential to make a difference, matters too.

So here we are! If you’d like to listen to one of my Sonitotum podcast episodes, there are many, many to choose from right here.

All right. So.

Origin Story

Twenty years ago, just a few days after I’d first heard the word “podcast” on Leo Laporte‘s The Tech Guy on an AM talk radio station as I drove to work, I published the RSS feed for the very first episode of The MWS Media Radio Show Podcast.

It was, by some reckonings at the time, the 41st podcast produced, and the 40th original podcast (not repurposed from other media, like terrestrial radio).

Aside from that very first episode, it was also the first podcast committed to playing only independent music and spoken word from creators not affiliated with the RIAA (the litigious Recording Industry Association of America). This came to be called “podsafe” music, which, if I’d come up with that term when I started doing it, might have saved me a mouthful of explanation every episode..!

I recorded the show using the same Shure SM58 microphone I’d sung into as a musician for nearly twenty years at that point, through a heavy PA mixing board, and into my SoundBlaster Audigy soundcard / interface. I got the music from the CD’s I’d ripped from my personal collection. The whole thing was probably edited and mixed in Cool Edit Pro. The RSS feed was hand-typed in Notepad after copy-pasting someone else’s (maybe Dave Winer‘s, maybe Adam Curry‘s; I can’t remember) code.

That equipment and software run-down really spells it out: it was twenty years ago! A generation. In Internet years? A geologic era.

That first episode featured music that had inspired me over the decades, but from the second one, by virtue of the show’s mission I needed to go beyond my own compact disc collection.

Where did one go to find unsigned, non-RIAA affiliated, independent music in late 2004?

I went to Garageband.com.

This had nothing to do with the Apple digital audio workstation software. That entry-level product also debuted in 2004, but… this wasn’t that.

This was a free-for-all indie music discovery, sharing, and bracket-style competition website originally co-founded by Jerry Harrison of Talking Heads. It was a great little community, and for someone looking for a bunch of unheard music to play on my brand new podcast? It was perfect.

All I had to do was reach out to artists whose music I dug, explain what in the hell a podcast was, and ask if I could play their stuff on it, with full credit and a link back to their website if they had one.

No one said no. In fact, as time went on, I’d find unsolicited CDs in my post office box every week.

My pledge? Send me something, and I’d find at least one track I’d be pleased to play on the podcast.

I helped bring scores of musicians and spoken word artists to new listeners, for years. I’m very proud of that.

A Podcast Fiction and Publishing Landmark

Still, it wasn’t The MWS Media Radio Show Podcast (soon renamed The DIY Endeavors Podcast) that really changed my life.

That would happen a year later, when my debut novel, Brave Men Run, became the first novel in history with a simultaneous publication in paperback, five e-book formats, and as a free weekly podcast.

It wasn’t the first podcast novel, but it was among the first two dozen or so.

The other early “podcast authors” (folks like Scott Sigler, Tee Morris, Mur Lafferty, Christiana Ellis, J.C. Hutchins, Phil Rossi, Matt Wallace, Jadzia Axelrod, and — though he was more private — the very first author to podcast a novel, the appropriately named Paul Story) and editors, developers, and visionaries like Serah Eley, Ray Slakinski, Evo Terra, Christopher Miller, and Rick Stringer, formed the core of a burgeoning community that was, for me, unlike anything I’d ever been part of.

Many of us crossed the parasocial web / life barrier to form lasting face-to-face friendships. Some of those folks, no matter how infrequently I see them in person, I will always consider friends, even if the intensity of those highly collaborative, pioneering, halcyon days are long past.

The podcast edition of Brave Men Run brought me a community of friends, fans, and readers that, a generation later, still make up a sizeable portion of my Multiversalists community.

Being a podcaster, an author, a good-enough web developer, and what’s these days called a “content creator,” got me a job building and managing a massive, globally distributed team of freelancers creating content for a news and pop culture website start-up that’s long gone… and then put me in a position with a boutique digital marketing studio creating websites and viral features for movies and TV shows from every major studio.

When that last gig dried up in 2011, I committed to a full-time life as a creative services provider helping authors, podcasters, and other creators bring their works to fruition, to market, and to an audience. I doubt I’d be doing what I unabashedly declare is the Good Work of bringing art into the world… if it was not for podcasting.

Past and Present Podcasts from Matthew Wayne Selznick

Along the way, I created and hosted a few different shows:

• The MWS Media Radio Show Podcast morphed into The DIY Endeavors Podcast and ran for 135 episodes, total, from October 15, 2004 until January 3, 2016.
• Five Minute Memoir presented bite-sized, formative anecdotes from various folks (mostly people I knew or know) for just seven episodes in 2007. Astonishingly, three of the six guests (I told my own story on one episode) have left this world: my friends and colleagues P.G. Holyfield, Justin Macumber, and Steve Ledesma. I’d really like to bring those episodes back into public availability, if only to let their voices be heard one more time. Maybe that’s a side project for this year.
• Also in 2007 was 19 episodes of Writers Talking (or, as Jason Adams used to call it, “Writer Stalking”), a call-in-show / podcast hybrid with a different panel of authors tackling a different subject each episode, coupled with live callers in the second half.
• There have been three versions of what I call my current show, Sonitotum with Matthew Wayne Selznick. The first, for 19 very intermittent episodes from 2006 through 2009; the second for just four episodes in 2013, and the most recent iteration, which begin in April of 2018 and has (as of this 20th anniversary marker) 106 episodes. All along, it’s been a mix of personal solo episodes and in-depth conversations with writers and other creators.
• Finally, there’s I Know This Much, a seven-episode audio and video experiment in 2016 that was mostly me rambling on about whatever was on my mind, and notable for being the only time I’ve had a significant other on as a guest. The topic was being in a relationship where one person (her) had never had a long-term thing, and the other (me) was, basically, a serial monogamist. It’s an interesting personal history artifact… for me, anyway. Can’t say how she feels about it these days..!

Despite being a podcaster for twenty years, I’ve not been podcasting that entire time. The RSS feed was dormant for nearly four years, from 2009 into 2013, marked by the difficult and very disruptive dissolution of my second marriage, a big move, a new relationship, and another big move.

In that time, though, I was working as a producer, audio editor, and engineer on other people’s shows.

Indeed, I’ve created far more podcast episodes for clients (1,329 and counting) than for myself (314 and counting).

And now, here on the 20th anniversary of my involvement with this culturally and personally revolutionary medium, I’m writing about it instead of podcasting about it.

Does that mean I’m cold on podcasting? That I don’t think it has a place in my creative kit bag?

Not at all. I wrote and talked about this in episode 106 of Sonitotum, which is also a Scribtotum article you can read. Check that out if you want to go deep.

A Podcasting Veteran Pontificates

I suppose, as someone who’s been doing this so long there are YouTube and TikTok stars who were in diapers or not even born when I started, I’m expected to write something about the medium of podcasting: what it means; what it’s for; where it’s going.

I also suppose, with greater certainty, that in a medium made up of content that is usually ephemeral, if not utterly disposable… in a medium with four million active shows… I, who was once a medium-sized fish in a very small pond, am now barely a bacteriophage in an ocean.

And that, dear reader, is pretty great.

That means we bright eyed, idealistic pioneers who staked this territory a generation ago… we were right to believe in the power of podcasting.

See, one thing that podcasting has always been — and, again, by its very nature will always be — is the epitome of the people’s media.

Twenty years ago, I could only make a podcast because I had gear from already spending half my life as a performing musician, and I had an uncommon level of technical expertise.

Twenty years on, anyone with a smartphone can record, edit, and release a podcast into the world, where anyone can hear it.

It doesn’t matter how many celebrities have multimillion dollar deals with billion-dollar podcast networks to create podcasts with millions of subscribers.

You can still make your own podcast. No one can tell you “no.” There are no gatekeepers.

No matter your passion, concern, interest, mission… there are people in the world who share it. Who want to know you’re out there. Who want to hear what you have to say.

I’ve been fortunate to be able to call “First,” or at least be in the pack of “Firsts,” for a humbling chunk of Internet and creative culture history.

I’ve been around long enough to have my spoken and written words on podcasting and independent, DIY creative endeavors be quoted twice- or thrice-removed, my original attribution long lost. Only those of us who were in the room know for sure that I said it first.

Podcasting has grown five orders of magnitude, at least, since October 15, 2004.

What do I think about it all?

A Fiftieth Anniversary of Podcasting Wish

If I’m fortunate enough at 87 years old to be speaking and typing and thinking and breathing for the 50th anniversary of my first podcast, I want to do just a couple things:

1. I want to subscribe to a new show launched by someone in their twenties or thirties who is committed to the idea of a single voice coming into any number of ears, for free, via an automatic distribution protocol. I wanna hear a new independent podcast full of sky’s the limit passion on whatever revs their engines.
2. I want to sit down in a room with whomever of us is left from those first Podcast and Portable Media Expos (1), (2), (3), or from the 2007 BaltiCon or DragonCon podcast panels, and I want to hug, and laugh, and cry, and hells yes, record it and put it in a feed.

Twenty Years a Podcaster: How Does It Feel?

On this twentieth anniversary as a podcaster, having finally arrived at the end of this much-longer-than-anticipated post, writing to figure out my thoughts and feelings as I go, the strongest emotion in my chest…

…is pride.

Look what we did, you guys.