Night Vale Presents and Gen-Z Media Partner with PRX

Audio drama networks Night Vale Presents and Gen-Z have partnered with “online marketplace for distribution, review, and licensing of public radio programming” Public Radio Exchange (PRX). PRX will take over marketing and distribution for all Night Vale Presents and Gen-Z productions.

You can read more about the partnership here.

The article also discusses new podcasts coming to Night Vale Presents:

Night Vale Presents plans to double their show roster over the next year, including new shows Pounded in the Butt by My Own Podcast with Chuck Tingle, coming March 14, and Adventures in New America from director Stephen Winter, launching April 20. Future projects include shows from musician Shamir and musician and theater artist Dane Terry.

Today’s announcement feels both like a surprise and an inevitability. The surprise here is due to PRX’s initial apprehension towards fiction. As discussed in writer Erin Wade’s Medium article, linked above, PRX’s only other fiction podcast pre-partnership was The Truth, a podcast of flash fiction. The world of serialized audio drama is quite the departure from typical PRX properties.

The inevitability, however, comes with the partnership of three large, critically acclaimed networks joining forces in an ever-expanding medium that is slowly gaining attention from traditional reporting. It seems natural that with the trend of audio dramas being optioned for TV–including Night Vale Presents’s own Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn’t Dead–larger companies like PRX would want to combine with podcasts that are often considered some of the best in the medium. As Night Vale Presents and Gen-Z expand, the desire to hand off marketing and distribution to a company that specializes in those facets of podcasting is obvious.

For now, all that can be done is wait to see how this partnership will affect PRX, Night Vale Presents, Gen-Z, and possibly even the audio drama medium. More updates will be posted as they develop and can be found on Podcast Problems’s Podcast News page.