Podcast are a difficult audience to attract. Sitting and watching youtube clips and 20 minute television shows are the majority of entertainment seekers. The average person can only truly give 10 minutes of their full attention someone talking or presenting, so zoning in and out of radio shows is frequent unless something relevant or interesting comes on. So unless an entertainment group or website has a fan base already, getting viewers to dedicate their full attention to your channel is not an easy task. One such show does so without any difficulties, and actually has people waiting anxiously to just sit and listen.
Welcome to Night Vale, a desert community that’s home to small pizza parlors, high school rivalries, and hooded figures stalking your local dog less dog parks. Welcome to Night Vale is the most popularly downloaded podcast in iTunes history as of this July, and has been gaining more listeners with their unnervingly hilarious writings.
Welcome to Night Vale is between 20 and 30 minutes and aired for free on iTunes twice a month.Each episode is co-written and produced by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, the founders of the online publishing company Commonplace Books. The bi monthly radio show is hosted by real life actor Cecil Baldwin, who voices the Night Vale Cecil that guides the listeners through the strange happenings of the Night Vale community. Cecil’s melodious voice informs you of the latest Angel sightings and the Sherifs secret police activities happening during the day. Episodes have a weather segment, which instead of reporting the weekly broadcast, feature a single from a different independent band each episode. Since it’s premier in June 2012, the town has a cult following of dedicated listeners on various social media websites has been growing rapidly.
Web and televisions shows give viewers the physical view of the plot and characters, while audio books give a degree of restriction of how you mentally picture a character or location. I ready the Harry Potter books, and when reading I had a clear image of what a skinny boy with a scar and black hair looked like. Daniel Radcliffe may not have been a dead ringer, more or less fit that description enough. But for characters like the beautiful scientist Carlos, Telly the Barber, and old woman Josie who runs a angel boardinghouse, the listener is completely alone in picturing the array for characters and events happening in Night Vale. Radio gives you the skeleton of people and events, a sort of mental freedom in imagining how people look and respond to the Night Vale events like Wheat turning into snakes, or a menacing technicolor glow cloud making it’s way over a neighborhood. Cecil is your one and only guide, with the occasional extra noises or menacing music to emphasis a segment, he is all you have to the Night Vale universe.
What makes the podcasts such a hit is the nonchalant introduction to weirdness. The very real events like PTA meetings and office building pets are embedded in the show, and the creators morph these simple things into surreal events like Pteranodon eating 38 people at the PTA meeting, and the office pet being a cat that happens to levitate in the mens bathroom exclusively. If I’m driving in a car for an extended period of time, I’d much rather listen to the adventures of the unfortunate interns who was corporally absorbed into the HR department at the Night Vale community radio station than the same song’s heard over and over again on pubic radio.
Weirdness can be refreshing, so with the truly unique and hysterical writing ventures of this desert town, it’s no wonder it attracts such a large fan base. Commonplace books even allows people to submit either full written episodes, or singles from bands trying to get their names out to an audience. For a truly unique show to listen to as you drive back to college or commute to work, I cannot recommend anything other than Welcome to Night Vale. So do not take your dog to the dog park, make sure the black helicopters are the only ones out, and download this free podcast ASAP.