Podcast Corner: Three new podcasts to check out
Judges Dannii Minogue and Simon Cowell on The X Factor.
The X Factor hasn’t been on our screens since 2018 but it’s still held up as the ultimate in Saturday night reality TV entertainment. From BBC Sounds (all episodes widely available), across six 30-minute episodes, host Chi Chi Izundu seeks to demystify the processes behind what we saw on TV, talking to producers and contestants - successful and ‘failed’ - about what really went on. From judge Simon Cowell’s comments about hopefuls’ weight to what it’s like to become famous overnight, a lot has changed since its heyday.
On the opening episode, one contestant, Sarah, tells of her harrowing experience. “I feel like I was humiliated just for the entertainment. That, for me, is false advertisement, really.”
Since it was announced that the music website Pitchfork was being subsumed into GQ by their owner, Conde Nast, there’s been much talk and eulogies, from Ezra Klein to Taylor Swift producer Jack Antonoff. Jon Caramonica and the long-running Popcast had the only interview with Ryan Schreiber, the founder of Pitchfork who sold the site to Conde Nast in 2015, in the following week. It’s a softball of an interview, a run through the rise of the site, before we finally get Scheiber’s thoughts on the sale.
He says: “People are sounding the death knell of music journalism… the audience is there, the demand is there, the need, certainly, is there - music journalism supports the entire music industry. Starting a new media brand from scratch in this environment is a more challenging proposition because there’s no longer a standard model or approach that will work for everyone.”
The “standard model” is also something vexing the aforementioned Ezra Klein on his titular show. His interview with Kyle Chayka, ‘How to discover your own taste’, seems to have struck a chord, even more so since the Pitchfork news. Chayka is the author of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, an early contender for word-of-mouth book of the year.
Klein opens the show by saying: “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why the internet isn’t fun anymore.”
He explains how now it’s an internet of algorithms and “it became harder to feel like you were finding individual experiences on the internet, and it became harder to be an individual on the internet. And because we live a lot of our lives on the internet, that means it also became harder to be an individual.”
