Here’s a shocker I realised today: YouTube has been around for almost two decades! And websites like Blogger and Facebook even more than that, so social media and its power to potentially reach millions of people has been around the block for quite some time now, but with all mediums, there slowly but steadily come changes to the way people consume their content.

At first there was the Newspaper — a wonderful and progressive way to inform people of happenings in society. Then came radio and the game changed immensely; you didn’t have to know how to read to be able to consume information and you didn’t even have to focus your attention on a piece of deadwood to get it. It all came from the “ether”.

It really got serious after the TV was invented, as the way we received information became more attuned to the natural way we used to communicate throughout history — talking face to face. 

Sure, the news host wasn’t really physically there, but they were close — popping up in our homes like some formal messenger of old and telling us about whatever was happening that day.

But you still had to wait to see the news. And if you missed it, you missed it. 

Luckily for us, platforms like TV on demand, YouTube, HBO GO, Netflix (I’m really interested to see if they ever decide to produce their own News segment), changed the game.

From us having to adapt our time schedules to the daily news, the providers of information have now given us the freedom to decide when to consume it. They also became more informal. 

Now I don’t watch TV professionals, I watch real people. If before I could only see movie stars appear on my tube, now it’s regular folk like you and me — all trying to get their message across. 

And they’re succeeding at it!

But while TV and the Internet have been pushing video content like crazy for so long, I have been noticing I rarely ever look at the videos I consume anymore. Mostly I just listen. And the statistics say there’s a steady rise of people online who are doing the same.

Podcasts have exploded; the Tim Ferris Show on YouTube is pretty much a podcast with a picture instead of a video, but he’s show gets thousands of “views”. Why? People listen. 

We listen, because we live busy lives and the idea of taking 1 hour or more from my day to sit somewhere and look at talking heads is ludicrous, if I could be getting the same (if not better) amount of info while listening to their conversations while on my morning run.

I believe voice content will be the big star in the years to come and I encourage anyone who might be thinking about how to get their message, their art or their lives across to as many people as possible — to actually be able to someday even live off their content — to take a good look at Podcasting.

In the past, you needed hundreds if not thousands to get a radio studio up and running and to get it on the air, now I do it with a 30€ microphone and a free account on anchor.fm. Times have changed and the incredibly powerful tools that were once reserved for big name studios and semi-wealthy individuals are now in our own hands.

So why not use them?

A lot of us know that the broader public doesn’t really take the artistic profession as seriously as lawyers or doctors, so why not make a talk show with a couple of our friends and talk about art and our experiences in the art world? 

The worst thing that could happen is that someone actually listens to them and finds something that could change how they think about art and artists in general.

And the best part: Almost nobody is doing it! But the demand for something like this is far from being met.