Tuning In (podcast)
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Short Project Summary
My Digital Artefact is a podcast that promotes young creative talent through interviews and other narrative podcast content. The choice of podcast as a medium was inspired by other interview-style podcasts like ABC Conversations with Richard Fidler, which uses interviews in a narrative style, and shows like Australian Story that tells people’s real stories.
My idea was to create my podcast with similar ideas, but focusing on more young, creative people and artists. The intent is to promote the artists while having a laugh, with a more personal and authentic tone to the conversations on the podcast. In my podcast I’m also interested in exploring how these creative artists are carving out their niche, particularly how they use connected networks, like social media, to grow and share with their audiences. Creative arts and particularly music have always had an element of do it yourself, like the garage band that practices and records their own first album. That hasn’t changed but these days artists have access to much more professional tools to create and record music, and networks to showcase their music.
Liquid labour is an idea that the nature of working life has changed as technology allows work to occur in many different settings outside of the traditional office or factory (or recording studio). But the concept captures more than just how traditional jobs have been impacted. It also captures disruptive structural change - think Uber or AirBnB. In the same way, this change has impacted the music industry and other creative arts, especially during covid. So I’ve been interested to hear how this affects my podcast guests, in a positive or negative way.
Important Project Moments
My previous experience interviewing young local musicians for my blog site was really enjoyable and part of the inspiration for my digital artefact, so this was my starting point for creating my digital artefact. Using a podcast interviewing young artists and musicians allowed me to create a fun and personal experience for my audience.
Creating a look and feel for my podcast was important. Not only the visual elements of the logos and design of the website, but also the persona I sought to create for myself as the ‘host’. Luckily there are plenty of examples to follow, and my first post was an introduction to myself and the podcast. In setting up the visual elements I used a graphic design website called Canva to create a mood board as well as a framework for the atmosphere. The images including surfboards, musicians and various photos of sunsets tried to create the vibe of a laid back aussie music podcast. I used the same app to create the logo of two chairs facing inward with a purple background similar to a late-night talk show.
Conducting the interviews might have seemed like the most confronting part, but in my previous experience the people I’ve interviewed have been very relaxed and happy to share their experiences. So much so that the trick is really to let them do the talking. My first interview with Lemon Pepper was a good choice as I knew them already and we were able to relate over my own experience as a creative person. I was lucky to receive feedback during the interview and after the record button was turned off, which helped my project. I later received feedback on social media, that my podcast guests enjoyed the questions and I had replies back to my Instagram stories with positive reviews.
I’ve used a pretty generic set of questions in the past, which is usually enough to get things going. But I learned over the course of creating the podcast that I could improve by researching the guests more individually in order to convey the comfortable and casual tone that I had intended to create. This would have helped to formulate my questions to cater to each guest.
Analysis of speculated and emergent future networks
As I was interviewing musicians and artists for my podcast, I designed questions about how artists managed their creative processes during the coronavirus. I interviewed 4 people who gave me similar responses that it was tough to stay motivated. In my interviews I found that coronavirus has been one of the major disruptions to their professional work especially as creatives. They often struggled with motivation and meeting times for band rehearsals, and of course live gigs were basically off the table. So releasing music online through different online networks became particularly important.
Like a lot of the workforce during coronavirus, this meant leveraging technology to be able to work from home, but also connect from home. Luckily a lot of the technology to allow this was already in place. Tools like music production software, affordable recording equipment such as microphones were already in the market. And the distribution channels like Spotify and YouTube were already well established. So a lot of the transformation represented by the concept of liquid labour was already happening.
An interesting musical trend related to this change is called Bedroom Pop. Bedroom Pop is a genre of musicians making music in their homes. Even artists like Halsey have used this style of creating and producing music and have been just as successful as other commercial artists who were discovered through people listening on the radio or live music. Bedroom pop differs from other music genres as the sound patterns are not traceable. Artists that are a part of this genre tend to mix different kinds of music together. Bedroom pop has been successful enough to make it to the Grammys with Billie Eillish and Finneas, winning song of the year for ‘Bad Guy’.
The independent style of bedroom pop has meant that artists feel free to explore their more personal and intimate experience. The result is music that reflects the identities of the artist, giving the genre strong representation from people of colour and LGBTQI community.
At the same time as these trends are emerging there is no doubt that among my guests the desire to get back out and perform live music is as strong as ever. The excitement and energy of live performance is as strong as ever, and as a fan I can certainly say I’m loving getting back out to gigs. And based on the crowds I'm seeing, a lot of young people feel the same!
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