No phrase is better calculated to tense the neck muscles of a regular podcast listener than ‘We have something special for you now.’
Having your radio shows downloaded to your phone, music player or computer, rather than plucked out of the air the old-fashioned way, immediately grants the listener a great deal of extra freedom: you choose the feeds to which you subscribe, you decide which episodes to hear and in which order. But it also demands from the listener a measure of extra trust, or at least a ruthless readiness to skip, because what a producer puts on a feed can vary much more than in the scheduled-to-the-second world of broadcast radio.
Sometimes, instead of a show, you’re sent an apology for a show: several of my favourite American podcasts have been replaced in recent weeks by cheery chats about the snowstorms that prevented their recording.
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