History of the Podcast Studio Glasgow

The Podcast Studio took the best part of 17 years to happen.

Hi, I’m Mark, and I started a music podcast back in March 2005. As a hobby. For a bit of fun. But it sort of grew arms and legs, and reluctantly I found myself and my podcast getting some international attention. The BBC in America interviewed me and NPR broadcast it. The BBC Technology Page then wrote a story about me.

Yeardley Smith, who voices Lisa Simpson, got in touch and offered her practical support and guidance. The New York Times wrote a piece. Then Murial Grey visited me at home and interviewed me for BBC Radio Scotland, and the Ecosse section of the Sunday Times followed that up with an interview. They even sent a photographer to my house, and the photo that accompanied the article still makes me cringe.

I’ve still got loads of the tartanpodcast episodes on Google Drive, so I thought I’d let you listen to episode 50, released circa late 2005.

It has lots of the history of my journey into podcasting, plus some great Scottish music! Listen below.

By the end of 2005 I was producing the annual Sustainable Scotland Network Podcast, the Association for International Cancer Research Podcast and within 2 years or so I was eventually “headhunted” to run a podcast production company called Podcastmatters. I then produced podcasts for organisations as diverse as Entrepreneurial Exchange and a handful of independent building societies, plus some schools and much more.

As the years went on I produced almost 200 weekly episodes of a power tool-based podcast for an e-commerce client before eventually hanging up my mics and mixer and moving into videography, photography, and digital marketing consultation full-time.

All told, I’ve got thousands of podcast episodes under my belt for a diverse range of clients. I’m a total podcast snob, though, I’m really fussy about what I’ll listen to.

If the audio doesn’t sound great, I switch the podcast off.

In 2019, I started up an experimental podcast called The Social Experiment, which you can listen to here. In 2020, along with a business partner, Fergus Reid, I began producing the Talking Shop Media Podcast.

As with most first loves, I just couldn’t keep away from podcasting. My love for the medium was re-ignited.

The tipping point came in 2021, when, along with a friend, I started a podcast where we very irreverently discuss the digital and social media worlds many of us live in. It immediately became a hit.

So I decided, almost 16 years after recording and producing my first podcast, to open up the finest possible podcast recording space in my home city, Glasgow, so that anyone who has a podcasting itch that needs to be scratched could have a space to make it happen.

And so the Podcast Studio Glasgow was born.