This episode features Solid Gold Podcasts Gavin Kennedy! We discuss the future of podcasting and the unbridled power of the spoken word. In this podcast series, Candice Nolan interviews professional podcasters or people working in the podcasting industry.

Transcript

Spudcaster: [00:00:00 ] baobulb.org is a podcasting platform and a medium for storytelling. This podcast is also available on all the major podcasting apps, including apple and Google podcasts, podcasts your life with baobulb.org.

[00:00:24 ] Candice: [00:00:24 ] Thank you so much for all of your help in getting this set up and your patience. I appreciate it. So we'll start off first. If you wouldn't mind, just introducing yourself for my listeners, your name for the record and in what capacity you're speaking to me. 

[00:00:35 ] Gavin: [00:00:35 ] Oh, well, nice to meet you, Candice. I've seen a couple of your posts on social media and seen your website. It's great work you guys are doing as well.

[00:00:42 ] My name is Gavin Kennedy. I've founded Solid Gold Podcasts a good few years ago. Funny enough, after driving around in my car one day, I just realised I wasn't listening to the radio anymore. I was just listening to podcasts and, uh, And wondered if this was going to be a thing. So, you know, it was a few years ago, added a studio and started making podcasts and added another one and another one and another one.

[00:01:02 ] And, uh, we're up to 11 studios now. And yeah, we, we got this amazing podcast, creative hub. It's a space where people engage with the spoken words. In and out of the building, people here to research record scripts, voiceover, audio, books, and podcasts. That's what we're doing. 

[00:01:23 ] Candice: [00:01:23 ] Tell me what was it that, what was the moment when the podcast bug hit?

[00:01:28 ] Was there like a particular moment where you fell in love with radio? Or has it always been something that's part of you

[00:01:34 ] Gavin: [00:01:34 ] I've been in radio and television about 30 years, uh, we were, we were involved in the very early days when broadcasting was deregulated and SABC sold its stations and there were a whole lot of new applicants.

[00:01:49 ] Uh, we applied for a license and unfortunately we didn't get it, but we kept the solid gold brand and we did a whole lot of other things along the way. So we did in store radio, we've done all sorts of things. Uh, I was first a podcast listener 15, 16 years ago when podcasting first happened, you know, back then it was really hard.

[00:02:05 ] You had to find an RSS feed and copy it to iTunes and then synchronise iTunes and then synchronise your iPod with iTunes. So I did that for a little while, a couple of years, and then it just, it's just too much work and gave it up and. Must been nearly 10 years again before came back to podcasting and, uh, came back strong.

[00:02:24 ] You know, it's, the friction has been removed with the iPhone, making it easy to integrate everything. That's probably the thing that made it all revive. And we got back into it again. 

[00:02:36 ] Candice: [00:02:36 ] But what was the thing that made you fall in love with the spoken word? You mentioned the spoken word. 

[00:02:42 ] Gavin: [00:02:42 ] Wow. Uh, it's it's it's a long time ago.

[00:02:45 ] It's kind of a sequence of things. Yeah, well, very funny story. We were sitting in office one Thursday afternoon, when somebody came in and said, we received a temporary broadcast license for an event. And that was Thursday, but we had to be on air by the Sunday. So between Thursday afternoon in a country that had no independent broadcasting, we set up a radio station, built it, equipped, it, hired the people and started broadcasting from the Victoria showgrounds that same Sunday night, it was just such a buzz, um, to start a radio station like that.

[00:03:20 ] Candice: [00:03:20 ] Oh, that's awesome. That's like the dream, isn't it? I mean, that's the thing. Wow. That's awesome. 

[00:03:26 ] Gavin: [00:03:26 ] Okay. It was an interesting time there in the nineties. 

[00:03:30 ] Candice: [00:03:30 ] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can imagine that. Must've been really exciting.

[00:03:31 ] Gavin: [00:03:31 ] There's lots of other things along the way. I just, I think there's something innate in us.

[00:03:36 ] I think as, as a species, you know, we're a couple of hundred thousand years old and it's only the last 10 or so thousand years, maybe 20,000 years that we've been able to write down and recall history and our stories. Uh, other than that, for the majority of our human existence, it's been oral, it's just been oral tradition.

[00:03:55 ] So I think the spoken word and podcasting and audio books and, and this whole genre, this whole thing we're experiencing, I think it taps into something fundamental about being human that we like to tell stories. We like to hear stories. We like to share our experiences in an oral way. 

[00:04:11 ] Candice: [00:04:11 ] Hmm. No, that's, that's a perfect answer to the question.

[00:04:13 ] Just give us a bit more information around your background and how you got into podcasting. You mentioned that you worked in television and radio. Um, what, what made you jump to podcasting in particular, did you get bored of radio and TV? 

[00:04:32 ] Gavin: [00:04:32 ] I think maybe not to do with boredom. Um, it's to do with part of the reason that there are a number of reasons podcasting is exploding, and one of them is the De-networkificationb.

[00:04:40 ] If, if, uh, if that's a word, you know, most of the time I've been involved in broadcasting, we were reliant on networks. We only got work if SABC or MNET hired us. It wasn't like we could get up one day and say, let's do something let's make television. There was no way to put the television. Let's make radio.

[00:04:56 ] Now we can't get a license. It was a very restricted network, vertical environment, and very, very controlled. And that's frustrating. You go, I've got this great idea. Let's make this program. Oh, wait, hang on. Let me go first see if it matches what one of the networks wants to do, and if they'll buy it from us and let us make it for them, you know, if they feel nice about it.

[00:05:15 ] Um, and there's been a democratisation by saying let's de-network. Whatever content I feel like, and put it up there and make it available as a podcast or a YouTube channel, um, without being reliant on a network. So, so it's that shift towards content being the most important thing up until now it well not up until now up until more recently the network was what controlled media, but it's not anymore.

[00:05:38 ] Now it's content that's going to drive things. 

[00:05:40 ] Candice: [00:05:40 ] Okay. What do you wish you knew when you started out podcasting? And I'm talking both as a podcaster and as a listener. 

[00:05:51 ] Gavin: [00:05:51 ] Golden rule. Don't wait to start, just get going, man. Um, if you're not embarrassed about your first podcast then you waited too long to make your first podcast, you know, you really just got to get out there and do it.

[00:06:02 ] Um, I think that can be a paralysis and spending too much time in planning this perfect series and podcasts. And, and, and I'm not suggesting that pick up your phone and start a 10 pod series without giving it some thought, um, you should have a strategy. You should have a plan. You should have an objective.

[00:06:18 ] You should have measureables that relate to it, but don't overthink it because by the time you've made three or four episodes, your thinking has changed and your, your creative process should respond to what's happening. So, yeah. Start just start, but have a purpose. Don’t just think that people want to hear you and your two friends sitting around talking garbage and no, they don't, but if you're talking garbage about a specific topic and you're all well versed on it and the purpose is to inform them on it, then yeah.

[00:06:47 ] There's, there's a possibility that will be engaging. As a studio. Wow. You know, there are a few, there are a few people in South Africa who are quite early to the space and there's some people who've been making podcasts for 10 years, uh, in, in South Africa that that's really something. I think it, would it be nice

[00:07:06 ] It would have been nice to know when the growth explosion was going to happen. Uh, you know, look into the future. I think one of the advantages we have is we are following a very similar trajectory to what the United States and Europe are following. So it's in a sense it's quite predictable that private podcasting is going to be big. Branded and corporate podcasting is gonna be big.

[00:07:27 ] Yeah, what do I wish I'd known sooner. That's a really, if I can go back. Yeah. Build, build more studios sooner is what I wish I did. 

[00:07:35 ] Candice: [00:07:35 ] Okay, just get on top of the curve before it hit basically 

[00:07:39 ] Gavin: [00:07:39 ] Capacity creates opportunity. If you've got one studio and a whole bunch of people lined up for it, uh, it looks like X. If you've got two, then somebody can walk in wit