For those of you that don’t know, I’m the co-host of a fairly popular podcast, VeganFreak Radio. We have a few thousand listeners who have generally been pretty damn cool. They send us cool stuff; they donate money to us to help us buy equipment; and they call in with great voicemails for the show. Overall, our audience rocks. Podcasting is a hard business, and without the generous support we’ve received, we would have quit long, long ago.

Still, we sometimes get odd, funny, or annoying feedback that just makes us go “huh?” Generally, it falls into 3 main categories:

1. Please stop cursing.

We say dirty words on the show on occasion. We sometimes talk about sex. We sometimes rant. We have warnings, including an explicit tag in iTunes. Yet we still have people writing to us to complain about the language. We’re usually accused of “putting forth a bad face for veganism,” or “turning off our audience,” or just “sounding uneducated” (that one is funny for 2 people with PhDs). Of course, we won’t stop cursing. We even have a form letter for this kind of complaint.
2. Can you please do X just for me?

Perhaps it is the intimacy of the medium that leads people to believe that it is a one-on-one experience, but sometimes we get these emails that ask us to do things that would affect the listening experience for thousands of people. “Can you please encode your shows at a lower/higher bitrate?” “Can you rename your entire feed so it shows up where I want it to in my playlists?” “Can you split your shows into pieces?” Mostly, we get these kinds of requests from people who have crap MP3 players that can’t hold enough. Why it doesn’t occur to them to upgrade if the player is not meeting their needs is beyond me, but apparently, they think it is easier for us to change the way we do things just to suit them.

Also, we try hard to produce a good-sounding show. (Don’t believe me? Check out our setup.) Of course we’ve given a lot of thought to bitrate and quality. But should we put out some 8kpbs file so that you can download a 2-hour show over your crap-ass dialup? No. You should get some broadband, or at least steal some if the show is important to you.

Finally, we do have show subscribers. For these folks, I’ll bend over backwards. Alas, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that we never get the odd requests from the people who actually see fit to chip in for the costs of bandwidth (sometimes, almost a terabyte per month) and recording equipment. The cheapos who never donate are the ones who always want odd shit.
3. Be more PC!
On an interview that we did once, someone said “retard.” Okay, it isn’t the nicest thing ever, but we then received a long email about why retard is bad. Yes, we know retard is bad. We know it isn’t nice. But for fuck’s sake, we didn’t even say it.

I sound bitter, but I’m not. I love most of our listeners. But I don’t think that people realize that a show takes us at least 10 hours to put together, not counting the 2 hours recording time. We value the feedback, honestly, but we can’t really accommodate every single person exactly as they want. I think what’s most frustrating isn’t the complaint as much as the self-centeredness of some of the tone…..meh! enough whining. I do very much enjoy podcasting, but on occasion, it has its frustrating times.