The new bedtime story is a podcast

As podcast makers look to expand their audience, they’re turning to a previously untapped demographic: children

Ben Stone-Zelman, who plays Luke on the paranormal podcast show The Ghost Of Jessica Majors, says his character is “like a nerd for ghosts”.

Sticking a child in front of the morning cartoons may carry a whiff of stigma now but it’s just as easy as it ever was. Also, it’s free. Partly because children’s podcast creators are claiming the moral high ground on screen time, advertising is controversial for the medium. Pinna is charging US$7.99 (RM33.70) a month for its ad-free offerings. Whether parents will pay up remains to be seen.

Andy Bowers, Panoply’s chief content officer, has been puzzling over how to turn children’s audio into a sustainable enterprise for a couple of decades.

Before he created Slate’s podcast network and spun it off into its own business, Panoply, he spent 17 years in public radio, where he tried unsuccessfully to evangelise for children’s programming.

The conventional wisdom for radio stations was to stick with just one format — music or news. Producers were loath to abandon their dedicated adult audiences and try to wrangle children in front of the radio for an hour a day. So in 2005, just as the podcast was emerging as a form, Bowers started his own homemade children’s show with his 5-year-old daughter, Emma, taping episodes in a closet of their house.

is a charming bit of reverse psychology: It features Bowers as an ornery monster who urges kids to eat junk food, and Emma as a wily kid who taunts him with tales of her vegetable consumption until he explodes in frustration.

Now the series has found a home on Pinna, where it’s been packaged along with a trove of exclusive audio content.

Emma Bowers, now 17, collaborated with Bowers on an original “sound picture book” for the app, Kid Wash, which used a binaural recording system — a mould of a human head outfitted with microphones — to create a 3D listening experience that feels unlike anything children can read or watch.

A LIFESTYLE SHIFT

Podcasts creators aren’t just selling content; they’re pitching a lifestyle shift.

“Because children weren’t valued as an audience in radio, I think there’s an assumption that children don’t listen to audio, or they can’t stay engaged by it,” said Lindsay Patterson, co-chairwoman of Kids Listen and the host of the children’s science podcast Tumble.

Podcast makers are hoping that as more and better content is made available, audio listening will become another family ritual, like reading books at bedtime or listening to kids’ albums in the car.

One of Pinna’s marketing pitches is an attempt to establish new habits: “It’s for car time, play time, family time, chore time, bed time, any time.”

But unlike with YouTube channels or mobile games, children don’t yet have an easy way to discover podcasts on their own.

Even the Kids & Family section of iTunes is peppered with often-inappropriate content for couples and parents. Dedicated apps for children’s podcasts — in addition to Pinna, Kids Listen offers its own app for surfacing children’s content, as does a new app called Leela Kids — seek to streamline that discovery process.

“Four-year-olds, these days, will be very fluent in their use of the app,” Shapiro said.

To help encourage the new habit, podcasters are leaning on some light shaming.

As Matt Lieber, co-founder of the podcast company Gimlet Media, said at a panel on the state of podcasting last year, “The guilt of a parent who puts the television on to pacify their children is one of the most powerful emotional forces in existence.”

If podcasters manage to capture the kids’ market, they stand to create podcast listeners for life. Kee has already started branching out to more advanced fare. “I’ve listened to a little bit of he said.