Feral Audio

» see feralaudio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Feral Audio was an independent podcast network in Los Angeles, back when that was a real category rather than a description of a hosting contract. It started on 14 May 2012 with no money, and three years later it was carrying Harmontown and The Duncan Trussell Family Hour, a roster the funded comedy networks could not match.

Independence was the whole model. Shows kept their rights and their tone, the network handled hosting and ads and the shirts, and nothing got formatted into a house style. My Favorite Murder started on Feral Audio in 2016 and left for a bigger deal inside a year, which was the normal trajectory for a show that got large on a small network.

On 21 December 2017, Abby Weems, a musician in the band Potty Mouth and a former partner of co-founder Dustin Marshall, published an account of that relationship describing controlling and violently unpredictable behavior. Marshall responded publicly and confirmed much of the account, then announced a step back from Feral Audio to get treatment. Within a week the trade press was reporting that the network was dissolving and that Starburns Industries would stand up a new one to take the shows. The announcement landed on 2 January 2018. Feral Audio's own headstone dates the end one day earlier than that.

~ the case file ~

~ the audience it had ~

What a network like this was for is easy to lose now. In 2012 a podcast was a file and an RSS feed, and a network was a set of shows that promoted each other and shared a sales person. The value being created was lent audience: a listener who trusted one show would try whichever show got advertised in the outro, and three years of that compounding is how an operation with no capital ends up with titles in the charts.

The shows themselves were built on being in a room. Harmontown was recorded in front of a live audience at a comic shop and later a theater, Teen Creeps was two people talking about young adult horror paperbacks with no production on it at all, and the catalog generally ran long and unedited. That is the format independence buys. It also leaves the shows with no infrastructure of their own the moment the network stops paying for it.

~ its own epitaph ~

The site did not go dark. Through January 2018 feralaudio.com kept serving the full network homepage with December's episodes still on it, and then in early February it became something else. The page is headed Here Lies Feral Audio, 2012-2018, and the epitaph under it is written in lowercase with the numbers spelled out. It says the network was founded may fourteenth two-thousand and twelve by dustin marshall and stig greve on zero dollars, and destroyed january first two-thousand eighteen by dustin marshall on zero dollars. It says it went from indie podcast collective to one of the biggest podcast networks in the world. It says it was a whole thing you had to be there. The rest of the page is a store selling shirts and mugs and a baby onesie with a cat skull on it.

I was nowhere near any of this while it ran. Los Angeles comedy podcasting in 2014 was an English-language subculture with its own in-jokes and a weekly room full of people who already knew each other, and what crossed to Turkey from it crossed late and in clips. The name I knew out of that world was Dan Harmon's, and I knew it from television. What I can read without having been there is the headstone, and the strange thing about it is the register: a network that ended the way this one ended still wrote itself an epitaph calling it the greatest podcast network that will ever exist, and then tried to sell you a pillow.

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