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    Why Did Matt Farley Put a Song About Me on Spotify?

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    I don’t want to make this all about me, but have you heard the song “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes”?I guess probably not. On Spotify, “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes” has not yet accumulated enough streams to even register a tally, despite an excessive number of plays in at least one household that I can personally confirm. Even I, the titular Nice Man, didn’t hear the 1 minute 14 second song until last summer, a full 11 years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Papa Razzi and the Photogs. I like to think this is because of a heroic lack of vanity, though it may just be evidence of very poor search skills.Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason MartinOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.When I did stumble on “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes,” I naturally assumed it was about a different, more famous Brett Martin: perhaps Brett Martin, the left-handed reliever who until recently played for the Texas Rangers; or Brett Martin, the legendary Australian squash player; or even Clara Brett Martin, the Canadian who in 1897 became the British Empire’s first female lawyer. Only when the singer began referencing details of stories that I made for public radio’s “This American Life” almost 20 years ago did I realize it actually was about me. The song ended, “I really like you/Will you be my friend?/Will you call me on the phone?” Then it gave a phone number, with a New Hampshire area code.So, I called.It’s possible that I dialed with outsize expectations. The author of this song, whoever he was, had been waiting 11 long years as his message in a bottle bobbed on the digital seas. Now, at long last, here I was! I spent serious time thinking about how to open the conversation, settling on what I imagined was something simple but iconic, on the order of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.” After one ring, a male voice answered.I said: “This is Brett Martin. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to call.”The man had no idea who I was. More

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      Joni Mitchell, Following Neil Young, Returns to Spotify After Protest

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      Her music has quietly reappeared on the streaming service, two years after a departure over what she called “lies” about Covid-19 vaccines in podcasts.Joni Mitchell’s music has quietly returned to Spotify, more than two years after she followed Neil Young in protest of what she called “lies” about Covid-19 vaccines being spread on the streaming platform.There was no official announcement of Mitchell’s decision, but on Thursday fans on social media began to note with excitement the reappearance of some of her albums on Spotify. By Friday morning, most if not all of Mitchell’s original albums had returned, including classics like “Blue” (1971), “Court and Spark” (1974) and “Mingus” (1979).Representatives of the singer-songwriter, her record labels and Spotify either did not answer or had no comment when asked on Thursday and Friday about the apparent return of Mitchell’s albums.In January 2022, with a post on her website titled “I Stand With Neil Young!,” Mitchell said she would be removing all of her music from Spotify. Young had done so after criticizing the service for its support of Joe Rogan, the podcast star whose show had come under fire from doctors and public health officials who said that some of Rogan’s guests promoted misinformation about Covid vaccines.“Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives,” Mitchell wrote.Young returned his music to Spotify last week, saying: “My decision comes as music services Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation podcast features I had opposed at Spotify.” Rogan previously had an exclusive deal with Spotify, which has since been renewed — for a reported $250 million — to allow distribution of his show on other platforms.Mitchell, 80, has become more active in recent years after suffering an aneurysm in 2015 that initially left her unable to speak. She has given several performances, including at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022 and at the Grammy Awards in February, and is set to play two “Joni Jam” shows at the Hollywood Bowl in October, joined by Brandi Carlile and others. More

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      Neil Young Will Return to Spotify, Ending Protest of Joe Rogan

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      The rock musician removed his songs from the streamer in 2022 to protest coronavirus podcast episodes, but reversed course in light of the show’s wider distribution.Neil Young will return his music to Spotify, two years after withdrawing it in protest over the podcast host Joe Rogan’s shows about Covid-19, the veteran rock musician announced on his website Tuesday.Without naming Rogan, Young wrote: “My decision comes as music services Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation podcast features I had opposed at Spotify.” Rogan previously had an exclusive deal with Spotify, which has since been renewed to allow wider distribution of his show.In January 2022, Young drew wide attention by accusing Spotify of “spreading fake information about vaccines” through Rogan’s show, and he gave the platform an ultimatum: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”Rogan, a comedian and actor, has become one of the most popular and influential figures in podcasting with his show “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which features long, freewheeling interviews with guests like Elon Musk, Ye, scientists and fellow comedians.Days before Young’s public letter, a group of doctors, scientists and public health officials asked Spotify to crack down on Covid-19 misinformation, pointing to an episode of Rogan’s show that featured Dr. Robert Malone, a virologist and vaccine skeptic who promoted a theory that millions of people had been “hypnotized” about the coronavirus.Following Young’s protest, the singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell also removed her music from Spotify, and the R&B singer India.Arie circulated clips showing Rogan using a racial slur repeatedly on the show. Rogan apologized for his use of the word, and Spotify quietly removed dozens of episodes of his show. Rogan also said he was willing to have “more experts with differing opinions right after I have the controversial ones.”In a public statement at the time, Daniel Ek, Spotify’s chief executive, said, “It is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them.” The company added a “content advisory” notice to any podcast episode that involved Covid.Spotify signed Rogan to a deal in 2020, worth at least $200 million, that made his show exclusive to that platform. Last month, the company announced a new, multiyear arrangement with Rogan in which Spotify would also distribute “The Joe Rogan Experience” to other podcast platforms, as well as YouTube. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, the new deal could be worth as much as $250 million.In his statement on Tuesday, Young didn’t give a timeline for when his music would return to Spotify, and a representative of Spotify did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Last year, in an analysis of how Young’s streaming activity had changed since withdrawing his music from Spotify, Billboard estimated that the protest had cost him about $16,000 in royalties per month. More

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      That Spotify Daylist That Really ‘Gets’ You? It Was Written by A.I.

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      The music-streaming platform’s new “daylist” feature serves users three personalized playlists a day, with titles ranging from quirky to bewildering.Have your Sunday scaries ever given way to a “Nervous Ocean Monday Morning”? Does the weekend truly begin on Friday, or on a “Wild and Free Chaotic Thursday Afternoon”? How should one dress for a “Paranormal Dark Cabaret Evening”?Those odd strings of words are titles of “daylists,” a newish offering from the music-streaming giant Spotify. The feature provides users three new algorithmically generated playlists a day, each with an ultra-specific title that practically begs to be screencapped and posted.The often baffling titles have recently captured the attention of social media, propelling the service to fresh popularity about four months after its September debut. In post after post, users seem amused by the feature’s ability to see right through them.“Spotify called me out a little bit with this daylist,” one X user wrote of her own playlist. Its title: “Midwest Emo Flannel Tuesday Early Morning.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Why Does Spotify Wrapped Think My ‘Sound Town’ Is Burlington, Vermont?

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      The music streaming service released a new feature — Sound Towns — with its yearly summary of listener preferences and linked many people to an unexpected city.Do you listen to a lot of Noah Kahan? How about boygenius? Taylor Swift? Odie Leigh? Car Seat Headrest? Indigo Girls? Brandi Carlile?Well, it might be time for you to visit Burlington, Vt.! Spotify thinks you’ll be in good company there. Pack layers and bring a hat!On Wednesday, the music platform released Spotify Wrapped, its annual summation of users’ streaming habits. This year, the campaign included a new feature called Sound Town, showing users a city in the world where others’ listening habits reportedly correspond to their own.Users have been both baffled and entertained by the results, with many posting on social media that Burlington, a town in northwest Vermont, was their designated Sound Town.Dr. Orlando Garner, an I.C.U. doctor in Midland, Texas, was surprised at that result, given that his top artist of the year was Bad Bunny. (Spotify informed Dr. Garner, 36, that the city was chosen because he also listened to boygenius, Courtney Barnett and Car Seat Headrest.)“This is the second year in a row where he’s my top artist,” he said. “Are people listening to Bad Bunny in Burlington, Vt.? That’s what really struck me. Is this accurate?”A spokesperson for Spotify said there were 1,300 Sound Town locations for the platform’s 574 million users. Of them, 0.6 percent were assigned to Burlington — a number disproportionately higher than if listeners had been distributed evenly.Online, some users have joked that Spotify designated certain cities — specifically Burlington, Cambridge, Mass. and Berkeley, Calif. — for L.G.B.T.Q. users. (“Did Your Spotify Wrapped Place You In Burlington, Berkeley, or Cambridge? You May Be Gay,” read a headline from the online publication Them.)Tiffany Hammer, a tarot card reader from Puyallup, Wash., felt the city was a sonic fit for her. “I do listen to a lot of Noah Kahan. I said throughout this year, ‘If I’m not listening to Taylor Swift, I’m listening to Noah Kahan,” said Hammer, 38, adding that she thought her penchant for indie and folk music might have placed her in the Pacific Northwest.Hammer, who is queer, said Burlington felt aligned with her identity. “I really think it’s coming down to having safe places to be recognized, to listen, to just exist peacefully,” she said.The sudden burst of cultural linkage to Burlington caught city officials by surprise.“It was not on my Wednesday surprise bingo card,” John Flanagan, a spokesperson for Burlington City Arts, a city-affiliated cultural space.But Flanagan, 37, did not pass up a chance to promote his city.“I know a lot of the artists that we’ve been identified with are artists who identify as queer,” Flanagan said. “So a lot of people who listen to those artists are aligning with Burlingtonian values. And I think that’s spot on. And we really do pride ourselves on inclusivity and exquisite taste.”Burlington has a population of roughly 45,000 people, about 85.6 percent are white, above the national average, according to the census. Notable artists and bands have emerged from the Burlington area, including the jam band Phish, as well as singer-songwriters like Grace Potter and Kahan, who has recently broken through to stardom. With events like the summer’s Festival of Fools, a celebration of busking; and an underground music scene, Burlington does have a certain cultural cache, Flanagan noted.“Many people are drawn to Burlington because it’s just got a reputation as a vibrant arts community,” Flanagan said. “And I get the sense that might be what Spotify is kind of going for here.”Howard Dean, who was the governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003, said that he had “absolutely no idea” why Spotify had linked so many to Burlington. He guessed it has something to do with the fact that the city is home to the University of Vermont — which has about 14,000 enrollees.“Vermont has, I think, the second- or third-highest education rate in the country, and with interest in education comes interest in culture and it’s skewed young because of the university. It is pretty much a cultural haven,” Dean said.The Burlington designation struck Kelly Gray, a University of Vermont alumna, as “hilarious.”“I had gone to a lot of like D.I.Y. shows in Burlington in my time there,” said Gray, 26. (D.I.Y. shows loosely refer to music shows that are out of the mainstream and built at the local level.) “So I kind of felt like I had earned it, whereas others were maybe more, stolen valor for Burlington music scene clout.”Meghan Sweeney, a 29-year-old in Brooklyn, has no connection to Vermont, having grown up in Long Island. Nonetheless, Spotify recommended the city to her — to her confusion — with Smashing Pumpkins, The Pixies and LCD Soundsystem reportedly making her very Burlington-ish.“I went to Vermont, I think, once as a child and then fairly recently as an adult,” Ms. Sweeney said, “and I don’t think my music taste really screams in Vermont based off the experience that I’ve had.”Ms. Sweeney suggested that it could be an aesthetic choice by Spotify.“I feel like every year Spotify comes up with new creative ways to diagnose clinical depression,” Ms. Sweeney said. “So my guess is that it’s because it gets like really cold there, and it’s like mostly dark for half of the year. So it’s very moody.” More

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      Taylor Swift Beats Out Bad Bunny in 2023’s Spotify Wrapped

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      The “Midnights” singer ended Bad Bunny’s three-year reign as the music platform’s most-streamed star.Don’t you just love the holiday season? Diwali. Thanksgiving. Hanukkah. Christmas. And, uh, Spotify Wrapped Day.On Wednesday, the platform released its highly detailed annual survey of its listeners’ streaming habits. As in previous years, the Spotify data dump was a social media occasion, giving music fans the stats they need to show off their taste and perhaps pick fights with those who do not share it.The data showed that Taylor Swift was the most-streamed artist on Earth in 2023, with more than 26.1 billion streams on Spotify, the company said. She is the first female artist to claim the top spot since the platform started Spotify Wrapped in 2015.Bad Bunny, Spotify’s top-streamed artist for the last three years, was the runner-up. It was not a close second, according to Sulinna Ong, Spotify’s global head of editorial.“Bad Bunny has had an enormous year and is still very much leading the cultural conversation,” Ms. Ong said in an interview. “I think what’s significant this year, and what I have loved seeing, is the dominance of female artists, not just in music, but actually in the cultural conversation, like with the ‘Barbie’ movie. That’s been the tone of 2023.”The rest of the global top five included The Weeknd, Drake and Peso Pluma. In the United States, Ms. Swift was No. 1, followed by Drake, Morgan Wallen, The Weeknd and Bad Bunny.Some fans expressed embarrassment on social media concerning their 2023 listening habits.SpotifyIn the days before the Spotify Wrapped announcement, the music platform dropped hints on billboards in 21 cities, including São Paulo, Brazil; Jakarta, Indonesia; and New York. Swifties began trying to decode them for hidden messages.On TikTok, fans traded theories about an online image that seemed to show Ms. Swift with orange-tinted hair. Some of them offered the theory that the color orange signaled the imminent arrival of an album, “Karma,” that some of her supporters believe is locked in a vault.Ms. Swift did not drop a secret album on Wednesday, but did make a track, “You’re Losing Me (From The Vault),” available for the first time on streaming platforms. She also recorded a short thank you video, which is available to some Spotify users as part of the Wrapped campaign.Numerous other artists, including Dolly Parton and SZA, recorded thank you videos this year and released them to select Spotify users on Wednesday, Ms. Ong said.The Wrapped campaign involves a complicated calculus of streaming data and listening habits. User data is tracked from January until just a few weeks before the campaign is released to provide an accurate, and surprisingly introspective, depiction of what went into listeners’ ears over the last 11 months.Spotify’s release of listener data, which is designed to be easily shareable on social media, doubles as a marketing push. Apple Music, a rival platform, has its own year-end campaign, Replay, but it has yet to elicit the same online response.On X and other platforms on Wednesday, Swifties traded notes on how many minutes they had spent in 2023 listening to their favorite singer.“So Spotify wrapped is out and I can’t say I’m shocked! 116,000 minutes!” wrote one.“I spent 40,952 minutes with taylor this year,” another fan wrote. “maybe i need to calm down.”Not everyone shared in the excitement about Ms. Swift’s statistical victory.“Happy Spotify Wrapped Day to all who celebrate. Many blessings,” wrote a non-fan. “Except to those of you who have Taylor Swift in your top 5.”Other people seemed embarrassed by their own streaming data: “i love spotify wrapped season,” an X user posted, “because its just me going ‘OH NO’ to every one of my top artists.” More

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      Want to Enjoy Music More? Stop Streaming It.

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      Build a real music collection. Reintroduce intimacy to the songs you care about.The only music-streaming account I’ve ever had lasted less than 72 hours in 2012. In 2023, I’m still building a non-streaming music collection, shelling out hard cash for what the streaming industry has convinced consumers should be free. As a very online millennial, that makes me somewhat of an anomaly among my peers. I know it’s a privilege for me to pooh-pooh streaming — after all, for those with less disposable income than I have, it offers access to enormous music libraries at little to no cost. But even for those who can afford to purchase music, the concept of paying for songs is a foreign one to many of us.People like me, who came of age in the decade after Apple introduced iTunes and before Spotify took over the market, belong to what is probably the last generation to remember what it was like to own a music collection that doesn’t live in the cloud. Maybe that’s why I never latched onto streaming services — I didn’t like depending on a third-party platform, or being part of a social experiment that feeds Spotify data that it then sells to advertisers. There’s also the matter of fair pay: Streams are the slowest way for musicians to earn money, at fractions of pennies per stream. Most important, though, I don’t like how streaming feels — like I’m only borrowing something for a while, rather than having a handpicked library of albums (digital or physical) that I’ve vetted and can keep forever.I was still using iTunes until 2019, when Apple decided to sunset the app and replace it with a new media player called Music (not to be confused with Apple Music, the streaming service). The appeal of the app remains the same: a media player where I can see my entire music library hosted on my local machine rather than in the cloud. In fact, I have several libraries across different devices and drives that — much to my dismay — all differ from one another slightly. What I lack in portability, I make up for in security. Once I add something to my iTunes library, I have it forever. I have no fear of platforms’ removing artists, or of artists’ removing themselves.When I started this journey in grade school, I, like many of my peers, got around the new order via dubious means. I started by importing CDs I found at the library (the “Juno” soundtrack, anyone?) to my hard drive. I graduated to downloading MP3s online in the heyday of music blogs (“Bitte Orca,” by the band Dirty Projectors, darlings of the hype machine) and searching Google for compressed files. I was a D.J. at my college’s radio station, where we shared files and browsed the station’s racks for CDs we could rip, all to fatten up our iTunes libraries.These days I’m paying for nearly all my music, and have become more selective when adding to my collection. I lean into Bandcamp for MP3s. The platform’s low barrier to entry allows nearly anyone to share and sell their music, whether they have a distributor or not — a limiting requirement for most major streaming platforms. Bandcamp is also possibly the best way to give the most money to small artists, aside from picking up a T-shirt from the merch table. If something isn’t available on Bandcamp, I’ll scope out used CDs to buy and rip. If I love something enough, I’ll try to get the record. If it’s out of print, I’ll throw it on my wish list and cross my fingers for a reissue. At the end of the day, the goal is to have something to hold onto: a digital file, a CD, a record, anything other than an ephemeral stream.This isn’t always convenient: Depriving myself of streaming means there’s no easy way for me to repeatedly listen to a song without a deeper monetary commitment; but for me, listening to music is not about convenience so much as engagement. Resisting Spotify pushes me to actively find new music, as opposed to sitting through Discover Weekly playlists generated by an algorithm. I tune into local college stations, or online stations like the London-based NTS Radio network, and go down rabbit holes on YouTube, whose algorithm can still surprise me as long as I give it the right seeds. YouTube can be the most reliable platform for obscure finds, like live sets or rips of small-production seven-inches lost to time (I’m still trying to find out more about Naming Mary, a not-so-S.E.O.-friendly ’90s shoegaze band with little to no internet presence that surfaced after several recommended videos).This process of discovery has created a stash of albums that is dwarfed by Spotify’s bloated world of curated playlists and anarchic algorithmic “radio stations.” I prefer it that way. When everyone has access to everything, nothing is stamped with the personal memories — the particulars that hold our experience of music together. I don’t need the entirety of recorded music at my fingertips. I just need the few curated albums that I cared enough about to collect. Having my own library means I can distinctly remember the context of every find, and that makes my intimacy with the songs I care about — the ones I can mentally fill in when one earbud falls out as I’m tying my shoes — feel especially rich.Denise Lu is a visual journalist at Bloomberg News. She has previously worked for The New York Times and The Washington Post. More

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      Steve Harwell: How Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’ Got a Second Wind From Memes

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      The track, sung by Steve Harwell, took a winding path to evergreen status that illustrates how social media and fan-made content have transformed the music business.Long before it became a soundtrack nugget and an internet meme, it was just a rock band’s attempt to land a radio hit.But the long path to evergreen status for “All Star,” the 1999 track by the California alternative band Smash Mouth, whose founding lead singer, Steve Harwell, died on Monday at age 56, is an illustration of how social media and fan-made content have transformed the music industry.The song took shape while the group was working on its second album, “Astro Lounge,” after its first taste of success with the song “Walkin’ on the Sun” (1997). The group submitted a batch of songs to its record company and was told: “You’re not done. We don’t hear a single, so keep working,” Robert Hayes, the band’s manager, told Rolling Stone in 2019. Greg Camp, Smash Mouth’s guitarist and primary songwriter, said the song’s lovable-loser theme (“I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed”) emerged from fan mail. “About 85 to 90 percent of the mail was from these kids who were being bullied” for being Smash Mouth fans, he told the website Songfacts. “So we were like, ‘We should write a song for fans.’”“All Star” was quickly placed on film soundtracks, including “Inspector Gadget” and “Mystery Men,” in 1999. (The original music video had clips from “Mystery Men,” a superhero sendup starring Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo, among others.) But the song’s immortality began with its placement in “Shrek,” the 2001 animated favorite starring Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy, where the song plays in the opening credits. The film grossed a total of $484 million around the world, according to the site Box Office Mojo.A decade or so later, generational nostalgia kicked off another level of success for “All Star,” when the children who grew up on “Shrek” began meme-ing on it relentlessly. There was the version made up entirely of samples of Bill O’Reilly saying his name. And the one, from “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” with lyrics stitched together from “Star Wars” clips. There were the ones sung by Jon Sudano, a YouTuber, showing him melding the song — sometimes painfully — to hits like Adele’s “Hello” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” or with the vocal line maddeningly shifted one beat from the original. And don’t forget the guy who recreated Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” using samples of Harwell’s voice.Perhaps the most popular take was “Mario, You’re a Plumber,” a Mario Bros.-theme adaptation — with actual effort taken to write new lyrics — that has garnered 1.6 million views on YouTube.Those were all iterations of what has become a key avenue for artists to find wide success in a fragmented media environment, with user-generated content ricocheting through social media to propel a new song (see Lil Nas X, “Old Town Road”) or point younger listeners to an old one (Fleetwood Mac, “Dreams”).In the case of “All Star,” this process kept an old track alive for years and led to gigs like the band performing a snippet of the song on a Progressive insurance ad in 2020. All of that activity tends to drive listeners back to streaming services, and “All Star” has garnered just under a billion streams on Spotify alone.In an interview with the music site Stereogum in 2017, Harwell expressed the contrasting opinions artists sometimes have about such memes. On the one hand, it’s valuable exposure, and that can lead to money in their pocket. On the other … it’s not always fun to have one’s work flattened into a joke.“It’s entertaining, I get it,” Harwell said. “It doesn’t bother me, but at the same time, I don’t love it.” More

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      Can the Tribeca Festival Make Audio Appealing?

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      The Tribeca Festival and audio artists each have something the other wants. Can they make it work?When Winnie and Alex Kemp submitted their first original fiction podcast “The Imperfection” to the 2021 Tribeca Festival, they set their expectations near the curb.The couple, co-founders of the podcast studio Wolf at the Door, believed in the project. Making the nine-episode series — a surrealist caper about two impaired friends whose psychiatrist goes missing — had been a nearly yearlong labor of love, but early signals from the market had been humbling. An agent the couple hired to find distribution for the show had come back empty-handed, and emails to 200 journalists generated just one reply — a rejection.At the Tribeca Festival, which dropped the word “film” from its name that year and expanded its focus on video games, virtual reality, music and audio, “The Imperfection” received a warmer reception. It was among the inaugural slate of 12 officially selected podcasts to premiere at the festival.Being chosen by Tribeca meant “The Imperfection” was featured with the other festival selections on the Apple Podcasts and Audible home pages, helping it reach the top 20 of Apple Podcasts’ fiction chart. The show was later nominated for best podcast of the year and best fiction writing at The Ambie awards, the industry’s answer to the Oscars. And the Kemps got new representation with the Creative Artists Agency; last year, they sold the television rights to the show, and they will co-write the pilot script.“It was a huge boon to us helping our first show get found,” Winnie Kemp said. “There are so many shows out there; the hardest thing to figure out is, ‘How do I cut through the noise?’”Winnie and Alex Kemp submitted their original fiction podcast “The Imperfection” to the 2021 Tribeca Festival.n/aThough it has never equaled the most prestigious galas of the film world, the Tribeca Festival, which began last Wednesday and will feature audio selections this week, has emerged as a uniquely appealing showcase for podcast creators. The demand for credible curatorial organizations is high in podcast land, where an explosion of titles — over two million have been created since the start of 2020, according to the database Listen Notes — has made it hard to break out even as overall listenership has increased.While other festivals exist specifically for audio storytelling, and some documentary festivals include podcast selections, Tribeca’s history — it was founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff — and association with Hollywood talent have made it an instant player in the audio community.“This is the next frontier of interesting, creative, independent storytelling — so much so that discoverability has been a challenge for audiences,” said Cara Cusumano, the director and vice president of programming at the Tribeca Festival. “That’s our forte; there was a place for us to play a role in this ecosystem and deliver an experience that you won’t find anywhere else.”This year, 16 podcasts are competing for various awards in fiction and nonfiction categories. The selections include Alissa Escarce, Nellie Gilles and Joe Richman’s “The Unmarked Graveyard,” a documentary series about the anonymous dead of New York’s Hart Island cemetery; Georgie Aldaco’s “These Were Humans,” a sketch comedy series that imagines the artifacts of an extinct human race; and Glynnis MacNicol, Emily Marinoff and Jo Piazza’s “Wilder,” a nonfiction series about the life and legacy of the “Little House on the Prairie” author Laura Ingalls Wilder.The festival will also host live tapings and premieres of several podcasts that are not in competition, including “Pod Save America,” Crooked Media’s popular political talk show; “Just Jack & Will,” the actors Sean Hayes and Eric McCormack’s new “Will & Grace” rewatch podcast and “You Feeling This?” an Los Angeles-centric fiction anthology from James Kim.Davy Gardner, the curator of audio storytelling at Tribeca, said the festival aims to demonstrate that podcasts deserve a comparable level of “cultural recognition” to films.“Tribeca is giving these creators the full red-carpet treatment,” he said. “This is its own art form and we want to help elevate it and push it forward.”Film festivals have long been the envy of audio artists. In the early 1990s, Sundance helped create a vogue for independent and art-house films that blossomed into a booming market. Filmmakers who entered the festival with few resources and no name recognition could exit it with the backing of a major studio and a burgeoning career.No similar infrastructure exists for independent podcasters. As major funders like Spotify and Amazon have consolidated around easy-to-monetize true-crime documentaries and celebrity interview shows — a trend that has intensified amid industrywide economic woes and a series of layoffs — many artists have struggled to find support for less obviously commercial work.“If you don’t have a promotional budget or aren’t attached to a big network it’s really hard to find an audience,” said Bianca Giaever, whose memoiristic podcast “Constellation Prize” was featured by the Tribeca Festival in 2021. (She is also a former producer of the Times’ podcast “The Daily”). “It’s a vicious cycle, because then less of that work gets made.” Bianca Giaever’s memoiristic podcast “Constellation Prize” was featured by the Tribeca Festival in 2021.n/aOf course, even award-winning films at the biggest festivals don’t always become hits. And podcast creators at Tribeca have to compete for audiences and prospective business partners accustomed to filling their schedules with movie premieres.Johanna Zorn, who co-founded the long-running Third Coast International Audio Festival and presented audio work at multiple documentary film festivals in the 2010s, said the payoff sometimes fell short of the promise.“We went to some fabulous film festivals and we were happy to be there,” she said. “But did they help us get real press coverage? Get us into a room with people who could lead us to the next thing? Give us something that we could really build on? Not so much.”To cast the podcast selections in an optimal light, Gardner and his colleagues have had to learn how to exhibit an art form not customarily experienced in a communal setting. They have planned around a dozen events at theaters and other venues around Manhattan that will pair excerpts from featured work with live discussions or supplementary video.One thing they won’t include? Quiet rooms with only an audio track and an empty stage.“I’ve tried it,” Gardner said wearily. “It’s incredibly awkward.” More