APA executive director Michele Cobb expects a full house of 400 attendees at the 23rd annual Audio Publishers Association Conference at the Jacob Javits Center’s River Pavilion on Wednesday, May 31. “We sold out at our early registration deadline,” she says, “and we have a waiting list.” The keen interest in the conference is understandable, Cobb notes: “Audio is hot at the moment because there’s been such growth in our industry.”
Following the traditional networking breakfast, the day’s events kick off with a keynote address from Tom Webster, v-p of strategy and marketing for Edison Research, the firm that conducts the APA’s consumer survey, released every two years. “We are in the midst of the survey right now, and it’s the perfect time for Tom to talk about what he’s seeing,” says Cobb.
Though he’s spoken at APAC before, this is Webster’s first time as a keynote. “There’s a lot of increased interest on the part of the APA membership on the state of the industry and state of spoken-word content,” he says. “For this talk, we’ll be trending some things from the last study that we did exclusively for APA three years ago and also include some brand-new unreleased info from our Infinite Dial research.” Infinite Dial is a research series that Edison has done since 1998, and Webster notes that it is the longest-running, continuous study of media use habits of Americans. With results from both the 2017 Infinite Dial Study and the latest APA Consumer Survey (which will not be released publicly until after APAC), Webster says, “We have new data on audiobook consumption and the intersection of audiobooks and podcasts. A good chunk of my talk will focus on the state and the future of spoken-word audio in general.”
Audiobook publishers have used the podcast format in various ways for a while now, but Webster is seeing increased interest in that area. “A lot of audiobook publishers in the space are keeping a close eye on the growth of podcasting and are encouraged by it,” he says. “As a result, we’re seeing a lot of innovation of form, I think, among the audiobook producers.”
While information on podcasting will certainly inform his remarks, Webster says the primary focus of his address will be on “audiobook listeners and the results of the APA study we’ve done.” He cites one of the new trends he observed. “The audiobook audience continues to grow bit by bit, year over year, but the makeup of that audience in terms of their behavior is changing even faster than the audience itself is growing,” he says. “There are people who have been listening to audiobooks for a long time, but their behaviors have changed recently. They’re now incorporating more and more digital listening, which I think is news.”
Another key point from the latest research is how people want to listen and watch media. “There’s almost never been a stronger audience for subscription content,” says Webster, “and paid content. That’s a trend that has spiked sharply over the past couple of years. We now have enormous numbers of people subscribing to Netflix, Hulu, Spotify. As a society, our willingness to pay for the privilege of being able to access the content when we want, and basically to shape our audio or video diet the way we want, has never been higher. Original content has been one of the big drivers of that.”
Webster says he plans to deliver “a lot of meat for the audiobook-focused audience,” including the specific reasons that people listen to audiobooks, the genres, and the content types, “and of course folksy analogies and a few jokes.”
After Webster’s keynote, APAC-goers have the opportunity to attend a lineup of concurrent sessions following either a business or a production track. “There will be some overlap of the tracks in terms of interest,” says Cobb, for example, building a brand, which is a topic of interest to both tracks, but approached differently by a business than by an individual narrator.
In addition to the panel sessions, Cobb says, “We have lots of opportunities for attendees to meet and sit down with [contacts].” Among the interactive sessions offered are Director Diagnostics (one-on-ones between registered narrators and directors), Narrator Speed Dating (narrators meet with casting directors and producers), and Publisher Speed Dating (participants meet with industry leaders).
The conference closes with a 5 p.m. cocktail party. Cobb says she is looking forward to the entire day’s programming, as well as its new venue. “We’re very excited to be back in New York, and this year we’re in a different hall,” she says. “We’re excited to see the sunshine, and there’s going to be a lot of good information presented.”
