Lessons on popular music form, creation and reception through the Song Exploder podcast

Abstract

This article positions Hrishikesh Hirway’s Song Exploder as an archetypical example of how musical exploration, examination and education can come together in podcast form. Song Exploder’s combination of content and format allows audiences with a range of musical experience and interest to gain insight into how popular music is created at the level of individual songs, and more broadly in terms of genre and industry reception and delivery processes. Originally conceived as an audio-only podcast, versions of Song Exploder have also been staged ‘live in concert’, and in audio-visual format for Netflix. To demonstrate Song Exploder’s success, I situate it alongside similar music/media crossovers in print, radio and film and television, while also presenting findings from my five years experience of using Song Exploder as a teaching tool for undergraduate students in Australia.