(4/15/2018) UPDATE: New podcast!
I have made a podcast. It will be available for distribution after 4/18/2018. When I have the podcast in my possession, I will be posting details on how you can obtain an episode. Just a heads up: the podcast is not available on vinyl, unfortunately. It will be distributed on cassette tapes.
I’m full of great ideas. One of these great ideas I had recently was to create a podcast, and to make it a great podcast that potential listeners would have to put an unreasonable amount of effort in to actually listen to, and make the experience of listening as tedious and boring as possible.
Podcasts are still quite a new format, but there are already dozens of them available. Podcasts for nearly every interest, made by all kinds of people, are readily available for download, which is great. I also think it would be great if there were one podcast that doesn’t really have any kind of theme or topic; was very difficult to get an episode of; and even when acquired requires relatively uncommon equipment, now generally considered novelty items or kitchy, to play.
To achieve these goals, the plan is to record a half-hearted and improvised narration of my day or whatever I might be thinking of at the time, and create a limited run of 7” records with the episode for distribution. The records, while not nearly as esoteric or difficult to play as other audio media, has the added benefit of being easy to damage. I imagine handing an acquaintance, newly met at a mutual friend’s party, a broken record containing an episode from my very good podcast would be a thrilling and satisfying experience.
Some ideas of what these episodes could be are things like:
Like all good ideas, this project is prohibitively expensive, and would require a good deal of time investment into editing audio tracks for a format that I don’t understand or really know much about. The record pressing alone for 100 records (the minimum order I was able to find for record pressing services) costs around $700. That’s without any kind of labeling or packaging, which means additional time or money would have to be spent on labeling each record. Additional services like test pressings or professional editing may be required (again, I don’t know anything about this, so really the sky’s the limit here w.r.t. additional charges), which would bring the total for each episode up closer to the $1,000 mark.
Of course, these episodes would be released and distributed for free. One would hope that the recipients of the Podcast would be able to detect and appreciate the care and money put into each record, but given that the content is intentionally bad and insipid, this would be highly unlikely.