The daily podcast trend has taken off at full speed. The New York Times was the first to venture into the space with The Daily, and the Guardian and BBC followed suit with Today in Focus and Beyond Today respectively.
Even the Standard has gone in on the hype with The Leader, a more opinion-focused look at the news cycle, which drops at 4pm every weekday (find it on Acast and Apple Podcasts).
Podcasting company Parcast, acquired by Spotify earlier this year, has decided to strip hard news out of its new daily podcast and focus on personal news instead. Meet Horoscope Today: 12 daily podcasts which drop into your Spotify podcast feed early in the morning to give people a more personalised, astrological look at their day ahead.
“Astrology and horoscopes have been a mainstay in society for over 50 years, whether its newspapers, online or in apps. In the podcast space, there’s no real horoscope shows, definitely not daily shows and definitely not 12 daily shows,” explains founder and managing director of Parcast, Max Cutler.
Creating one daily podcast is difficult on the production side, let alone 12. But Cutler wanted to ensure that people could listen directly to their own sign, without having to skip through 11 others to get there. In total, this amounts to nearly 4,400 episodes a year on one topic. Impressive ambition.
So how does Parcast prepare the Horoscope Today shows? There’s a team of astrologers that conduct the research. They pass this on to the writers who adapt it into snackable bites of content for the show, and ensure each episode fits with the Horoscope Today “voice” and tone. Then, the show’s reader records each episode.
Due to the nature of horoscopes, the shows can be prepared between one to two weeks in advance. You can’t plan too far in advance because the moons may change, meaning the episode may be out of date before it arrives. But it also means that each new episode is available for you to listen to when you wake up in the morning, whether you’re in the US, Europe or somewhere else in the world.
The team at Parcast spent a lot of time working on the sound design in order for it to feel like something you would want to listen to when you’re trying to make coffee through bleery eyes in the morney. “The post-production team take the audio files and bring the music to life – they make it what it is and gives it that special feel,” says Cutler. “We wanted to figure out a way to get people to listen in the morning when they wake up, so they have a calming feel. That took a lot of time from the sound design perspective.”
Since launching in August, Horoscope Today has shown two things to the team: one, that people want customised audio content for them, and that you can be creative with the format of the podcast. “This show is a two to three-minute podcast in the morning, that’s it. A lot of content creators forget that a podcast doesn’t have to be 30 minutes. You can do amazing things with digital technology and as a creator there’s no strict format you need to follow.”
Cutler says he is keen to explore the daily podcast space more as he sees it as a “huge opportunity” for podcasts. Parcast has another daily show, focusing on true crime, named Today in True Crime.“The interesting thing about daily shows and why we haven’t seen more is because it’s challenging,” he explains. “It’s a huge production overall and they’re expensive to do so only certain networks and companies can really do them effectively and in the right way. But as the podcast space matures, there’s more daily shows coming out and it’s exciting.”
One thing in particular that helps the daily format appeal to listeners is that the shows are often shorter than other podcasts.
“From a format perspective, some hosts spend 10-15 minutes not talking about anything. And we know from our listeners that that upsets some people because time is finite. We want to make sure that, at least with Parcast, you’re getting the information and then you can get on with the rest of your day and listen to other great podcasts.”
The company has plans to release around 35 shows over the next year, exploring different formats and genres, so it looks like Parcast is not done with experimenting just yet.
Cutler adds: “There might be 450,000 podcasts on Spotify but a lot of them are very similar. And there’s a lot of great stories so I think we have a unique opportunity to move into new verticals and tell new stories that haven’t been told before.”
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