Yogyakarta, 16 April 2020 – These days, podcast is not a strange thing for the millenials in Indonesia. Many top influencers uses podcast as a content to share their casual conversations or even as their source of income. Even though it is quite popular for the millennials, but it seems like there are still many of us that do not know how to make a good podcast. Therefore, Career Development Center or CDC Fisipol UGM held a webinar event called “How to Start A Podcast” on Thursday, 16 April 2020 through the Cisco Webex platform. This webinar started at 01.00 p.m., with Wisnu Prasetya Utomo, S.I.P, M.A. as the speaker and also the lecturer of Communication Science Department UGM and was moderated by Alfira Nuarifia H. as the staff event of CDC.
Before going into the point of discussion, Mas Wisnu explained first about what is podcast. Based on the Oxford English Dictionary, it mentioned that podcast is “a digital audio file made available on the internet for downloading to a computer or mobile device, typically available as a series, new installment of which can be received by subscribers automatically”. According to Mas Wisnu, podcast is like radio. “We can listen to it whenever we want, with various topics, from series to the political issues,” he said.
Then, in his presentation, Mas Wisnu showed the graphic data with diagrams that explained about the podcast trend in Indonesia and global. According to the graphic which based on research in 2005-2019, there were 49,514 podcasts categorized as news and the country with the most proportion is France with 34%. United Kingdom, United States of America, Australia, Sweden, and France are the dominant producers of talk or interview podcasts, with the highest percentage of various types of popular news podcasts of them combined is 44%. The majority of those that aged 35 years or older listen to podcast at home through a smartphone. In Indonesia, the data showed that podcasts were more listened by men than the women with 80.57% listeners in Java as the dominant location. As many as 42.12% who dominate the use of podcasts were those who aged 25-35 years old.
Most of them are interested in podcast creators who are entrepreneurs or businessmen. Ideal duration for the podcast listeners in Indonesia is 10 – 20 minutes and the averge listening is at night after 09.00 p.m. Three most used platforms for podcasts listening are Spotify, SoundCloud, and Google Podcast. It also mentioned that based on top 20 channels on Spotify Indonesia in February 2020, the favorite topics of the listeners were comedy, mystery stories, social and culture, sport, also art and entertainment.
After showing the data about podcast trends, Mas Wisnu explained the point of discussion, which was how to start a podcast. According to him, a podcast begin with choose a theme, learned another podcasts with the similar themes, decide how long the duration will be, and plan the update routine. The more specific the theme, the better. And we should listen to another podcasts with the similar themes as references and evaluate their weakness. A good podcast also contains clear substances and does not talk much about unimportant things.
“Duration is also important because I often listened to many podcasts but it is just prolifigate, did not have substances, and so many chit-chats. Ya, it is actually okay, but in this context that you are looking for listeners, being prolifigate that does not have something related to the substance of the podcasts is not good and ineffective to get many listeners,” he explained. “Then, the update routine is also important because when you already have podcast, but it is not routinely updated, then it potential to lose the listeners,” he added. Other than that, Mas Wisnu also recommended to target the audiences, whether from age, places, or occupations because it will also determine the communication style and contents.
After that, we need to draft concepts before starting podcast. We should decide is the podcast going to be a monologue or dialog, a series or not, then we should looking for a ‘sexy’ name as the branding of a podcast that indicates about what we want to highlight and give a unique cover art. Other than that, there are several things to be prepared, like microphone or handphone, script, also a quiet space and time to reduce the noises in the production process.
“Script is important. Whatever the concept is, it should have a script that will talk about the points that we want to deliver. If there is no script, you would be profligate and that is the character of many podcasts in Indonesia. Ended up the listeners are not comfortable, especially if there are many internal jokes that could be understood by the podcast host only,” he said. After the explanation was enough, moderator opened the question and answer session for the audiences. Finally, the discussion was ended at 02.00 p.m.