What <em>Song Exploder</em> Has Taught Us
Headphones on. Earbuds in. Seal your consciousness; prepare to fertilize the inner life. Now, what’s it going to be: some music, or a podcast? A dose of (in my case) Iron Maiden doing “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” or (again in my case) three dudes muttering about the Premier League?
So far, the two spheres—music and words, rapture and sobriety—have been largely nonoverlapping. Few podcasts have had the resources or pluck to license music for their shows. But now a giant of music streaming has made a massive lurch into the podcast world: In February, Spotify announced its multimillion-dollar purchase of the podcast companies Gimlet and Anchor. Some industry watchers believe the merger could clear the way for music from major record labels to replace the homely, pajama-inflected podcast scores of old. Pandora, meanwhile, has
