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Attempts to separate "Podcasts” from RSS #112

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extratone opened this issue Apr 28, 2021 · 15 comments
Open

Attempts to separate "Podcasts” from RSS #112

extratone opened this issue Apr 28, 2021 · 15 comments
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audio Audio, the medium! End User and other stuff. editorial General editorial considerations/policy and corresponding self-analysis/discipline. legacy The oldest content. meta Involving THE PSALMS and/or this repo social The Social Web (Subject) spectacle I don't know what is funny anymore, but my monocle has definitively fallen out.

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@extratone extratone added the legacy The oldest content. label Apr 28, 2021
@extratone extratone self-assigned this Apr 28, 2021
@extratone extratone added meta Involving THE PSALMS and/or this repo and removed legacy The oldest content. labels Apr 28, 2021
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"Apple Podcasts says it’ll launch in-app subscriptions globally on June 15th"

Ashley Carman Jun 9, 2021 at 11:55

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

After some major hiccups and a delay, Apple Podcasts says it’s launching in-app subscriptions next week. The global launch of subscriptions and channels, which are groups of shows, will happen on June 15th, the company said today in an email to podcasters, which The Verge has viewed.

Apple first debuted in-app subscriptions in April with a launch planned for May. It then emailed creators to tell them the feature launch would be pushed to June to “ensure we are delivering the best experience for creators and listeners,” likely because of issues the company introduced with a recent backend update. Through the feature, listeners can subscribe to certain shows or networks for early access and ad-free content, among other perks.

Beyond this rollout being delayed, podcasters have complained that Apple’s latest Podcasts update, made in preparation for the subscription offerings, completely bonked the system. _Podnews_ wrote two weeks ago that multiple creators experienced a range of issues, including their episodes being delayed, their analytics breaking, and artwork going missing. Hopefully Apple will have all that sorted prior to this rollout.

Meanwhile, Spotify announced and launched its plan for subscription podcasts in the time since Apple debuted its product and delayed the release. Spotify’s solution doesn’t allow people to subscribe in-app, thereby allowing the creators and the company to skirt around Apple’s App Store fees. Instead, listeners have to navigate to an external Anchor webpage. Though that also puts a big hurdle between creators and potential subscribers.

Apple’s big idea is that putting a subscribe button in the podcast app could draw more premium listeners to various services, like Luminary and Wondery Plus. Those groups have had to get over the hurdle of making people subscribe in an app separate from their usual listening platform. Starting this month, we’ll finally see how powerful a subscribe button might be.

Source: "Apple Podcasts says it’ll launch in-app subscriptions globally on June 15th"

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"Apple Podcasts Channels and Subscriptions Launch"

19-06-2021 16:12

Podcast channels and subscriptions are now available as part of the new Apple Podcasts Subscriptions service first announced in April. As Apple explains in its press release: …listeners in more than 170 countries and regions can purchase subscriptions for individual shows and groups of shows through channels, making it easy to support their favorite creators, enjoy
Podcast channels and subscriptions are now available as part of the new Apple Podcasts Subscriptions service first announced in April. As Apple explains in its press release:

…listeners in more than 170 countries and regions can purchase subscriptions for individual shows and groups of shows through channels, making it easy to support their favorite creators, enjoy new content, and unlock additional benefits such as ad-free listening and early access, directly on Apple Podcasts.

As we previously covered on MacStories, when a listener subscribes to a show, the page in the Apple Podcasts app is updated with subscriber content and a badge confirming for the listener that they’ve subscribed. Channels, which are collections of subscription-based and free podcasts, are incorporated into Apple Podcasts’ search, recommendation, and sharing functionality. After a listener has subscribed to two or more channels, a new row called ‘My Channels’ appears in the Listen Now tab to facilitate browsing them.

The company’s press release spotlights a long list of shows that are participating in Apple Podcasts Subscriptions. There’s a wide variety of podcasts represented, which makes the press release a good place to start if you’re looking for a channel or subscription to explore. Of course, channels and subscriptions are front-and-center in the Podcasts app too, and I’ve found it easy to find and understand what shows offer.

Club MacStories

Unlock MacStories Extras

Club MacStories offers exclusive access to extra MacStories content, delivered every week; it’s also a way to support us directly.

Club MacStories will help you discover the best apps for your devices and get the most out of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. It’ll also give you access to advanced iOS shortcuts, tips and tricks, and lots more.

Starting at $5/month, with an annual option available.

Join the Club.

A Club MacStories membership includes:

  • MacStories Weekly newsletter, delivered every week on Friday with app collections, tips, iOS workflows, and more;
  • MacStories Unplugged podcast, published monthly with discussions on what we’re working on and more;
  • Monthly Log newsletter, delivered once every month with behind-the-scenes stories, app notes, personal journals, and more;
  • Access to occasional giveaways, discounts, and free downloads.

John, MacStories’ Managing Editor, has been writing about Apple and apps since joining the team in 2015. He also co-hosts MacStories’ podcasts, including AppStories, which explores of the world of apps, MacStories Unwind, a weekly recap of everything MacStories and more, and MacStories Unplugged, a behind-the-scenes, anything-goes show exclusively for Club MacStories members.

Twitter: @johnvoorhees | Email: [email protected]

==2956== Words

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"Apple Podcasts Subscriptions and channels are now available worldwide"

19-06-2021 16:13

Apple today announced Apple Podcasts Subscriptions and channels are available to listeners beginning today.
PRESS RELEASE June 15, 2021

Thousands of Apple Podcasts Subscriptions and channels from the world’s best audio creators, including the Los Angeles Times, Luminary, NPR, Pushkin Industries, and QCODE, are available today, with more launching every week

Apple Podcasts Subscriptions and channels are available for listeners starting today.

Cupertino, California Apple today announced Apple Podcasts Subscriptions, the global marketplace for premium podcast subscriptions, is now available. Starting today, listeners in more than 170 countries and regions1 can purchase subscriptions for individual shows and groups of shows through channels, making it easy to support their favorite creators, enjoy new content, and unlock additional benefits such as ad-free listening and early access, directly on Apple Podcasts.

Listeners can discover thousands of subscriptions and channels featuring brand new shows that span many genres and formats, including news, comedy, sports, and true crime, offering listeners premium experiences that help them stay informed, entertained, connected, and inspired. These include subscriptions to shows from essential independent voices like “Birthful” with Adriana Lozada, “Pantsuit Politics” with Beth Silvers and Sarah Stewart Holland, “Snap Judgment” with Glynn Washington, and “You Had Me At Black” with Martina Abrams Ilunga; premier studios such as Lemonada Media, Luminary, Realm, and Wondery; and leading media and entertainment brands, including CNN, NPR, The Washington Post, and Sony Music Entertainment.

With Apple Podcasts Subscriptions, listeners can experience never-before-heard stories on Luminary’s “The Midnight Miracle” with Talib Kweli, Yasiin Bey, and Dave Chappelle, and Pushkin Industries’ “Revisionist History” with Malcolm Gladwell; the next chapters of QCODE’s apocalyptic thriller “Blackout,” starring Rami Malek and Aja Naomi King, and Realm’s “Orphan Black,” featuring Tatiana Maslany; the unrivaled chemistry and insightful commentary driving CNN’s “The Handoff,” and Politico’s “Playbook: Deep Dive”; and many more.

“Listeners can’t get enough of their favorite podcasts and want a simple way to support the extraordinary creators who make them possible,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats. “Now, listeners can enjoy new content and additional benefits for thousands of new and popular podcasts, alongside millions of free shows, with more arriving every week. Apple Podcasts Subscriptions will help creators grow their businesses and continue to make podcasting an important source of information, entertainment, connection, and inspiration for hundreds of millions of listeners around the world.”

Discover Subscriptions and Channels

When listeners purchase a subscription to a show, they automatically follow the show and the page is updated with a Subscriber Edition label so they know they have access to the premium experience. Listeners can discover channels for their favorite podcasts from each show page and through Search, explore recommendations from the Listen Now and Browse tabs, and share channels using Messages, Mail, and other apps. As listeners subscribe to channels, the Listen Now tab expands with new rows that provide easy access to all of the content included in the channel and with their subscription. Listeners who subscribe to two or more channels will see a My Channels row in the Listen Now tab, where they can browse and follow all of the shows offered.

New Shows and Seasons, Available with Apple Podcasts Subscriptions

Listeners can hear new and original shows, and get early access to new seasons of critically acclaimed and fan-favorite series, all ad-free, including:

“Chameleon: High Rollers” with Trevor Aaronson, from Campside Media: Last year, Josh Dean and Vanessa Grigoriadis told listeners the remarkable true story of the Hollywood Con Queen scam. This summer, the critically acclaimed series returns with a new story about a doomed FBI sting operation in Las Vegas. Trevor Aaronson investigates what happened and how it all went off the rails. Subscribers enjoy new episodes first starting today, plus exclusive bonus episodes throughout the season.

“The Handoff” with Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo from CNN: The love viewers witness between Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo in the handoff between their evening broadcasts is real. Now, Lemon and Cuomo are stepping out from behind the anchor desk for a weekly conversation where nothing is off limits. “The Handoff” is available today exclusively to subscribers on Apple Podcasts.

“The Midnight Miracle” with Talib Kweli, Yasiin Bey, and Dave Chappelle, from Luminary: A groundbreaking original series that uniquely blends the salon and variety shows formats, recorded during Chappelle’s legendary 2020 Summer Camp in Ohio. “The Midnight Miracle” is available exclusively to Luminary subscribers today.

“Revisionist History” with Malcolm Gladwell, part of PushNik from Pushkin Industries: Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell’s journey through the overlooked and the misunderstood moments in history continues. In this new season, Gladwell races autonomous vehicles, rewrites one of America’s most beloved fairy tales, falls in love with a small college in New Orleans, and dives into dirty laundry.

“To Live and Die in LA” with Neil Strauss, from Tenderfoot TV: After revealing the truth about the tragic death of an aspiring Hollywood actress, the award-winning series returns to uncover the baffling, tragic, and mysterious disappearance of Elaine Park. Neil Strauss investigates — along with his wife, neighbors, Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger, and concert violinist Ann Marie Simpson — to advance the investigation and provide closure for her loved ones. TenderfootPlus+ subscribers will gain early and exclusive access to upcoming bonus episodes.

New Subscriptions and Channels from Premier Studios

Lemonada Media: Sort through the messiness of life and get inspired by high-quality shows with all-star hosts focused on important causes. Subscribers to Lemonada Premium join an incredible community, support meaningful, world-shaping content from a women-run network, gain early access to new series, and unlock bonus episodes from leading shows.

Radiotopia from PRX: Home to podcasts from extraordinary, independent creators, including “Ear Hustle,” with Earlonne Woods, Nigel Poor, and Rahsaan Thomas, “Criminal” with Phoebe Judge, “Song Exploder” with Hrishikesh Hirway, “The Stoop” with Hana Baba and Leila Day, “Passenger List” starring Kelly Marie Tran, and more. Subscribers to Radiotopia Uninterrupted support the work they do and gain access to ad-free listening across the award-winning network.

Pushkin Industries: Listen to revelatory shows from world-class writers and thinkers, including “A Slight Change of Plans” with Dr. Maya Shankar, “The Last Archive” with historian Jill Lepore, “The Happiness Lab” with Dr. Laurie Santos, “Against The Rules” with author Michael Lewis, “Broken Record” with legendary producer Rick Rubin, and more. PushNik subscribers can hear these shows and more with no interruptions, and access exclusive bonus content.

Tenderfoot TV: Dive into gripping true-crime narratives, documentaries, and anthology series from the award-winning, independent, Atlanta-based production studio behind “Up and Vanished” and “Atlanta Monster” with filmmaker Payne Lindsey, “Whistleblower” with sports journalist Tim Livingston, “Radio Rental,” and more. Subscribers to TenderfootPlus+ enjoy ad-free listening and gain early and exclusive access to upcoming bonus episodes.

Beginning today, listeners can find additional subscriptions from other premier studios and entertainment brands, including Audio Up, Betches Media, Blue Wire, Imperative Entertainment, Lantigua Williams & Co., Magnificent Noise, The Moth, Neon Hum Media, Sony Music Entertainment, Three Uncanny Four, and Wondery, plus channels from Audacy’s Cadence13 and Ramble, Barstool Sports, Jake Brennan’s Double Elvis, Headgum, iHeartMedia’s The Black Effect, Big Money Players, Grim & Mild, Seneca Women, Shondaland, and Relay FM.

New and Emerging Formats Powered by Subscriptions

Scripted Fiction: Subscribers get early and exclusive access to immersive original narratives with uninterrupted listening experiences from award-winning storytellers, produced by Meet Cute, QCODE, Realm, and more.

Mindfulness and Sleep: New shows featuring calming meditations, soothing music, and relaxing stories from WaitWhat’s “Meditative Story” with Rohan Gunatillake, Frequency’s “Drift” with Erin Davis, and “Sleep by Headspace” help listeners practice mindfulness and support a good night’s rest.

Kids and Family: Introduce kids to their new co-detectives, downtime companions, and study buddies with premium subscriptions featuring curated collections of age-appropriate, ad-free original stories spanning mysteries, comedies, musicals, and more from GBH, Gen-Z Media, Pinna, Wonkybot Studios, TRAX from PRX, and others.

News Providers Offering Subscriptions and Channels

The Athletic: Join the conversation on every sports story that matters. With breaking news, expert commentary, insightful analysis, and unrivaled narratives, The Athletic is powered by hundreds of full-time local writers to deliver exclusive sports coverage built around fandom.

FOX News: Hear from Dana Perino, Bret Baier, Shannon Bream, Trey Gowdy, Martha MacCallum, and other signature voices — all without commercials. Subscribers receive early access to seasonal series from FOX News Investigates, bonus episodes from FOX News Radio’s talk shows, audio versions of popular FOX News Channel programs, and a variety of long-form interviews.

Los Angeles Times: Enjoy the engaging, informative, and diverse journalism and storytelling the L.A. Times is known for with access to ad-free versions of “The Times,” a new daily news podcast hosted by columnist Gustavo Arellano; the new season of “Asian Enough” with reporters Jen Yamato, Johana Bhuiyan, Tracy Brown, and Suhauna Hussain; “Chasing Cosby” with Nicki Weisensee Egan and other narrative series; plus subscriber-exclusive bonus episodes for the all-new “The Trials of Frank Carson” from Christopher Goffard, host of “Dirty John” and “Detective Trapp.”

NPR: Enjoy sponsor-free versions of leading NPR shows across news, business, culture, and more, including “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross, “How I Built This with Guy Raz,” “It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders,” “Planet Money” with Jacob Goldstein, Karen Duffin, and Sarah Gonzalez, “Short Wave” with Madeline Sofia, and the Apple Podcasts 2020 Show of the Year, “Code Switch,” with Shereen Marisol Meraji and Gene Demby.

The Washington Post: Listen to ad-free editions of The Post’s award-winning podcasts spanning daily news, documentaries, investigations, and deep discussions around specific topics and moments in history, including “Post Reports” with Martine Powers, “Moonrise” with Lillian Cunningham, “Canary” with Amy Brittain, and “Cape Up with Jonathan Capehart.”

This month, listeners can also find subscriptions from Bloomberg Media, Los Angeles Times, Politico, and Vox Media, plus channels from other leading newspapers, magazines, broadcasters, radio stations, and digital publishers, including ABC News, Axios, Billboard, Bravo, CNBC, CNN, Crooked Media, Dateline, Entertainment Weekly, Futuro Media, The Hollywood Reporter, LAist Studios, National Geographic, MSNBC, NBC News, NBC Sports, New York Magazine, The New York Times, SiriusXM, SB Nation, Southern Living, The Verge, TODAY, VICE, Vogue, Vox, and WBUR.

Even More Subscriptions with Channels

Notable international subscriptions and channels available beginning today include ABC, LiSTNR, and SBS from Australia; Abrace Podcasts from Brazil; CANADALAND and Frequency Podcast Network from Canada; GoLittle from Denmark; Europe 1, Louie Media, and Radio France from France; Der Spiegel, Podimo, and ZEIT ONLINE from Germany; Il Sole 24 Ore and Storielibere.fm from Italy; J-WAVE from Japan; Brainrich from Korea; libo/libo from Russia; Finyal Media from the UAE; and Broccoli Productions, The Bugle, Content Is Queen, the Guardian, Immediate Media, and Somethin’ Else from the UK.

Creators interested in offering subscriptions and channels are encouraged to visit Apple Podcasts for Creators.

Pricing and Availability

  • Apple Podcasts Subscriptions and channels are available to listeners in more than 170 countries and regions on Apple devices running iOS 14.6, iPadOS 14.6, and macOS 11.4 or later.

  • Customers can play subscription content on Apple Watch with watchOS 7.5 or later and with HomePod, HomePod mini, and CarPlay.

  • Pricing for each subscription is set by creators and starts at $0.49 (US) per month. Listeners can manage their subscriptions, and switch from monthly to annual billing if offered, from their Apple ID Account Settings, accessible from the top of the Listen Now tab in Apple Podcasts.

  • Apple Podcasts Subscriptions can be purchased and gifted using Apple Gift Card.

  • Apple Card customers receive 3 percent Daily Cash with each Apple Podcasts Subscription and can view itemized receipts for each Apple Podcasts Subscription in the Apple Wallet app.

  • Each Apple Podcasts Subscription can be shared among six family members through Family Sharing.

  • For recommendations on shows to follow and what to listen to next, follow @ApplePodcasts on Twitter.

About Apple Podcasts

Apple took podcasts mainstream. With iPod and iTunes, listeners could enjoy thousands of free shows from the best radio stations, news publishers, and independent creators instantly. For more than 15 years, podcasts have informed, entertained, and inspired hundreds of millions of listeners with gripping stories and fresh perspectives. Today, Apple Podcasts is the best place for listeners to discover, enjoy, and support their favorite podcasts, now featuring millions of shows with programming in more than 100 languages. Apple Podcasts is available for free in over 170 countries and regions on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, HomePod and HomePod mini, CarPlay, iTunes on Windows, and other smart speakers and car systems.

  1. Subscriptions and channel availability and pricing vary by country and region. Some features are not available in all regions and for some languages.

==19277== Words

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Featured on the TechMeme SpaceCasts Space 06-24-2021

Techmeme Ride Home - a16z's Future Plans And Audio Spaces With @smc90 and @kyurieff

June 24, 2021

Techmeme Ride Home - a16z's Future Plans And Audio Spaces With @smc90 and @kyurieff

The great Sonal Chokshi of a16z comes on to discuss their Future plans. And the Information's Kaya Yurieff tells us all about the explosion in Social Audio Spaces.

  • __Show Notes

_We have two special guests this week! The first is ****Sonal Chokshi_**, Editor in Chief of a16z and showrunner of a16z podcasts. We’ll be getting her perspective on the launch of ****FUTURE_****, which we discussed last week._**

_​Second, as the major social platforms (save for YouTube!) have launched their social audio offerings, we’ll get the latest updates and analysis from ****Kaya Yurieff_**_ of The Information who recently published ****“The Week Social Audio Went Mainstream”_**

Hosts:

Subscribe to the Techmeme Ride Home daily tech news podcast here

Privacy Policy and California Privacy Notice.

Source: "Techmeme Ride Home - a16z's Future Plans And Audio Spaces With @smc90 and @kyurieff"

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Upload.from.GitHub.for.iOS.MOV

Here's the last ten minutes... I'm in there, somewhere.

@extratone extratone added audio Audio, the medium! End User and other stuff. editorial General editorial considerations/policy and corresponding self-analysis/discipline. legacy The oldest content. social The Social Web (Subject) spectacle I don't know what is funny anymore, but my monocle has definitively fallen out. labels Jul 3, 2021
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"Which podcast apps will my custom audio RSS link work with?"

**By ****
''

This article will go over which mobile apps can be used to listen to the audio posts your creator publishes by using the RSS link for both iOS and Android. It will go over what an RSS feed is and how it is a benefit for patrons. Along with that, we will cover the apps that do not work and some best practices on how to go about using the link in the most effective way.

What is an RSS feed?

RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a great way to subscribe to a source of information or entertainment, such as a podcast, and get brief updates delivered to you. These sources are called feeds.

Many podcasters of Patreon offer private audio RSS feeds as a benefit. If you’re a patron to a creator offering a private RSS link, you’ll be able to listen to their feeds in a podcast app.

Android Apps that work:

  • Beyond Pod

  • Dog Catcher*

  • Player FM * (Important: you must register an account with them to import our private RSS.)

  • Pocket Casts * (**Important: **Visit this article by Pocket Casts support center to know more)

  • Podcast Addict*

  • PodcastGuru*

  • Podcast Republic*

  • Podcasts Tracker*

  • Podcasty

  • PodKicker

  • Swoot

  • Google Podcasts

Apps that will not work with your RSS link

Android apps that we've tested and do not work:

  • DoublePod
  • PodBean
  • Podcast App
  • PodcastHD
  • PodcastOne
  • Podomatic
  • Spotify

**Apps that do not support authentication:
**

  • TuneIn Radio
  • Stitcher
  • Castbox
  • Amazon Music

What else should I know about my RSS link and feed?

Here are some important things to keep in mind when using your private RSS feed as a patron:

  1. Don’t** share your private RSS Link! **Your Patreon RSS link is specifically for you, as a patron to the creator offering this benefit. It contains an authorization token that links directly to your account. If you share it with anyone, they will have access to the benefits you're paying for - and rob the creator of a potential patron.

For this reason, sites and services that share RSS feeds with other users are generally restricted from hosting our feeds. Many are blocked outright. If the feed is found on another site you may have your account blocked.

  1. **So****me apps will not allow you to add your RSS feed because ** . As we discover these apps that are not compatible with RSS feeds, we will list them here in the "not working" section below.

  2. There are some apps that require the creators to submit the feeds themselves (and** usually pay a fee**** to do so****).** These apps will not allow you to add your RSS feed because the Patreon creator, who owns the podcast, has no way to create a feed without authentication.

Email Patreon Support

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"Apple Podcasts monetization, and the future of audio - an interview with James Cridland | AppleInsider"

By Stephen Robles
'Jul 5, 2021 at 12:00'

article thumbnail

On a special episode of the AppleInsider podcast, editor of Podnews James Cridland, joins us to discuss the current state of Apple Podcasts monetization, platform exclusives, and the future of audio.

James has worked in radio over 28 years, and in 2005 James helped launch the first daily podcast from a UK radio station. As the curator of the Podnews website, he analyzes the state of podcasting around the world and reports the latest news through his daily newsletter.

During our interview we discuss the rise of exclusive shows, such as Joe Rogan and Dax Shepard moving to Spotify only, and what it means for the industry. While companies like Spotify are more likely to promote shows available only on their platform, it means listeners would have to juggle multiple podcast apps just to hear their favorite personalities.

We discuss monetization and the new Apple Podcasts subscriptions, which also locks listeners in to the Apple Podcasts app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Listeners may be more likely to sign up through Apple's payment system, and subscription tools for creators offer greater flexibility. On the downside, listener data such as contact info is hidden from creators and it's impossible to deliver any exclusive content aside from audio through Apple Podcasts.

Live audio, popularized by the app Clubhouse, has also spread throughout podcast platforms, including Twitter Spaces, Spotify Green Room, and Facebook Live Audio Rooms. We discuss the staying power of this new live audio medium, and go on to comment on the future of podcasting for the small and individual creator.

If you have questions or comments on the show, tweet at @stephenrobles. Find us in your favorite podcast player by searching for "AppleInsider" and support the show by leaving a 5-Star rating and comment in Apple Podcasts.

Stephen Robles: Welcome to the, the AppleInsider podcast. Today. I have a special guest with me, James Cridland. He's the editor of Pod News, a daily podcast newsletter, and you've written and spoken a lot on radio and podcasting doing copywriting and all that. And so, James Cridland thanks for joining me today.

James Cridland: Oh, it's a great pleasure. Thank you so much for asking.

Stephen Robles: And you also have a great accent for podcasting. Let me just say, I think you're the first. Well, you're originally from the UK, you're now living in Australia. So, which is your accent is UK or is it Australian?

James Cridland: It's most definitely a UK accent. I've had 50 years of doing a UK accent, I can't possibly change now.

Stephen Robles: That's right. And because you're currently in Australia, we are podcasting across time. You are living in the future. It's 7:00 AM for me. And what time is it for you?

James Cridland: Yeah. And it's 9:00 PM for me. So, yes. It's been a — it's been a long day, but you still have to experience.

Stephen Robles: Did anything earth shattering happen today that I need to look forward to?

James Cridland: Not really? No, not really. We're currently currently in lock down again. So therefore, frankly, there's been very little going on, which is probably a good thing.

Stephen Robles: I thought Australia was doing like really well with the whole pandemic a number of months ago. And were kind of showing how everything was opening back up again.

James Cridland: Well we've been doing pretty well in terms of not allowing anybody else in it's almost as if it's some kind of a prison colony, I don't know. But anyway, um, so we've been doing pretty well in terms of that just over the last week or so there's been a spate of cases. So there's two cases in the entire state of Queensland.

I think maybe there are three. Now the whole three of those, uh, cases means that, um, much of the state is in complete lockdown and we're not allowed to go anywhere, do anything only for, you know, maybe three days, maybe five days. So it's going to come out okay. But that's the first lockdown that we've had since April I think.

Stephen Robles: So just three cases and the country is like, "Everybody stay home."

James Cridland: Yeah. And so three cases in the state stays home. So, you know, it's a big deal. We've basically had very few cases, very few deaths, thankfully, but that is common with the downside of the borders just simply not being open.

So if you're an Australian and you're wanting to come home, it's really hard. And if you're, you know, Britain, you're wanting to go home every so often, it's impossible. Yeah. So still there we are.

Stephen Robles: Well, we hope that it will pass as quickly for sure. I wanted to have a very meta podcast on the Apple Insider podcast today because it's going to be a podcast about podcasting because of all the stuff that's been in the news and Spotify and Facebook.

And we'll get all into that. But for you yourself, you've been in radio for a long time. What made you make the transition to get into podcasting? And why are you so passionate about it that you would write about it, you know all the time?

James Cridland: Every single day. Yeah. Well, I mean, I've being involved in radio since the late 1980s, a long, long time, but I started being involved in what the future of audio was in the early two thousands.

So I was looking after a website for a Virgin radio in London, which was Richard Branson's radio station, and one of the things that we were doing is we were the first radio station to stream online in Europe. We were the first radio station to do a bunch of really interesting things. And one of those was to have the first radio app in the world where you could tune into us in glorious nine kilobits per second.

Oh, the audio quality. Feel the quality. Um, but also, uh, that same year, which was 2005, we launched the first daily podcast from a radio station. So just to put that into context, that was, um, January of 2005, Steve jobs only put podcasting into the iPod in the middle of the year in June. So it was very, very early times.

So I've been, you know, sort of really involved in, on demand audio and podcasting ever since then. Really.

Stephen Robles: So because you have this great experience and I think you really have great foresight into what's coming, what are your thoughts on Spotify first? And so Spotify has been making the play, I would say the past two years to really go with those exclusive shows.

You got Joe Rogan, armchair expert with Dax Shepard, and they're announcing more and more exclusive seemingly every month. These exclusives are a little different than what Apple has now offered. And we'll get to that in a moment. Just to be clear, these exclusives are not things you have to pay for, they're just shows that you have to listen using Spotify app. And so it is a platform lock-in play, not necessarily a subscription play, at least just yet. What are your overall thoughts about these kinds of exclusives going on Spotify?

James Cridland: Yeah, I mean, you know, Spotify has a number of different plans here. Some of them are exclusive.

So if you listen to Joe Rogan, the only way that you can get Joe Rogan is on the Spotify app and that's all fine. And then you have things like Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen, where that show is available everywhere, including Apple, but there is a window, um, where you can only get it exclusive in the Spotify app.

And then you also have Spotify. Um, they own a couple of big podcast hosts, Anchor and Megaphone. And so therefore they are also making a bunch of their shows available, you know, of course, across the internet. But paid for by Spotify, with Spotify advertising in them. So there's a bunch of sort of different things that they're doing.

It seems to be working very well for them. So if you have a look at human beings, people who listen to podcasts, then you can see that there's a good amount now who are using Spotify. Possibly more people using Spotify to listen to podcasts than Apple. And that's a big deal. Now that's not the case in terms of downloads, uh, because people who use Apple podcasts tends to download quite a few different shows.

But in terms of, you know, human beings using Spotify. There's a bunch of people now who are consuming all of their podcasts through Spotify. And that of course is where Spotify wants to bait, wants to go, because that way Spotify can sell advertising to those people. Can lock people in to the platform where of course they can also get music if they pay for that as well.

And so it's beneficial for them to keep people within the Spotify ecosystem and their plan is to be the destination for audio.

Stephen Robles: So I've been in podcasting for a while back when you had to hardcode your RSS feed and XML and upload a text file to a server. I think in the indie podcast world, especially a lot of us who have been in it a long time, we loved it because it was an open venue.

Like it was an open media, you know, you can use any app you want, even, you just want to download MP3 files to your computer and podcasts were that. Podcasts by definition were MP3 or audio files served through an RSS feed that's publicly available on the internet. And some people now feel like these exclusive shows is not really a podcast anymore.

This is something different. Do you feel like there's a distinction there? Are we losing something because we've lost some openness with these shows?

James Cridland: Well, I mean, I think the two sides of that conversation, I think one side of that conversation is very much focusing on what a podcast is and what we might think a podcast is from a technical point of view, isn't necessarily what normal human beings think a podcast is.

The most popular platform to listen to podcasts in the US by quite a margin is a thing called YouTube. Now YouTube is not a podcast app. It doesn't use RSS feeds. It doesn't use enclosures in MP3 or a C format. Um, it doesn't use, you know, non DRMS, you know, downloadable, uh, stuff. It's a very different experience, but for audio first, that is what a lot of people are saying that they listen to podcasts on.

Now, quite a lot of people will turn around and say, "Well, James, that's not a podcast." Well, that's fine. But if people are calling something a duck, it's probably a duck. So at the end of the day, I kind of am guided by what normal human beings are saying on this.

But to come back to your point around, you know, podcasting has always been a very level playing field, anybody can get involved. That really hasn't changed. If you have an RSS feed and you have MP3 or AAC files, you can get that into Spotify. You can get that into Apple Music. You can get that into Amazon Music, into a bunch of these individual apps, and you can still do that now.

And in fact, I still write my own RSS feed and upload audio onto my own server. And it's available on Spotify and on Apple just as well as everything else is. So you can still do that. I think one of the difficulties. If you're getting involved into podcasting now is that there are an awful lot of podcasts out there.

So Apple has broken the 2 million mark recently. And in fact, if you have a look overall, um, including the podcasts, which are available only on Spotify and podcasts, which are available in other platforms as well, then there are over 4 million RSS feeds with podcasts out there. That is an awful lot of content.

And it's therefore much harder to find a great show than if you were going to find "This Week in Tech," back in 2006, that was an awful lot easier than it is now. So, you know, clearly it is much harder to be a small creator. It really helps if you're part of a large podcast network. If you've got, you know, iHeart radio promoting you and all that kind of stuff, then that certainly helps.

But it doesn't mean that you can't get involved if you're just, you know, one person by themselves. And I think, you know, the advent of free podcast hosts like Anchor, which Spotify owns like Red Circle, uh, Launchpad, which is owned by Podcast One and so on and so forth. Those free podcast hosts are again, That playing field so that you don't even need a credit cards to start being involved and get getting your show out there. And that's a great thing.

Stephen Robles: Yeah. And I think for people wanting to get into podcast creation, you're absolutely right. You know, the tools we have today make them much easier. Again, 10 years ago, 15 years ago it was difficult. Yeah. You have to learn how to XML and RSS. So I think as a creator, it's, you have more tools and access to get to listeners.

But as far as discoverability, like you were saying with exclusivity, you know, Apple now has a podcast subscription service, and there are certain shows, either paid for exclusive content or what have you, but you could only use or listen in the Apple podcast app. Then Spotify has their exclusives. Amazon Prime is now making their play for their exclusives for the typical listener or user, not someone creating podcasts, but just one who wants to listen to shows that they would enjoy, do you think that this kind of fracturing of podcasts, meaning you have to go to this app for this one, and this app for this one, is that going to make it a worse experience for the average listener? I don't know about you, but I mean, I have, you know, four podcasts apps on my phone, but most people do not.

Most people are going to use one app, listen to podcasts. And if your show your podcast, your exclusive subscription is not in that one. You're probably not going to reach that listener. So I guess I'm asking is that fracturing of this podcast space, is that good for discoverability and for ease of listening to podcasts?

James Cridland: Well, I think the answer is probably both yes and no. Um, so it's bad for audiences if they have to be bullied into downloading specific apps to listen to specific shows. Although we are quite used to that in the video world. We're quite used to shows only being available on Netflix or only being available on Hulu or on any of the other, um, platforms there.

So we're kind of used to this in the, in the world of video, but maybe not so much in the world of audio. So it's bad from that point of view. However, looking at it the other way round. It does mean that Spotify, for example, is much more likely to put serious money into promoting some of their shows. And I remember, you know, when I was in Chicago this time a year and a half ago, I was seeing ad banners all over town. Um, they're not called ad banners, are they? Those big things next to the bus stops

Stephen Robles: Billboards?

James Cridland: Yes. Billboards. Thank you. It's been a long day, you know, I would say got a bunch of those for individual Spotify shows, you know, that, uh, that Spotify were really piling some cash into.

Now would they have done that as much? If they were. You know, just pushing a show, which you could get anywhere. I don't think so. So I think it's probably a good thing for getting the understanding of what a podcast is and how to find individual shows and all of that. I think it's a good thing from that point of view.

I think Adam Curry, for example, is very, very keen on not calling these things podcasts and calling them netcasts or something else instead, because he thinks that they don't qualify as being a podcast if they're not open anymore. Again, I'm not so sure about that, but I can see where he's coming from.

I think that we need to be a little bit more clear when we're talking about exclusive podcasts, you know, spotty casts, um, Amazon, you know, casts so on and so forth. I think we just need to be careful.

Stephen Robles: Yeah. I think Leila Port really tried to make the netcast thing catch on too. And I don't think it has. I think we're, we're with podcasts now for the long haul.

James Cridland: He did no, he did. He was doing that for a long, long time. And, um, but I think he had a very good point, which was that the word podcast, because it contains a bit of, a bit of the iPod in it. I mean, firstly, very out of date, um, because who listens to a podcast on an iPod anymore, but also secondly, he was worried that Apple might go away and trademark that particular name.

And I know that Apple have been quite cautious around people who have used the pod portmanteau. Um, way of actually, you know, naming things. Um, they haven't talked to me about Pod News, but, um, they, they, I do know that they've talked to a bunch of folk so I can well see that his, his plan there was to actually make sure that netcast would be a trademark that could be used for all of them.

I can kind of see his point of view on that. Weirdly enough, LG ended up bagging that particular trademark for something to do with fridges, I think. What's going on there anyway? Anyway, it's available again, if you want it.

Stephen Robles: Very good. So Apple has long been kind of the silent curator.

I don't know if curator would you call it, but you know, they've had the iTunes podcast directory, which powered many, many podcast apps through the years. It was the free directory. You could submit your show. There was no money changing hands. And they were kind of like the benevolent arbiter of like the podcast directory basically until recently.

And so now they have paid subscription content and you can offer exclusive or bonus content through Apple podcasts directly. Curious, there's no Apple podcasts app for Android yet. So there's a huge portion of listeners that couldn't reach with those subscriptions or exclusive content. But you can do that now on Apple and they take the 30% cut from your subscribers, at least in the first year, 15%, the second.

James Cridland: Yes, at least right now they do, yeah.

Stephen Robles: Now, what are your thoughts on that? Okay. Now offering those kinds of paid subscriptions.

James Cridland: Well, look, I mean, I think Apple has done a couple of things this year. One of the things that they have done is redesigned the way that you get podcasts into Apple Podcasts.

They've rebuilt the Apple Podcasts connect, which was, um, which was a dreadful, miserable failure, and everything broke and people were, you know, I think what was frustrating to many podcasters was that it was completely broken. Apple knew it was completely broken and Apple never said anything. So as a result, if you were a podcast consultant and you were there saying, "I'm sorry, I can't get you into Apple at the moment because Apple's broken."

They would turn around and say, "Well, where's the, where's the press? You're just making this up. You're just a useless consultant." And so you ended up, you know, it ended up really hurting the industry. They also made quite a few changes in terms of the way that podcasts were actually appearing in their app to the point where if you had a daily podcast, It would take, uh, sometimes three days to update your individual show. So that was completely, completely useless.

So from that point of view, that was a pretty bad experience and a very Apple experience of not saying anything at all, not coming out and fessing up and saying we've messed up. We're really sorry. Um, and that, and that was, and that was, you know, a bit sad. But on the other side, I think that the Apple subscriptions stuff that they've been doing, their paid subscription model has been really well thought out.

They've done it in a very good way where you can subscribe to channels. So you can get a bunch of different shows. You can subscribe to individual shows if you want. You can pay in certain ways, you can get money off for buying a year in advance. You can do all of this kind of clever stuff. And they've done that in a really clever way.

And in a way where they've obviously been talking to a bunch of different podcasters and come up with some really good plans. So I think, yeah, I think what they've done there is really good and really smartly done. And I think what excites me is that that then opens up alternative business models in podcasting for pretty well the first time.

No longer do I have to play a kid's podcast to my daughter that has advertising in there. Right. You know, I can actually just pay money and get rid of the advertising. That's a great thing. There are some people who are producing audio to meditate to. Um, there are some people who are producing, you know, different audio, which is just free from advertising free from the, you know, having to please every, every advertiser that is actually in there.

So I think from that point of view, that really opens up Apple Podcasts to be a very creative place and a place where you will hear some really innovative ideas for content in the future.

So I think Apple has done a fantastic job there.

Stephen Robles: So as getting into podcasting has been made easier for creators with all the free tools out there. Now, if you want to monetize your podcast through these kinds of subscription services and things like that, I know at least for me, it now feels like the work to produce an episode is exponentially increasing.

For instance, to offer an ad free version of the show previously, before Apple launched this, I would do it to Patreon because that was a platform that, you know, everybody knows patreon. And now there's kind of a whole third step. You know, I have my free public episode. I have published that to our host.

And then I have the Patreon episode, which is an MP3. And I do that ad-free, edit that, but now I also have to do it in Apple, which Apple only accepts wave or flat file. They export a third file there. And because there's notes have been broken as far as our HTML links and they haven't really said anything about that publicly, but we all know it's broken, you can't click links in the podcast notes. So now I have to do that whole thing.

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James Cridland: Well do we know it? Do we know it's broken or is that just the way that it will always work in the future? We don't even know that.

Stephen Robles: Supposedly when Apple podcast subscriptions were just launching, someone from Apple reached out to me to get like artwork together for our channel for Apple Insider.

And I did ask them directly, "Is this something that's going to be fixed?" And they did say, "Yes, it will be fixed soon." So I don't think it will last this way forever. I really hope not. Because again, then you have to have two versions of your show notes to do that. And so if I want to offer a Spotify subscription, that would be a fourth thing.

Do you think that this is sustainable for podcast creators? To have to offer subscriptions everywhere so you can reach those listeners who would pay for your show? What do you think podcasts are just going to choose a platform, stick to it and just say, if you want it, you have to listen to it here.

James Cridland: There's probably two things there. I think one thing is that Apple have been very clever in terms of their pricing. So it does mean that you can offer your show somewhere else, as long as they are price parity, um, then you can offer a show on, you know, Spotify as well as on Apple, as well as on a Patreon. And again, I think that that's a bright place.

I think one of the weird things about podcasting in the whole Apple world is that Apple has never really been one for APIs. Never been one for, you know, any access into any of the Apple ecosystem. And what that essentially means, therefore, is that there's no APIs into uploading a special version of your show directly from your audio editor or directly from D script or whatever it is that you end up using. And so there's a lot of manual steps here and that's a bit frustrating. There are also manual steps, of course, in actually going into the Apple Podcasts connect and grabbing the data, um, about who's listening. And you know, how many people you have and all of this kind of stuff.

Cause there's no APIs into that either. And that is, I think, a bit of a frustration. I'm sure that, um, well I'd like to think that it will get fixed, you know, eventually. I think that that's something that Apple's still working on. Is it getting harder? Yeah, absolutely, it is. And I think it's certainly getting harder if you end up offering, you know, special, additional versions of shows, um, you know, ad free versions.

What you could do in terms of ad free, incidentally is you could use dynamic ad insertion, uh, and then you're essentially making an ad free show, upload that one to Apple and just, um, and, and then upload exactly the same show with the ad points to your podcast host and then, Hey Presto, you've theoretically done no extra work, but it's still, it's still a little bit of extra sort of fiddling around.

So yeah, I mean, I think, I think some of the tools will, you know, clearly take a little bit of time to get there. I mean, if you edit your audio with D script is one example, then that has in built API for quite a lot of the podcast hosts so you can press one button and it just uploads the same for Hidenburg Journalist Pro, which is the audio editor I use. So, you know, so those do exist, but not yet for the Apple Podcasts premium, uh, host. And that's something that, you know, clearly needs to be done.

I mean, I would probably step back a little bit and just say, I wonder I've not read all of the terms and conditions, but I do wonder whether you can offer a subscription version of your podcast, which is actually exactly the same, but it's the version of your podcast where you want to allow your audience to help pay for it. And so if you like to, a little bit like Shareware, you can pay five bucks a month, and that will be a lovely thing.

The rules around using Patreon are, you don't need to give people extra things if you don't want to. And so it may well be that you can actually get away without doing that if you feel that that's right for your audience, if your audience is comfortable enough. Maybe that's an interesting way.

And that's of course the plan. If you watch a Patreon supported YouTube show, then you know, quite a lot of the times you end up seeing people with their names up in lights at the end of a show and you think, well, that's older, older, people are interested in.

Stephen Robles: That is one of the things that you can't do with the Apple podcast subscription is say support the show, but there's no bonus content or exclusive content. Like you said, with Patreon, you could do that. With Apple podcasts, when I first set up our subscription for Apple Insider, I tried putting two benefits, one being ad free episodes, which I had a couple waves loaded and early access, but because. In the middle of publishing episodes, I didn't have one set for early access. And so Apple denied the subscription. I wasn't able to put the subscription through, we're going to have to change it. I had to take out that early access benefit because in the Apple podcast dashboard, you can choose the benefits from a dropdown.

And so they want it to really make sure that you had audio already loaded in podcast connect. That matched the benefit you are offering. And again, unlike Patreon, you don't have access to your listeners as far as if you want to send them a message. If you want to send them merch or offer other benefits that are not audio related, you just don't have that option in Apple Podcasts.

And that's something I don't know if they're going to offer that in the future, because they are very big on privacy and don't want, they don't want to give you all these email addresses, you know, all these iCloud accounts from the thing. So again, that's something that I don't know, we'll just thought we'll have to see if they'll actually have some kind of mechanism to do that.

But before we go too long, I want it to get your thoughts on this now, new wave of live audio, namely Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, and now even Facebook has gotten in on the game with live audio rooms. And this is, you know, we've had live stream video for a long time and we've had live stream audio. It's just not been very prevalent. And so now we have live audio and it's kind of the new hot thing.

As far as, you know, the exciting medium. What do you think about this? Is this something that you think is going to last a long time? Is this kind of like here to stay?

James Cridland: I think in some respects, it's here to stay in quite a lot of respects I think it was born out of the pandemic and Clubhouse did a very clever job of, um, of, you know, signing up a number of influencers.

Now that those deals have all finished, Clubhouses beginning to be quite quiet. If you've ever been in there recently.

Stephen Robles: I have not, which is why I'm asking this question.

James Cridland: Oh, well, there you go. I'm on record as saying that Clubhouse is mostly full of the worst people from LinkedIn, just with a microphone.

Stephen Robles: I'm going to get tweets. I'm going to get tweets for that one. I'm going to get Tweets, that's alright.

James Cridland: That's possibly slightly over the top. But yeah, I think, you know, what, what I found interesting is Clubhouse has a certain vibe to it, of, you know, people who think they are experts. And to be fair people who think they're experts more than people who are experts on that platform.

Twitter Spaces seems to be much more of a friends platform where you have people who know each other in I'm going to use the word meatspace. Sorry. Um, but people who know each other in real life, real life is a better phrase.

Stephen Robles: That's M-E-E-T not M-E-A-T.

James Cridland: Well, I kind of actually meant, M-E-A-T but anyway, yes, yes.

Actually, you know, human beings, but anyway Twitter has a very different vibe. Facebook's live rooms are only available to you folks in the US so therefore, the likes of us, don't get to play around with those also, by the way, podcasts on Facebook are only available in the US as well, which is a mad, mad idea.

But anyway, let's not go there. The one that I've been particularly impressed, I actually is a Spotify's version, which is Spotify Greenroom, and what Spotify have done. They have a few additional features in there that actually makes it a really good place to record podcasts. And one of those additional features is you can send messages to people.

So you can, uh, there's a sort of, there's an ongoing chat, which is actually really handy for knowing which questions you want to actually take from the audience, but it will also automatically record everything and send you an AAC file after the event. So that's really handy in terms of making a show.

So I've been quite impressed at the Spotify version and also by the way, it's available on Android phones as well as on iOS phones, which Clubhouse wasn't for a long, long time, so the 80% of the world that don't use iOS could still actually play along, you know, so I'm, I'm really interested in those, I think, um, quite a lot of them haven't yet had the correct tools to allow you to produce something that's good.

I think that Spotify is beginning to get there. And my suspicion is because Spotify has so much access to big stars, particularly in the music world, my suspicion is that we will see a bunch more integration between Spotify as music product and their social audio service.

They announced a couple of weeks ago a sports podcast, which is going to be produced on Spotify Greenroom. So after every particular sports ball game, um, you'll have a sports commentator coming on and, you know, taking questions and, you know, uh, after match reactions and all that kind of stuff, which will then be turned into a podcast afterwards, so that it clearly using the tool to make shows, which is really interesting.

So it'll be interesting seeing how that works in terms of, um, what it replaces. I don't think it replaces podcasts in particular.

What I do think is that it has the capacity of replacing is conferences. and there are a bunch of them. A bunch of conferences where there are some which are multi-day conferences, which you want to go to because you'll bump into people in the corridors and everything else, but there are some shorter conferences that frankly, you don't want to jump into an airplane and travel across, you know, half of the country for.

So if you can do that, In a, in an experience like a Twitter space or a Clubhouse room, um, and maybe even charge for them, then that seems to be quite an interesting plan for conferences, but maybe not for podcasting and that sort of thing.

Stephen Robles: Well, let's look towards the future and what we think that might hold.

So podcasting, again in the past, has been largely small creator, medium individuals, or, you know, I think TWIT was probably the largest network for a long time, but now we have huge companies, you know, you have Gimlet, you have of Wondery, you have, you know, all these big names and Amazon, Spotify are producing their own first party content.

Do you think that there will be room in the future for the small individual creators or small networks as these large companies are kind of taking, not taking over, but really taking a lot of the AirWave space or like the mind space of the casual, podcast listener?

James Cridland: I mean, I think that, um, what we're certainly seeing is a lot of vertical consolidation. What do I mean by that? I mean, companies who are buying a hosting company. So Amazon, for example, last week bought Art19, um, Amazon, uh, also owns a Wondery, uh, Amazon have just bought another podcast called Smartless. For 80 million us dollars for a podcast. And what they get for that is they get a whole week's exclusive.

Wow, brilliant. But anyway, so there's clearly an awful lot of money going on in, in terms of that. That essentially is how all of the big media companies are working. So Sirius XM owns some ad tech, owns a podcast host, owns a bunch of people. Making shows the same goes for iHeart radio. The same goes for Odyssey used to be called Entercom, another broadcaster.

So we're seeing a bunch of that going on. My suspicion there is that the void that that's left of not having large independent producers is probably a good. Because that essentially means that we will have far more smaller, independent production houses who are making niche content.

And that's what podcasting is. It's very different to broadcast. Broadcast is let's reach as many people as we possibly can. Stephen Colbert we'll sign him, we'll sign, you know, whoever it is when you're looking at podcasting, it's a much more niche experience. And so therefore niche content works really, really well.

You couldn't necessarily have an awful lot of broadcast TV about the new M1chip, but you could certainly have an awful lot of podcasts as I'm sure that you have, around that sort of thing. One of the things I'm particularly excited about is seeing the rise of audio fiction and the good old days, maybe of the sixties and the fifties, when you had drama on the radio and people used to sit around the radio and listen to Lone Ranger or whatever it was.

It's that sort of thing, which is happening now. I think Cadence 13 is calling it, um, movies for the ears. And I just love that phrase. So we're seeing a bunch of that sort of content happening from smaller, independent folks who are making independent shows. And I think that's quite an exciting time.

And what we're also seeing is we're seeing a bunch of individual podcast hosts who are there to help smaller podcasters get in. I'm an advisor for one called Captivate, which is very good. Based in the UK, but there's also, you know, everywhere from Anchor, which is specifically built for tiny podcasters.

To Libsyn, transistor simple cast through all of these individual hosts. What I think is interesting is we're seeing more of those being owned by large media companies, but that means that they can spot you. And as you do an amazing podcast, That is beginning to trend and beginning to really take off, they can jump in and say, would you like us to help with your ad sales?

Would you like us to help with a bit of your promotion and so on and so forth? So actually that may help get more interesting of voices and interesting content into the podcasting world. Yeah, that's great.

Stephen Robles: Well, do you think podcasting is here to stay and is there anything you haven't mentioned that you think the future holds for the podcasting industry?

James Cridland: The other big thing that we will see is historically, as you were saying earlier, Apple has been basically in charge of podcasting. I think quite a lot of people have been calling them a benign dictator, right. They've basically been making the rules because nobody else was. Um, but they've also not had their foot on the gas.

I think what we're seeing now, now that podcasting is actually be beginning to earn Apple some money, I think that we'll see a big change in terms of that and a big change in terms of how seriously they are taking it, but they also need to, because they have lost the market share that they used to have, which was easily 70% of all downloads that I calculate is down to about 40% now.

Spotify is around 30% and there are an astonishing amount of podcasts now who are launching putting their show onto Spotify and not caring about Apple because it's too difficult and too complicated. And I think one of the things—

James Cridland: I know it's an amazing thing, I was talking to the folks at BuzzSprout. And they shared some data with me about how many of their new shows are on Spotify and how many are on Apple. And there are way more on Spotify. And the reason for that is, you know, the hassles of signing up for an Apple ID. If you don't have one of those of, you know, doing the terms and conditions, which you have to have an Apple device for somehow and all of this kind of stuff, people just, uh, you know, can't be bothered.

So my suspicion is that we will see that we will see one of two things happening. Either Apple will get overtaken by, uh, Spotify, and that will be, um, such a loss, I think. Or we will see Apple suddenly realizing, wow, we need to kick everything up a gear here. And, you know, Apple beginning to spend proper money on podcast training, which Spotify have been doing for a while, which HeyCast had been doing for a while.

Apple jumping into that particular space and, you know, doing what they can to regain some of the lost market share. And if they do that well, wow. Won't that be exciting? Because all of a sudden we know that great competition means that there is great innovation and there's great movement in this space.

And that's perhaps something that we haven't had over the last 5 or 10 years.

Stephen Robles: Yeah. All right. My last question. What app do you use to listen to your podcasts?

James Cridland: Well, I have a, I mean, that's a bad thing to ask an editor of a podcasts newsletter because obviously I've got 400 million. I use a Google Pixel, other phones are available, it turns out. And so therefore, um, for, while I was using, uh, the Google podcasts app, which is okay. But I really use PocketCasts, which is a great app. It came out originally Android. And, uh, it's very good, comes from Australia. Yeah. And is a very good thing, um, on my iPod touch, which I have, earlier, I was saying nobody listens to podcasts on their iPod.

I do because I have an iPod touch so that I can, um, you know, stick my little toe into the world of iOS every now and again. And so that mostly is running Overcast, which is a great, great podcast app.

The one that I would recommend, which isn't necessarily a podcast app, it's a bit more than that, it's a thing called Hark. I interviewed the CEO of it about a week or so ago. And one of the things it's got in there is, yes, it's got all of the podcasts and you could listen to all the podcasts and that's great, but what it's also got in there is a playlist or as they call them heartlists and a heartlist is essentially a radio presenter guiding you through a bunch of different, podcasts that are about, I don't know, they might be about the anniversary of the end of slavery, or they might be about the Coronavirus, or they might be about whatever they are. And you have this trusted guide who is taking you through individual clips of these individual shows.

And it's a great way of finding new podcasts. And I think, you know, that's, that's the sort of innovation that I'm quite excited by. And by the way, the innovation, that things like paid subscriptions and indeed Apple's affiliate scheme, which they also have as well, should actually unlock for more folks. So, um, I would, I would certainly recommend giving apps like Hark or GoodPods or try because that's a great way of finding great new shows that you might want to have a listen to.

Stephen Robles: I had never heard of Hark and I'm on their website right now and this looks beautiful, first of all. And so I'm going to be signing up to be a creator on here, for sure. That's awesome. And I will say my 12 year old son, we have not gotten him an iPhone yet. And so he too uses an iPod touch to listen to podcasts.

And so you're not the only one left in the world. There are other iPod users as well.

James Cridland: Yeah, It's a very cheap way of being able to try the very latest and greatest on iOS. I do a bunch of testing. I have a podcast called PodClock. I launched it on April 1st and I called it a podcast about time.'

It is literally a podcast about time when you play the podcast, it tells you what time it is. But the point of all of that is to do a bunch of testing around individual apps and everything else. And obviously being able to test on the very latest version of iOS, and even the upcoming beaters has been really, really helpful.

So, um, long may the iPod touch continue to exist as far as I'm concerned.

Stephen Robles: I hope so. Well, James Cridland thanks so much for joining us on Apple insider listeners, of course, can read your work and listen to you at podnews.net. Is there anywhere else you would like to point people to, to discover your content?

James Cridland: Yeah. And if you've got a Siri speaker, then firstly, I am sorry, but secondly, you'll find PodNews on there in the news briefings as you will, of course, on, uh, Google Speakers and on Amazon as well.

Stephen Robles: Very cool. Well, James, thanks so much for coming on the show.

James Cridland: Thank you so much.

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-"Apple Podcasts monetization, and the future of audio - an interview with James Cridland | AppleInsider"4

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"Apple Podcasts reliability problem is turning into an image problem"

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Podcasting has been an important part of my life for more than a decade now; these days, I make roughly half my income from the various shows that I host and produce. That’s why it’s so frustrating when Apple, the de facto leader in podcast discovery, seems to have screwed up what was once its biggest asset in favor of trying to capitalize on a new feature.

Back in April of this year, Apple announced plans to roll out Podcast Subscriptions, which would allow creators to monetize their podcasts with subscriptions that can be purchased directly in the Apple Podcasts app. The company’s Podcasts app is one of the biggest podcast clients in the industry, thanks to Apple’s longstanding position as the most prominent directory of shows and the fact that the app is preinstalled on every iOS device.

Unfortunately, when Apple started rolling out the podcast subscription feature, it came with a (presumably unintended) side effect: new podcast episodes sometimes don’t show up. Back in May, Jason speculated about some of the possible causes, the most likely culprit being Apple changing how it handles podcasts behind the scenes.

But more than two months later, this problem persists. Just this week, I’ve received multiple emails, direct messages, and Twitter replies mentioning that the latest episodes of several of my shows simply aren’t showing up in the Apple Podcasts app. Sometimes it seems to vary by platform or region. Other shows that I’ve put out in the same time period show up as normal. It’s maddeningly inconsistent. And I’m certainly not alone in this, either; when I asked in a Slack community of podcasters if there was anything to do about this other than throw up my hands in frustration, several other hosts could offer nothing but sympathies.

But all of this points to a very serious root issue: a loss of reliability.

A Complicated ProfessionMy Star Wars podcast, A Complicated Profession, shown in Apple Podcasts (left) and on The Incomparable website (right). The July 12 episode finally appeared on July 16.

The previous incarnation of Apple’s podcasting management tools wasn’t particularly amazing, and at times the system worked in ways that felt capricious and arbitrary.

But those frustrations have largely hit creators, while the service has generally remained reliable for end users. And given that it’s always been a free service, most creators shrugged and took a “you get what you pay for” mentality.

But the problems with reliability cropped up right around the time that Apple also decided that there was money to be made on podcasts. And much as this might benefit creators, Apple also gets to take its usual 30 percent cut. Awkward.

ClockwiseApple Podcasts (left) and the Relay FM website (right). The July 14 episode has not yet appeared in the former.

The bottom line is that it’s a shame that Apple’s addition of a monetization feature has ended up damaging its reputation amongst podcast creators. Consumers, at least, can turn to a different podcast app like Overcast, Castro, or Pocket Casts, all of which seem to have no problem displaying the latest episodes of shows. But some won’t even know that’s an option and, as a result, shows may lose out on listeners and, in some cases, revenue.

As I said above, I do make money from podcasting—just not via Apple’s subscriptions. And it’s started to feel uncomfortably like Apple doesn’t care about podcast creators livelihoods’ unless it’s also getting a cut.

Unfortunately, the options for creators are limited since pulling up stakes on Apple Podcasts—still the place most people find podcasts—is a non-starter. But with competitors like Spotify and Amazon pushing into the market, this doesn’t help Apple’s reputation any. It’s probably not the tipping point that will drive people to abandon Apple’s podcast platform, but it’s another drop in the bucket.

Perhaps, looking back over nearly two decades of Apple stewardship in podcasting, I was naive in thinking that the company’s aims in supporting the free distribution of podcasts were at all altruistic. Maybe they started that way, but at some point, Apple decided it could make podcasting another revenue generator to add into its growing Services portfolio.

I’d like to be proved wrong about this, but I haven’t seen any direct acknowledgment from Apple about this issue over the last two months, much less any indication of what went wrong and how it plans to fix it. And even if Apple does deal with these particular examples

, it doesn’t give me confidence that I won’t run into the problem in the future with these or other shows—or that other creators wouldn’t encounter it as well. That lack of reliability is hardly a recipe for success or trust.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Twitter at @dmoren or reach him by email at [email protected]. His latest novel, The Aleph Extraction, is out now and available in fine book stores everywhere, so be sure to pick up a copy.]

If you appreciate articles like this one, support us by becoming a Six Colors subscriber. Subscribers get access to an exclusive podcast, members-only stories, and a special community.

-"Apple Podcasts reliability problem is turning into an image problem"

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I am renaming this issue and associating it with #196 considering that apparently Apple Podcasts is broken.

@extratone extratone changed the title “Podcasts” is not the right term anymore Attempts to separate "Podcasts” from RSS Jul 20, 2021
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"Should podcasters push their listeners off Apple?"

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Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media newsletter. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button:

Let’s jump right into it…

Should podcasters push their listeners off Apple?

In the most recent episode of my podcast, The Business of Content, I included a short message that went like this:

I stopped using the Apple Podcast app a long time ago, but I’ve been reading lots of articles indicating that the latest update to Apple Podcasts has rendered the app to be almost unusable. If you are one of those people who really don’t like the update to Apple Podcasts, then the podcast app I use is called Overcast. It’s an independent podcast company. It’s a really good, simple player. Your podcasts are listed in alphabetical order. You can just go to the app, find the podcast you want to listen to, and download the episode. It’s very straightforward, it’s not trying to feed you some kind of algorithm. It’s not trying to push podcasts on you. It’s just a very simple, good podcast listening app. So if you are on the lookout for a new podcast app, definitely check out Overcast. I would highly recommend it.

Up until that point I’d been relatively agnostic about how people listened to my podcast; as long as they were able to subscribe to and access new episodes, I was happy.

But the reliability of the Apple Podcast app has grown so shaky that I legitimately wonder whether my subscribers will be able to access new episodes. The problem has been so persistent that several prominent podcasters — who usually don’t criticize Apple publicly because they still want their shows featured — are beginning to speak out. Here’s Dan Moren, for instance:

Just this week, I’ve received multiple emails, direct messages, and Twitter replies mentioning that the latest episodes of several of my shows simply aren’t showing up in the Apple Podcasts app. Sometimes it seems to vary by platform or region. Other shows that I’ve put out in the same time period show up as normal. It’s maddeningly inconsistent. And I’m certainly not alone in this, either; when I asked in a Slack community of podcasters if there was anything to do about this other than throw up my hands in frustration, several other hosts could offer nothing but sympathies.

Right now, Apple is in a precarious position. Depending on which metrics you consult, Spotify may have already surpassed it in terms of total podcast listening. Behemoths like Amazon and SiriusXM are seriously investing in the medium. It’s no longer the default option for those who are trying out podcasts for the first time.

Which begs the question: should other podcasters follow my lead and try to move their audience off of Apple? Let’s imagine a scenario in which thousands of hosts record a short segment where they recommend alternative listening apps; it may be the tipping point that triggers a mass migration from Apple’s app, especially if users were already fed up with it.

Either way, Apple picked the absolute worst time to begin pissing off the podcast community. If this had happened five years ago, we might have all shrugged our shoulders and just dealt with it. But now that there are viable alternatives and real money at stake? It may just be enough to end Apple’s reign as the benevolent overlord of podcasting.

My latest: How Zikoko became Nigeria's most viral publisher

When Zikoko started out in 2013, Facebook was its biggest traffic driver, but now Twitter is its leading referral source.

Will people listen to multiple daily news podcasts?

Every major news outlet is launching a daily podcast, and they often claim that they’re not competing with NYT’s massively successful podcast The Daily. I wrote about why I find this claim ridiculous over here.

Not everyone’s sharing in the comic book movie wealth

It’s safe to say at this point that comic book movies and TV shows now generate billions of dollars a year for Hollywood. Not only do you have the blockbuster Marvel and DC properties, but also dozens of other adaptations of lesser-known comics like The Boys, Umbrella Academy, and Invincible.

But not everyone’s sharing in all of that wealth. The Hollywood Reporter reports that the creators of comic book superheroes are often left out in the cold. I found this anecdote to be especially striking:

Len Wein, the late Wolverine co-creator, said he received more money for creating Lucius Fox, the Batman character played by Morgan Freeman in Nolan’s films, than for creating the iconic X-Men hero portrayed by Hugh Jackman in nine movies.

NBC’s Snapchat show reaches 1 million unique viewers per episode

Digiday reports:

Starting out, “Stay Tuned” was very much a traditionally produced news program shot in a studio at NBCUniversal’s famed 30 Rockefeller Plaza building where “Today” and “NBC Nightly News” are also filmed. Over the years, the series had dabbled in remote and on-location production, but the pandemic’s impact on in-person production required the show to be produced from people’s homes. It was an adjustment that seemingly every production had to make and one that will remain an element of “Stay Tuned” as the show maintains the looser feel that’s more at home on platforms like Snapchat and TikTok.

REMINDER: I wrote about how Snapchat had repaired its relationship with publishers and how its media partnerships are now producing impressive audience and revenue numbers.

Creators becoming venture capitalists

Forbes reports that the YouTube megastars Rhett and Link are starting to invest in the businesses of up-and-coming creators:

For their next act, they’d like to be investors, too, and they’ve put aside $5 million to start their grandly named Mythical Accelerator fund, using the money to acquire ownership stakes in other social media stars’ businesses. “We’ve always been interested in building outside of ourselves, building significant enterprises, hopefully, something that looks like a studio with other people who’ve succeeded in building fandom on the internet,” says Brian Flanagan. He’s Mythical Entertainment’s chief operating officer, a role he held previously at Demarest Media, which produced things like 2016’s Oscar-nominated Hacksaw Ridge. “We think we can invest and then deploy a lot of expertise, advice and growth guidance to people,” he says. “They have developed a major fandom, and their fandom is loyal, highly engaged and growing.”

Mr. Beast, who has 65 million YouTube subscribers, has also begun buying equity stakes in creator businesses.

It’s easy to see the logic behind these deals. As successful creators, Rhett and Link are particularly adept at spotting new talent. They have the experience and resources to provide production help and business advice to those they invest in. And best of all, they can heavily promote the up-and-coming creator on their own channels, thereby scaling the audience growth at a much faster rate. If I were a YouTuber with a few hundred thousand subscribers, I’d take their money in a heartbeat.

ICYMI: How to grow your newsletter by syndicating it to mainstream media outlets

Ernie Smith’s newsletter Tedium was featured in an episode of the hit NPR podcast Planet Money. Its individual issues have been syndicated in Vice, Atlas Obscura, and Popular Mechanics.

Want to interact with me directly?

I have a private Facebook group that I only promote in this newsletter, and I’m pretty responsive to just about everyone who comments and posts to it. It has over 500 members, and I’m consistently impressed by the quality of discussion I find there. You can join over here: [Facebook]

Do you like this newsletter?

Then you should subscribe here:

Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at [email protected]. For a full bio, go here.

-"Should podcasters push their listeners off Apple?"

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"Spotify opens its podcast catalog to third-party apps, but not for streaming – TechCrunch"

25-07-2021 20:50

Spotify is opening its podcast catalog to third-party apps. The company this week launched a new version of its Podcast APIs that makes it possible for third-party apps to connect to Spotify in order to manage a user’s podcast library, search its podcast catalog and fetch detailed information…
Spotify is opening its podcast catalog to third-party apps. The company this week launched a new version of its Podcast APIs that makes it possible for third-party apps to connect to Spotify in order to manage a user’s podcast library, search its podcast catalog and fetch detailed information and podcast shows and episodes, the company says.

The launch is significant as it taps into the wider developer community to help Spotify grow its podcast user base. More importantly, it offers access to Spotify’s exclusive shows outside of Spotify’s own app for the first time.

Spotify, like many streaming providers, has begun to use the term “podcast” loosely. To Spotify, the name simply means an audio program, presented in an episodic format. But originally, the word was meant to refer to audio episodes made available over the web using the open format RSS.

Apple’s own Podcasts app, despite its majority market share, never changed what a podcast was by putting select shows behind some sort of paywall, membership or paid subscription.

But Spotify (and other newcomers like Luminary), have done exactly this. In Spotify’s case, it acquired technology startups designed to help people create and manage their podcasts, as well as a number of podcast networks — including The Ringer, Gimlet and Parcast — which put out some of the industry’s top shows. The investments in the podcast-streaming side of Spotify’s business helped boost podcast listening on its service by 200% last year, and have paved the way for the company to generate additional revenue through better-targeted ads.

Today, many of Spotify’s 700,000-some podcasts are exclusive to its service. That means if you want to listen to them, you have to join Spotify.

Unfortunately for podcast listeners, it also means you had to use the Spotify app to stream these shows, instead of your otherwise preferred third-party podcast app like Overcast, Pocket Casts, Breaker, Castro or the many others that fill the app stores.

Spotify’s new podcast APIs don’t change this, sadly.

Instead, the new API is focused on podcast discovery, search and managing shows — not on streaming Spotify’s podcasts, exclusives or originals through a third-party app experience.

Spotify anticipates the new features available now will be useful to apps that import shows to a user’s Spotify library, or for integrations with calendar apps, or social podcasting experiences to help Spotify users share what they’re listening to with their friends.

“Launching this podcast API is very meaningful for Spotify right now as we continue to delve deeper into creating value in new ways for listeners with podcasting,” the company wrote in its announcement. “We are excited to unleash the creative power of the developer community and allow the expansion of Spotify into areas we’ve yet to explore,” it said.

Prior to the launch of its new podcast API, Spotify worked with a select group of partners who were building out their external integrations in order to gain feedback. Spotify made some revisions to the design of the API and improved the developer onboarding experience as a result. However, the company says it plans to continue to work closely on the project over the next six months to refine it further as it’s more broadly available.

Further down the road, it expects to highlight new apps on its developer website.

==3352== Words

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Spotify for iOS

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"The history of the word 'Podcast'" Oct 5, 2021 at 12:00

A close-up of the word Podcasts Image:

How did audio referenced by an enclosure tag in an RSS feed get named? This is a full timeline, showing when, and where, it was used - and who invented the term.

A new medium emerges

As Eric Nuzum discusses elsewhere here, the first audio referenced by an enclosure tag in an RSS feed was published on Jan 20, 2001; with Dave Winer placing one song by the Grateful Dead into a post, as a test.

Christopher Lydon is generally held to have the published the first ever original piece of audio referenced by an enclosure tag in an RSS feed on Jul 9, 2003. Here’s the first 60 seconds, via Dave Winer’s website:

The first program to automatically grab an audio show like this, originally called RSS2iPod, was launched by Adam Curry on Oct 12, 2003.

But these audio shows did not have a name. Yet.

'Podcasting’

Ben Hammersley, a British author and journalist, had been researching RSS and audio for some time, writing Content Syndication with RSS for O’Reilly Media, published in March 2003. In chapter 4.2 of this book, he discussed enclosures in RSS 0.92, and gave an example of an RSS feed with a number of linked audio MP3s.

He was interviewed on Rob and Dana Greenlee’s syndicated Web Talk Radio show on Dec 20, 2003, including a chat about RSS:

In The Guardian, Hammersley turned his attention to the growing use of RSS for the use of audio and radio content, and wrote on Feb 12, 2004:

What to call it? Audioblogging? Podcasting? GuerillaMedia?

He spoke about this piece in a BBC documentary (“Podcasting - The First Ten Years”, Trevor Dann for BBC Radio 4):

That was the first time the word 'podcasting’ had been seen in print, alongside two other potential words for the medium. In the same piece, Hammersley interviewed Christopher Lydon, who, with Dave Winer, had been producing audio referenced by an enclosure tag in an RSS feed.

Hammersley told Podnews in an email: “It’s a dumb thing I made up in about 5 seconds while trying to pad that article out to make it fit the page, very close to deadline”; but it was the first time 'podcasting’ had been seen in print: in a national British newspaper with a circulation of 383,000, and one that, later that year, was claimed to be reaching 2.5m US readers alone.

The word didn’t appear to instantly catch on, however. After Hammersley’s initial article, the “podcasting”, or any derivative of it, was not mentioned anywhere else in the media or in blogs for five months.

The community takes notice

The next time it was mentioned at all was on Sep 16 2004, when Dannie J Gregoire wrote on the ipodder-dev mailing list:

I can see there being the desire of users in some instances to be able to easily subscribe and get older posts/episodes/shows (what are we calling these things anyway? How about pode or sode for short?) that no longer appear on the rss feed. Right now if for example someone wanted to listen to all the Daily Source Codes back to sode #1, they would have to manually go through the archives and download any sodes not automagically received, somewhat defeating the purpose of an ipodder. Not too much of a problem now but…

…adding…

I guess one could argue that this is simply an rss/server side issue, and that the “podcaster” (yes, I like making up new words) should be responsible enough to offer a page of seperate feeds of old sodes by month/year/season/etc.

Gregoire is credited by Dave Winer, speaking in Guy Kawasaki’s podcast Remarkable People:

Adam had the initial idea for why this made sense at that particular point in time. This was the first meeting that we had, and this goes back to 2000.

He saw me do it, and then he started doing it. And then, I don’t know, by September of 2004, there were twenty or thirty people doing [it], and we needed a name. And so we had a mail list and I asked people, “What should we call this?” And a guy named Dannie Gregoire said, just call it “podcasting.”

And Adam and I were doing a podcast called Trade Secrets, and on that we discussed it. So let’s just go with podcasting, and that’s it.

Guy Kawasaki: That’s how podcasting got named?!

Dave Winer: What did you think? We hired some kind of a market research firm and they did a focus groups and shit? Come on! That wasn’t how it worked!

and by Adam Curry, in Joe Rogan #1436 in March 2020:

And this just kept building and building, and other people started doing these and we call them soliloquies, and little bundles of joy, and all kinds of really dumb names. And Dannie Gregoire, a guy who was just listening, said “Oh, this is a podcast”, and the name stuck.

Now - Ben Hammersley from The Guardian years earlier had actually use the term 'podcast’ somewhere in an article which - there was no podcasting at the time, but he envisioned that, and called it 'podcasts’, so…

Joe Rogan: Oh, wow, so he’s the guy - he’s the guy who named it.

Curry: (sigh) He used the term, but I would say Dannie Gregoire really named what we were doing at the time.

While, as can be seen here, Curry’s recollection of the timeline is not accurate - it is fifteen years after the fact, after all - it certainly appears that Gregoire, backed by Curry and Winer, kick-started the term’s popularity.

Gregoire, a blogger, was registering a number of domain names, and registered podcaster.net. According to the WHOIS history of that domain name, he created it, via GoDaddy using his nameservers, on Sep 16 2004.

"domainName": "podcaster.net",
"domainType": "added",
"createdDateRaw": "2004-09-16 15:58:58 UTC",
"nameServers": [
    "NS1.DGREGOIRE.COM",
    "NS2.DGREGOIRE.COM"
],
"registrarName": "GoDaddy.com, LLC"




## The first use of 'podcast’ in a podcast




On [Sep 18 2004](https://evilgeniuschronicles.org/2004/09/18/audioblog-for-sept-18-2004/?utm_source=podnews.net&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=podnews.net:2021-10-05), Dave Slusher is said to have been the first to have used the word “podcast” in a podcast, _Evil Genius Chronicles_, and credited (un-named) Gregoire:




> 

Somebody has registered podcasting.net, and I saw podcaster, or podcaster.net and I saw podcaster hitting as a user agent hitting my RSS feed and I went and looked at it and right now it’s just a coming soon page but I’m going to pay attention to that. I want to see who’s got that and what they’re doing but that term, I think they’ve coined the term. So “iPod platform” just doesn’t spring from the tongue but what I’m doing right here, and what Adam [Curry]'s doing, and what Dave Winer’s doing, and what IT Conversations are doing, that’s _podcasting_. I think that is the term. I am using that from here on out. Y’know, so I am a _podcaster_, and they are _podcasters_, and I am _podcasting_ right now, and you listen to my _podcast_. Fuckin’ A! I’d like to know who this is, because you are one brilliant bastard! Goddamn that’s a good term!

## The word catches on




The term was quickly taken up. Adam Curry mentioned podcasting on his blog for the first time on [Sep 21 2004](https://web.archive.org/web/20040922035146/http://www.blognewsnetwork.com/members/0000001/2004/09/21.html#a6593); Dave Winer blogged 'what is podcasting?' on [Sep 24 2004](https://web.archive.org/web/20040930225119/http://secrets.scripting.com/whatIsPodcasting), by Doc Searls, who blogged about podcasts on [Sep 28 2004](https://web.archive.org/web/20041011020427/http://garage.docsearls.com/node/view/462/), and Dan Gillmor on [Sep 28 2004](https://web.archive.org/web/20041010202320/http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/010836.shtml#010836).




A number of podcast-related websites began to go live in early October, including PodcastAlley.com, live on [Oct 7 2004](https://web.archive.org/web/20041109040610/http://podcastalley.com/), and the original podcaster.net seems to forward through to podcast.net, which was already live on [Oct 9 2004](https://web.archive.org/web/20041009223949/http://podcast.net/).




As an example that the term was already well-embedded, Todd Cochrane posted the first “Geek News Central Podcast” on [Oct 9 2004](https://web.archive.org/web/20041010065909/http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archives/003171.html); and, on the [same day](https://web.archive.org/web/20041019010304/http://www.webtalkradio.com/blog/22.shtml), Rob Greenlee posted a comment announcing the new name on the Web Talk Radio Show website. Evo Terra followed on [Oct 13, 2004](https://web.archive.org/web/20041014010011/http://www.dragonpage.com:80/current.html).




The first time the word “podcast” appeared in print (alongside “podcasting”) was on [Oct 14 2004](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-oct-14-wk-podcasting14-story.html?utm_source=podnews.net&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=podnews.net:2021-10-05) in _The Los Angeles Times_.




It was then swiftly taken up by _The New York Times_, on [Oct 28 2004](https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/technology/new-food-for-ipods-audio-by-subscription.html?utm_source=podnews.net&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=podnews.net:2021-10-05); Matt Webb, then working at the BBC as a software developer, used it in an informal announcement on [Nov 11 2004](https://interconnected.org/home/2004/11/11/you_can_now_get?utm_source=podnews.net&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=podnews.net:2021-10-05); Newsweek used “podcasts” on [Dec 2 2004](https://web.archive.org/web/20041207080812/http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6640519/site/newsweek/); The UK’s _Independent_ newspaper on [Dec 8 2004](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-people-s-radio-679858.html?utm_source=podnews.net&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=podnews.net:2021-10-05); Dublin’s _Sunday Tribune_ on Dec 12 2004 (p39, “Radio Head”); and the BBC on [Dec 30 2004](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4120773.stm?utm_source=podnews.net&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=podnews.net:2021-10-05).




As for Hammersley, on [Nov 14, 2004](https://web.archive.org/web/20041129092614/http://www.benhammersley.com/weblog/2004/11/14/releasing_radiopod.html) he released “RadioPod”, a piece of software that recorded radio streams, converted the audio into MP3, and produced an RSS feed for a… podcast.




## So, who invented the term?




Ben Hammersley was the first to use the term in print, in a widely-read publication.




Dannie J Gregoire was the person to make the term popular in the community: and it’s very possible that without Gregoire’s use of the term in Sep 2004 - and its enthusiastic use by Adam Curry and Dave Winer - we’d be calling _audio referenced by an enclosure tag in an RSS feed_ something quite different.




  * [Contact us](https://podnews.net/contact-us) if you can help improve this article.



![James Cridland](https://podnews.net/static/authors/james-cridland.jpg)
[James Cridland](https://james.cridland.net?utm_source=podnews.net&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=podnews.net:2021-10-05) is the Editor of Podnews, a keynote speaker and consultant. He wrote his first podcast RSS feed in January 2005; and also launched the first live radio streaming app for mobile phones in the same year. He's worked in the audio industry since 1989.

-"The history of the word 'Podcast'"

@extratone extratone moved this to Mulling in The Psalms Jun 17, 2022
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Spotify Divests "Anchor" branding entirely, replacing it with "Spotify for Podcasters"

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