PodX brings podcasting to the midwest

While the rest of Nashville spent the first weekend of June preparing for the CMAs like an oncoming storm, the Music City Center hosted brand new podcasting convention PodX. Most known for their popular Harry Potter fandom convention Leaky Con, Mischief Management’s first podcast convention assembled a bevy of featured guests for three days of audio-forward fun. While not without some teething troubles, PodX did well to fill the now-empty niche of multi-purpose podcast con.

Offering two tracks of panels and 31 hours of live shows, PodX was a hell of an experience to step into mere weeks into a post-PodCon world. It felt strange Both conventions are/were ostensibly for fans but also employ their cast of featured guests (as well as a handful of industry experts) to host production-focused workshops and panels. While PodCon, for better or worse, sported a communal “we’re gonna put on a show” feel both behind the scenes and on stage, the watchword of PodX seemed to be “efficiency.”

No convention can operate without a small army of volunteers and employees keeping everything running smoothly. While I was attending as a member of the press to review the convention, I also submitted a lecture proposal that was accepted, which allowed me a glimpse behind the scenes. At the risk of spoiling the review: I liked what I saw from both perspectives.

Building Anticipation

After experiencing several examples of convention-by-committee (ranging from a small anime convention arranged over Facebook Messenger group chat to the massive PodCon 2) I cannot overstate the beauty of a convention that exudes an air of “business as usual” 100% of the time. From a public perspective the PodX Twitter was posting semi-regularly, as well as retweeting strategically-timed posts from some of the show’s featured guests.

Panels were announced with eight weeks of run-up time to the convention, a welcome change from prior conventions that waited until three weeks to drop a full schedule. Many of the featured guests were already confirmed. One could get a feel for what PodX would be like with plenty of time to make a decision about attending. And, most importantly: the convention chose Nashville, TN.

Location

Conventions over a certain size have to be in a larger city. As an organizer you raise your chances of getting foot traffic from locals interested in the event, while attendees have a much easier (and affordable) time getting to larger cities. Someone in Boston can rely on there being cheap regularly-booked flights out to the usual targets of conventions (New York City, Seattle, Portland, Philadelphia, Orlando) if only because those cities have significant airports.

The unfortunate commonality among the usual suspects is they’re coastal and usually high-cost locations. Chicago and Austin, TX are somewhat more centrally located, but come with a travel time and cost penalty of if you’re from the midwest. Living without a major airport in easy driving distance means your options are whittled down to a 10+ hour bus trip, a multi-day road trip, or paying not-insignificant amounts more per plane ticket out of a rural airport.

These are not insurmountable challenges to face if one truly wants to attend a podcast convention, but as a midwesterner the fact that conventions are usually coastal means engaging in a tricky balancing act between choosing between affordable transport and transport that doesn’t take so long to arrive one uses up all of their vacation hours/PTO.

Seattle sports a wonderfully smooth public transportation system, is a gorgeous city, and my normal Subway order cost $4 extra. Nashville, on the other hand, is a 150 minute drive away. We posted up in a nearby Day’s Inn for $60 a night. Nashville isn’t the cheapest city in the world, but it’s leagues better than most. My fiance and I are still talking about how surprising it was to walk into the convention center’s Dunkin Donuts franchise and the prices were basically the same. Before PodX the idea of attending a convention and it costing under a thousand dollars seemed like fantasy. Mischief Management made that happen in a big way.

The Convention

The section of the Music City Center booked for PodX offered the most compact and easy to navigate con experience I’ve ever had. Everything located on the same floor in three parallel hallways connected to one main hallway. Walk one way you hit the parking garage, walk the other and you find a Dunkin Donuts with all the sugary no-sleep juice your wallet can stand.

Big panels and live shows were hosted in rooms named after audio file types, exactly the kind of easy half-joke to make me fall in love with several foam core signs. Though, for future iterations of the con, I would encourage taking the joke one step further and making the main stage with the most seats the .wav stage instead of .mp3 stage. ‘Cus, y’know, file size.

I’ll see myself out.

Full-color schedule pamphlets were handed out upon check-in and were also stacked high on a table for when one would inevitably lose the first schedule. While I had the PodX app on my phone with a tentative schedule laid out giving me alerts ten minutes before one was set to start, having a physical piece of paper in my hand with panel host names and descriptions helped visualize what was going on. At the risk of sounding like an insufferable driver on a road trip: there’s something real about having something on paper than on your device.

A designated quiet room was both available and well-indicated both in the physical space and on the provided maps. A gender neutral bathroom was also arranged in the middle of the three hallways, marked by a large convention-branded sign. While provided with good intentions, the problem lies in the fact said sign was used to cover up the “male side” branding instead of the women’s. By converting a bathroom designed to be a mens room one dooms it to always have a line. Anyone can use a stall, only a certain set of the population can (or want to) utilize a urinal. The gender neutral room sported two stalls and, by my memory, eight urinals. My fiance was shocked to hear this as apparently the women’s room across the hall sported “a minimum of ten stalls, probably more. I didn’t count.” I never encountered particularly egregious lines in the gender neutral room, but I also didn’t frequent it during periods of high foot traffic.  

Traffic in general seemed to never be much of an issue all three days, though it was difficult to gauge attendance as there wasn’t much in the way of space to congregate between panels. The two closest food options were a floor below and the third in the building was effectively a city block away. Between people spreading out naturally in the massive main hallway and those running off to get food, there weren’t many bottlenecks one could stand at and get a feel for how many were in attendance. I originally pegged the PodX marketplace as being the place I’d spend a significant amount of time perusing and networking with producers and fans alike. The marketplace was bigged up on the website, yet ended up being a relatively small room with eight total exhibitors, one of which being the PodX official merch booth. I was expecting the classic convention staple of a large open room with 15+ vendors (and a car, for some reason, there’s always a car).

Instead, we got a room. One could experience everything the marketplace had to offer in a single 20 minute open period between panels. I’m not sure if this was the result of organizers only dedicating a room big enough to hold eight vendors to the marketplace or if the space was chosen once they knew how many vendors they had total.

That said, nowhere in the convention felt particularly starved for space. Even main stage panels that had high attendance never felt overcrowded. I poked my head into the speaker’s lounge a couple of times, finding small groups of featured guests clustered at the two tables closest to the food in an otherwise dis-used dining room. I didn’t spend long in there, but in the time I did I found it a calm hideaway with good catering. Even Sunday afternoon – after a good portion of featured guests had already flown out for other engagements – I found the modest breakfast offerings had been replaced by best taco bar I’ve ever seen. It was the stuff of legend, the stations took up three tables. Most appetizing-looking catering I’ve ever seen, right down to the massive container of sopapillas.

For the few teething troubles PodX experienced, the biggest by far was confusion regarding day pass tickets. PodX offered three levels of badge one could purchase: single-day festival badges, three-day Fan badges, and Podcast Pro badges that gave one access to the industry-focused events. It is common for conventions to offer a single day pass at an affordable rate (but also priced just high enough to make getting the three-day pass a better deal).

My fiance and I arrived early Saturday morning excited for the panel Women in Podcasting: Behind the Mic and Leading the Way. So early we walked in on sound checks and elected to drink coffee in the hallway outside to pass the time. While we were sitting near the entrance we witnessed at least five people turned away by the security person at the door, all of which were sporting Saturday day passes.

Checking the social feed on the PodX app confirmed our suspicions: fans were buying day passes with the intention of seeing a couple of live shows and the Women in Podcasting panel. The problem? Those one-day “festival” badges only allow access to live shows. Anyone who wanted to see Women in Podcasting (or anything else on the Fan track) would have to buy the $130 Fan pass. While the festival passes clearly state that on the website, I personally have not encountered a day pass with such limitations. There also wasn’t much verbiage explaining the limitations at the physical counter walk-in attendees could buy passes at on-site.

While there were plenty of good podcasts in attendance, looking at it PodX from the perspective of just the live shows there’s such a wide selection of genres and networks on display it would be difficult to choose a single day and not feel like one was missing out. While I forgot to officially confirm this, one person on the app mentioned an add-on of some kind available at the customer service desk for festival badges to be upgraded to allow access to Fan track events.   

Hopes for the future

One hope I have for a hypothetical PodX 2 is that in a post-PodCon world they will get more traction as being the overall convention. Podcast Movement and Podfest Multimedia Expo have established themselves as the industry-focused conferences, while newcomer (and free) PodTales festival in October is primed to be an audio drama powerhouse. Since Hank Green’s Medium post shutting down PodCon due to organizers say they “couldn’t make it sustainable,” there is a niche in the con circuit that needs filling in 2020. Here’s hoping there’s enough run-up for attendees to plan for it in the same manner most people I follow prepared for PodCon 2. Spreadsheets were made, AirBnBs were scouted and shared, savings accounts were actually used for once.

Here in 2019, things feel a little stretched thin. Even as a member of the press whose beat is fast becoming “convention reviewer,” I was only able to attend due to PodX’s convenient location. Many friends and colleagues I talked to expressed interest but they had already committed too much money to PodCon 2 or were hoping to squirrel away savings for the now-cancelled PodCon 3.

In addition to the ghost of another convention looming large, several big-ticket podcasts are doing tours this summer that potentially tap out an con-goer’s reserves of money and free time. The McElroy brothers brought live shows of My Brother, My Brother, and Me and The Adventure Zone to Nashville a week after PodX as well as shows in nearby Indianapolis. Podcast network Headgum is bringing all of their shows to Chicago for a festival two weeks after PodX. Welcome to Night Vale makes landfall a month later.

That’s five live events in the midwest within a month of PodX and all of the other options are a single-night affairs that cost <$50 per ticket. All of these event dates were made in a vacuum from each other but also all tap into similar listener groups as PodX. There are a myriad of different factors that go into scheduling a convention, I can’t pretend to have considered all of them, but from the outside looking in one has to wonder where the positive trade-off of booking when college kids are between semesters is outweighed by everyone else booking live shows.  

PodCon 2 benefitted from both a Welcome to Night Vale live show in Seattle the same week and several McElroy live shows in the convention proper. If a future PodX happens it would be interesting to see how it fares in the midwest during a period when other shows aren’t crowding the spotlight. Or, potentially, said live shows happen in Nashville in the afternoons after PodX 2 has adjourned similar to podcast collective Multitude’s live show in Seattle back in January that coincided with PodCon 2 but didn’t directly compete with the convention during open hours.

On the subject of booking more things in future: While I enjoyed the offerings at PodX I do hope for the future of this convention (and podcast conferences overall) to see more LGBTQA and people of color-focused panels. There has been a trend of conventions of having a queer podcasting panel and a POC panel. The audio industry hires and platforms straight and white people by an overwhelming majority and I would love to see conventions go further in embracing the diversity of the field. PodX had some good panels, here’s hoping there are more next go-around.

Final thoughts

PodX didn’t sport the escalator-jamming crowds of PodCon 2, but I could see this happening the next time around now that a brand has been established and people have more run-up time. I wasn’t able to dedicate much space in this review to panels and live shows because there’s not much to say outside of “the hosts were all class acts who did very good work.” For all the teething troubles I’ve mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, PodX was an absolute blast of a convention. I not only experienced it for myself, but got to hear my fiance (who does not actively listen to podcasts) get excited and engaged in the medium.

While I doubt PodX will double-dip on Nashville, or even a not-coastal city, for the second go-around, I sincerely hope there will be a second go-around. Podcasting as a medium is simultaneously intimate and isolating. Live shows and conventions are the two ways fans and producers get to reaffirm the idea there’s real live people on the other side of that .mp3 file. There’s something beautiful about being in a space where a person can walk down the main concourse wearing a hoodie with the Bureau of Balance logo on it and a large portion of people in the room have heard enough Adventure Zone to get and appreciate that. There aren’t many places in the world one can see two different Girl in Space t-shirts on two different people on the same day, PodX created such a place for three wonderful days.

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