Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 231, dated October 22, 2019.
Risk. The Wild West is a common metaphor for the podcast ecosystem, both as descriptor (“There are no rules out here!”) and excuse (“There are no rules for me to follow!”). Personally, I don’t have much love for it — it’s overused by those who wish to sound like they know a damn thing — but that doesn’t take anything away from the relative accuracy of the image. For a long time, standards of conduct in this previously underdeveloped corner of the media universe were indeed emergent, and podcast folk have both profited off and suffered from this nascent state of conditions.
The thing about the Wild West, though, is that it eventually gives way to industrialization, which ultimately results in chaos that can manifest itself in a number of ways. [watches Deadwood once] One such way revolves around contracts and commissions, or the formal process by which podcast producers…
