There are more podcasts out there than you could ever try, but most of them are crap, or just aren’t your thing. How do you find the good stuff? I talked to Caroline Crampton, editor of the email newsletter The Listener, where she recommends three to five great podcast episodes every day. To find them, she listens to 2–6 hours of podcasts a day, and she’s constantly searching for shows to try out. Here’s how she finds so many good podcasts, and how you can too.
Read newsletters
You can, of course, find shows through Crampton’s newsletter. The daily edition is around $40/year, with occasional free editions every week or two. But you don’t have to spend money to find new shows.
Crampton recommends the Bello Collective, a group blog and email newsletter for podcast listeners and creators. Start with their list of 100 outstanding podcasts from 2018.
And you can pile up the recs with these free podcast recommendation newsletters:
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Wil Williams Reviews (also see Wil’s blog)
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Due Credit (news shows)
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The Venn (politics shows)
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Hot Pod (industry newsletter with contributions from Crampton)
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Audio Dramatic (fiction and audio drama shows)
You’ll also find podcast recommendations inside many general “stuff we like” newsletters, such as Rex Sorgatz’s Recs newsletter.
Follow podcast recommenders
There are many blogs covering and recommending podcasts, like the 30+ shows listed here (with an emphasis on audio drama), and the blogs associated with the newsletters above. Whenever you get a good rec, look for the author on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to see if they’re also recommending shows there.
The r/podcasts subreddit has over half a million subscribers, and there are always several recommendation threads on the front page. For example, “I’m looking for podcasts to get my mum off of watching evil cable television. Cooking, romance, news, anything a 45yo mum may like!”
The subreddit even has a daily free-for-all recommendation thread, and a weekly thread where podcasters can describe their own shows.
Search for “best of” lists
A simple google search for a type of podcast will turn up lists from blogs and news sites. Crampton is always searching for blog posts that collect great podcast episodes, especially ones from years ago that are still worth resurfacing. You can search for roundups from each year, and/or search for a specific topic: “best knitting podcasts 2018,” or “musical theatre podcasts,” or “best chemistry podcasts,” or “best podcast episodes 2017.”
Try the most specific version of your search first; you’ll be surprised what topics someone has cataloged, saving you the trouble of finding and listening to everything in the genre.
Wait for good episodes
Crampton often sees a promising podcast whose best episodes are yet to come. Instead of subscribing to it on her podcast player, she’ll subscribe with an RSS reader. Crampton uses NewsBlur, but you can use whatever reader you want. You can look at all the new podcast episodes available every day, or check in every few weeks and gather up all the good episodes.
This is also what you can do when one of your favourite shows starts to get less interesting: put it on RSS reader probation, like Crampton does, and watch for a particularly noteworthy episode. It’s a way to track many shows without watching them pile up in your player, taking up space and mental energy.
Build a custom podcast out of different shows
Instead of hunting down each podcast in your app, then downloading the episodes you want, use the podcast search engine Listen Notes to combine episodes from multiple shows into one podcast feed. Lifehacker has instructions here.
This makes it easier to try out a ton of different shows, especially if you’re more interested in specific episodes than committing to every show. Searching within podcast apps can be a pain in the arse, as many won’t let you search for specific episodes without first searching for the show title.
Use it as small talk
Crampton likes to bring up podcasts in conversation: “Whenever I meet people, I just ask them what do you listen to?” She especially loves when someone pulls out their phone and shows her, so she learns not just what they subscribe to, but what their “listening system” is: what app, how they order episodes, whether they keep shows downloaded after they finish.
Change your country
Apple and Google, of course, regularly feature “New and Noteworthy” podcasts on their official apps, and they list the most popular shows and episodes in multiple genres. But if you want to branch out further, try changing your country of residence.
This will show you what’s popular in different countries. Crampton uses this to find local shows, including regional sports podcasts, and other genres that are especially popular in certain areas. (Europe, she says, loves interview shows.)
Here’s how to change your country on the mobile Google Play Store and on the mobile iTunes store. But it’s much easier in iTunes on Mac:
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Go to the podcasts front page (select Podcasts as your media type in the top left, and go to the Store tab).
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Scroll to the bottom of the page, and under Manage, select Country or Region.
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Pick a country.
Choose short podcasts
Most podcasts should be shorter, Crampton says. “Everything can always be tighter. [Podcasters] are asking for however long out of somebody’s day.” Her favourite shows include Seven-Minute Opinions from news magazine The Week (ended in 2017), and Rob Long’s 4-minute Hollywood podcast Martini Shot.
My own favourite podcasts under 30 minutes include:
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Song Exploder (10-15 min): Musicians break down their own songs, lyrically and instrumentally
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A Piece of Work (15-25 min): Broad City star Abbi Jacobson demystifies major works of modern and contemporary art in a limited series with guest stars and experts
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Uncanny Japan (10-20 min): Japanese folklore and mythology explored
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Desert Oracle Radio (28 min): Journalist Ken Layne delivers Art Bell-inspired rants about UFOs, cryptids, and the tourists ruining the Southwest’s fragile desert ecosystem
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Earth Break (24 min): Jenny Slate gives a shiveringly good performance in an audio drama about the last survivor of an alien invasion
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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy (9 min): Brief histories of major technologies and their economic impact
Listen all the time
You don’t have to listen for multiple hours a day like Crampton does, or resort to speeding up shows. Instead, find the show that fits your time frame or your mood: a 20-minute episode when you have 20 free minutes, a loose chat show like Comedy Bang! Bang! when you’ll be distracted and a tight, attention-demanding show when you can focus. With most podcast apps, you can arrange episodes in your queue like a playlist.
And don’t struggle to get into a show that’s not catching your attention. Crampton likes to give podcasts a lot of time to prove themselves, but that’s up to you. Personally, I like to switch away the first moment I’m bored, and start a different show.
It’s not like you’ll ever run out of podcasts to try.
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