Melissa Anelli
“We all crave stories so much,” says Melissa Anelli, the CEO of Mischief Management, a New York City-based firm that is bringing the new PodX podcasting conference to Music City Center this Friday through Sunday, May 31-June 2. “The glossy stuff in podcasting is secondary,” she says. “What makes for a good podcast is storytelling, whether it is fiction or nonfiction.”
Nashville is a city of storytellers, built on the careers of songwriters who craft those stories, so it makes sense that Anelli and her team chose Nashville as the site for their first podcasting conference. The company produces other events, including Con of Thrones, a Game of Thrones conference that will come to Music City Center in July.
“Nashville has such a rich audio history, and that’s the other side of podcasting, so it was a natural fit,” Anelli says. “Plus, it’s a vibrant place where people want to be.” More than 1,500 people are expected at the inaugural PodX conference, ranging from avid listeners to wannabe hosts and professional podcasters.
And the booming podcast industry has a real presence in Nashville. In the Scene’s “Pod Goals” series, we’ve featured some of the city’s best, including Tyler Mahan Coe’s breakout country-music-history podcast, Cocaine and Rhinestones, and WPLN-FM’s exploration of public housing, The Promise. Both shows have gone on to gain national recognition. Though not based in Nashville, hosts Malcolm Gladwell and Rick Rubin have interviewed Nashville heavyweights such as Mary Gauthier, T. Bone Burnett and Liz Rose on their show Broken Record.
In general, podcasting has very few barriers to entry — as Anelli puts it, “There is no gatekeeper.” PodX will celebrate some of the diverse voices represented within the industry. Panels with titles like The Queer Podcast Space, Podcasters of Color and Women in Podcasting will put a spotlight on folks who have been traditionally underrepresented in media.
While almost anyone can put a program on Apple Podcasts, that doesn’t automatically make a podcast worth listening to.
“There is an advantage [in Nashville] of home studios and high-quality mics,” says Emily Siner, news director at WPLN and host of the station’s Movers and Thinkers podcast. “People here know what good sound is.”
Public relations firm owner and new podcaster Hannah Schneider learned that lesson the hard (and slightly embarrassing) way earlier this year when launching No Time for Coffee, an interview podcast that sheds light on public-relations and hospitality careers. “I Googled ‘podcast starter kit’ and ordered one from Amazon,” she says. “My boyfriend, who is an audio engineer, took one look at it and told me to throw it away. Obviously, I couldn’t get away with a $50 starter kit, and I don’t need to. There are so many studios here that will rent space to podcasters so you can do it the right way.”
Movers and Thinkers started as a live interview series about four years ago. Siner and her team liked the way they could connect with a live, albeit smaller, audience without being constrained by time, as they are with shorter radio segments. WPLN has now produced seven different podcasts, including The Promise.
“It is not exclusive to us, but to all news organizations that have podcasts, there is a level of journalistic thought,” Siner says. “With The Promise, it was thoroughly fact-checked. You do not see that in every podcast. The level of reporting care is evident.”
On Friday morning at PodX, WPLN will record a live episode of its Curious Nashville podcast, which typically answers listener-submitted questions. Anelli counts Curious Nashville among her favorite podcasts (others including Reply All, Binge Mode and Radiolab). This weekend, participants can also attend live tapings of Hell and High Horror, Says Who?, Pottercast and a host of others.
Podcasting is a still-evolving medium, and Anelli points out that some things have to be learned on the job. “The first episode of an independent podcast is always bad,” she says. “I think it’s something you can only learn by doing. You have to connect with your audience. And that doesn’t happen practicing in your living room.”
Other techniques can be honed. At PodX, experts from across the country and all spectrums of genre — from the booming world of true crime to pop culture and politics — will lead panels. Topics will include everything from conducting interviews to capturing good sound, composing a score, engineering audio, monetizing a podcast and more.
“We want podcasts to be good,” says Siner, “because the more good podcasts that are out there, the more people will listen to podcasts, and the more they will listen to ours.”
