The Podcasting Food Chain
misfitrad.io is born.
Almost two months ago, my friend Mike Monteiro told the world about how Mule Radio Syndicate was significantly scaling back operations. For the past two years, I produced and hosted a show on Mule Radio called The Shakes. When Mule Radio’s doors closed, we found ourselves on the outside, wondering what our next move was going to be.
Mike wrote that everything dies. Sometimes those things just die well. Mule Radio Syndicate certainly did die well and I’m proud that our show was able to be part of its life. But, also, when things die, new things inevitably emerge.
My son and I watched a recent episode of Adventure Time called ‘The Food Chain’. We learned that the caterpillar eats the leaves, the bird eats the caterpillar, the big bird eats the small bird and the bacteria eat the big bird when it dies so that it can become fertilizer for the plant to grow again. Mule Radio’s death was a way for me to grow something of my own to see if it eventually gets eaten by bacteria.
On July 1, I launched a new podcast network called misfitrad.io. I figured since I needed to build a way for The Shakes to continue to show up via RSS on iTunes and other podcast apps, I might as well build a scalable system that would allow other shows to come together the way we did at Mule Radio and try to find our voices.
Why did I decide to do something like this? In the wake of Mike’s announcement, there was discussion as to whether podcast networks were still relevant or needed. Marco Arment said no while Radio Survivor said yes. And, truthfully, I can see both sides of the issue. We could have certainly continued to produce episodes of The Shakes independently and that would have been that. The one thing that made me want to start a network and rally a group of shows together was the one thing I found at Mule Radio that would never be true as an independent: community.
Mule Radio had a group of hosts and producers of varying experience levels that supported each other and really worked together to make the network and the shows within it the best they could. That’s something I wanted to continue to foster for shows and voices that were a bit off the beaten path or unknown to many of podcasting’s more ardent fans.
That’s why I settled on misfitrad.io as the name. Partly because we found ourselves suddenly without a network home. But also because, thematically, I wanted to build something that felt like the Island of Misfit Toys or, more aptly, Channel 62 from the Weird Al movie, UHF.
I want to program this network with shows that are really good and interesting in their own special ways but, for one reason or another, may just not have found the love that they know they potentially deserve. And, The Shakes fits right in there with the rest of those shows. We were not the most popular show on Mule Radio but we constantly work to improve our episodes in the hope that one day listeners will tell a couple of friends and then the world will discover what they’ve been missing all this time.
I’m in a weird position to be running a podcast network. I’m not popular and famous enough to make it an overnight success, but I know that if we all want it enough, we’ll make our shows and the network a success. We’ll find someone to love us the way the ostrich-riding cowboy did. Or maybe we’ll stumble upon our own Stanley Spadowski’s Clubhouse. Who knows?
You can help. Please visit misfitrad.io and listen/subscribe to our initial roster of shows:
We’ve got more shows coming later this summer. You can find out about those by following @misfitrad_io on Twitter or liking misfitrad.io on Facebook.
And, finally, you can help by letting us know about other shows that would make good misfits by emailing us at pitch@misfitrad.io.
Our plant has just sprouted out of the bacteria-digested bird. Let’s see how far we can go before we get eaten by caterpillars.
