We are never better served than by ourselves, including telling ourselves terrible stories.
Michèle Ouellette has long been passionate about criminal cases. She listened to specialized podcasts without finding what she liked in the self-produced Quebec offerings. So, when the pandemic hit, she decided, with her half-sister, Annie Laurin, just as passionate about the genre “ true crime “, or criminal documentary, to create the podcast Captives to recount significant real cases from the Quebec legal scene.
“We were on Facetime, at the very beginning of confinement,” says Mme Ouellette. I stressed to Annie that we had everything we needed to create a podcast ourselves that we would want to listen to, with stories from Quebec, “journalistic” rigor, with quotation marks, and polished production. Plus, my musician lover has a recording studio. We gave ourselves a month, working separately. And then we tried it. And it worked. »
Season 2023, the third, has just added episode 5 (of the eight planned episodes). Captives has now passed the milestone of 1.2 million listens. New true stories will be published as a book by Fides in mid-October. TV producers have made offers to adapt — postponed for now. “We’re trying to ride the wave, but not too much,” says the walker.
Except that all this doesn’t pay off. ” Realize Captives costs us between $3,500 and $5,000 per year: Annie and I tell ourselves that it’s not more expensive than playing golf,” says M.me Ouellette laughing.
The wind is turning a little. Each episode now begins with an advertising insert for Sushi à la maison, because the founder of this SME, Geneviève Everell, a fan of the podcast, offered to support it. An extremely rare chance, an exception which confirms the rule of the sector in turmoil, but almost completely left to its own devices.
For independents, including very high-profile producers, it’s often a hassle. Six podcast producers or designers interviewed this week unanimously deplored the lack of state support for this new form of culture and communication, while all others are entitled to it, from theater to the media, from publishing to cinema or on TV.
Canadian Heritage conducted a survey of 24 podcasters and podcast network owners in February and March 2021 with the aim of better understanding the dynamics of this emerging sector and potentially better supporting it. The bilingual sample (nine Anglos, nine Francos and six Indigenous people) was dominated by Montreal creators (12 out of 24).
Independent podcasters almost always host their own podcasts alone and, in fact, they only host one. One in three people surveyed (30%) report no income from podcasting and 41% earn less than $5,000 per year. Two respondents, however, reported between $100,000 and $250,000 in income in 2020. Limited resources are cited as the main barrier to growth, with little or no government support.
The broken ear
Julien Morissette knows the song, he who has run the company Transistor Média at the end of his exhausted arms since 2017 to produce fiction series, documentaries and sound experiments. The Gatineau organization also organizes the Digital Radio Festival, which will be in its eighth edition this spring.
All this is done with one-off project aid from cultural support organizations, without sectoral components intended for them. The Cultural Enterprise Development Corporation (SODEC) unveiled this week an assistance program for producers of digital experiences which excludes podcast producers. When Nathalie Roy was Minister of Culture, in 2022, she promised that support for creative cultural industries would henceforth include this new audio sector. The office of his successor, Mathieu Lacombe, did not respond to the interview request of the Duty on this subject.
“The challenge is enormous,” summarizes artistic director Julien Morissette. We are at a crossroads, particularly at Transistor. We experienced a boom during the pandemic. But there, we have a lot of doors closed because we are not eligible for subsidies. »
He explains that Transistor can reach a million in turnover per year without being considered a sustainable cultural enterprise. The paradoxes multiply. Ariane Moffatt was able to develop a podcast to accompany the release of her latest album funded by SODEC, but the same state corporation would not directly subsidize Transistor for the same work.
“It’s absurd: we constantly fall into trouble,” said Mr. Morissette. It’s very difficult to maintain quality in creation, to have ambitious projects, to offer good working conditions. However, it should be a priority for Quebec to have a strong French-speaking digital presence if we do not want to find ourselves drowned in the global offering. »
In the hollow of the ear
The global figures are dizzying. Productions number in the millions in English alone. French-speaking Europe, aided by public support, produces at full capacity and certain Franco-French podcasts attract an audience as large as the best TV shows.
Here, the small institutional epicenter of production and broadcasting is concentrated around Radio-Canada and QUB. Radio-Canada claims to be the first Quebec podcast with The techno notebook by Bruno Guglielminetti around fifteen years ago. The sector took off four years ago under the direction of Caroline Jamet, general director of audio and radio, a sector moreover unified under her leadership.
“We decided to become the French-speaking destination for quality content in the country,” she says. We had everything we needed to create and put together this content. »
The subsidized public media has the autonomous budgets to support its ambition. A small creative team works there, in collaboration with independent producers or other media (TV5, TQ, Savoir Média). Radio-Canada also buys productions, including from Transistor. An agreement has just been signed with the Belgian Radio-Television of the French Community for content sharing. The Canadian radio catalog includes more than 200 podcasts and 150 audio books, another part of the offer.
Competition therefore comes from QUB radio, which will celebrate its fifth anniversary in a few days, in mid-October. The media offers live broadcasts on the Web (and catch-up), but also native podcasts.
“We wanted a podcast library from the start,” says Étienne Roy, director of digital platforms and content at QUB radio, who took office at the start of the adventure, in 2018. “We launched a year before the Ohdio platform , at a time when the term “podcast” itself was not widespread. »
In the long run, QUB became a distribution center, like Spotify, hence, for example, the presence of the crime series Summaries of Transistor. Étienne Roy describes the new digital audio genre as “a unicorn”: it can appear on multiple platforms, without license, without regulation, but also without or almost no subsidy and without ever being monetized either.
“Quebec remains a small market for all media,” he concludes. Advertising helps us. The sector has been developing for several years, but unfortunately public funding has not followed. I don’t know whether we should say that we are at a crossroads, but we certainly need a reaction and concrete actions. We need dedicated, defined programs that identify sectors, like in television production. Fiction and documentaries require more resources. The ideal would be for all producers to have the same chance of accessing financing. »
Ultimately, we are not always better served than ourselves, and a helping hand would be greatly appreciated…