They're called "Podcasts"

In short

Podcast Notes: The Vergecast - Episode: They're called "Podcasts"

Overview In this episode of The Vergecast, hosts David Pierce and Nilay Patel delve into the history and evolution of podcasts, a term that originated in 2004. They reflect on the beginnings of podcasting, the impact of technological advancements and cultural events, and speculate on the future of the medium.

Episode Highlights

Introduction to Podcasting History

Year of Origin: The term "podcast" was coined in 2004, joining "iPod" and "broadcast."
Significant Events of 2004:
Google went public.
Gmail and Facebook were launched.
Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction influenced media consumption.
Cultural Context: Reflection on how these events shaped the digital landscape.

Early Days of Podcasts

DIY Approach: Many early podcasters recorded content with basic setups, often in cars, benefiting from favorable acoustics.
First Usage of the Term:
Ben Hammersley’s 2004 article "Audible Revolution" is credited with the earliest published use of "podcasting."
Steve Jobs popularized the term at WWDC 2005 by explaining its integration into iTunes.
Early Podcasting Scene:
Initially called "audio blogs."
Featured limited content but laid the groundwork for future growth.

Key Figures in Podcasting's Evolution

Chris Lydon and Dave Weiner: Central figures in podcasting’s inception, both contributing to the concept of audio blogs.
Adam Curry: Developed iPodder, an early software that allowed users to download podcasts to their iPods, crucial for the format’s early adoption.
Danny Gregoire: Suggested the term "podcast" in a mailing list for iPodder developers, further solidifying its usage.

Transition and Growth

Mainstreaming of Podcasts:
The importance of accessibility and the evolution of content creation.
Apple’s role in legitimizing podcasts through their platforms.
The Oxford Dictionary's recognition of "podcast" as the word of the year in 2005.
Podcast Boom: Transition from niche content to a widely recognized form of media, leading to an explosion in available shows.

Current State of Podcasts

Industry Landscape: Over 3 to 5 million podcasts now exist, highlighting the significant growth since inception.
Diverse Content: The variety ranges from amateur shows to professionally produced series.
Monetization Challenges: Discussion on the balance between creative content and advertising revenue, including the role of exclusive platforms.

Future of Podcasts

Challenges Ahead:
Despite popularity, podcasts have not replaced traditional radio.
Questions about how the industry will adapt amidst changing media consumption habits.
Emerging Trends:
Increased integration of video into podcasting.
Potential for new platforms and distribution methods, such as YouTube.
The role of monetization and accessibility as key future considerations.

Expert Insights

James Cridland Interview:
Current perspectives on podcasting's evolution and its future.
Discussion on the importance of open distribution versus exclusivity.
Predictions about how podcasting will continue to integrate with video content while maintaining its audio-first nature.

Conclusion

The podcast concludes with an acknowledgment of the rich history of the medium and a hopeful outlook for its continued evolution. The hosts encourage listeners to engage with the show and provide feedback.

Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:03Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of RSSSens. closures. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting in my car recording a podcast. So our episode today is all about the early days of podcasting. We're doing this whole big package of stories on The Verge all week, all about 2004. The stuff that happened in 2004, the legacy of that year, 20 years later, which is a surprisingly consequential one in tech. It was the year Google went public. It was the year Gmail was created. It was the year Facebook launched. It was the year that Firefox browser became a thing. It was the year of Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, which was a huge deal that changed the streaming and television worlds forever.

0:44All kinds of stuff. But for this episode of The Vergecast, we're going to talk about the word podcast. Because the word podcast became a word and came to describe this whole industry, this whole thing we're doing right now, back in 2004. So we're going to talk about where that name came from, what it has come to mean, and then what might happen in the next 20 years. But the thing I've discovered in doing all this research and in talking to a bunch of people who were around in those early days is that a surprising number of people were just sitting in their car making podcasts. Back then they were, you know, talking into microphones or had really crude sort of rudimentary cell phone setups that they could call into with a phone number and record a podcast that way.

1:29But the acoustics of a car are pretty good. It does a pretty good job of dampening noise and echoes and all kinds of issues. So the car, it doesn't look great, but it turns out to be a half decent place to make a podcast. So here I am in the car, making a podcast, just like our good forefathers of the podcast years did. So anyway, all of that is coming up. We're going to talk about the past, the present and the future of podcasts on this whole episode. It's very meta. It's a super fun episode. I'm really excited about it. All of that is coming up in just a second, but it's warm out and I had to turn the car off to do this.

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3:17Welcome back. Do you remember when you first heard about podcasts? If you've been listening to this show, The Vergecast, since 2011, maybe it was that. Or if you were a listener of the Engadget podcast before even that, maybe that's where you got into it. Or really, to be way less self-absorbed and much more realistic about it, maybe it was Serial in 2014 that turned you and, frankly, millions of other people onto the idea of radio on demand. That's when podcasts became a thing. But I'd bet that for most people, the farthest possible distance back you could go would be this moment in 2005, when Steve Jobs got on stage at WWDC, and before he announced that Apple was switching to using Intel chips, and before he said that Leopard would be the next version of macOS, he explained to a lot of people why they were about to start seeing podcasts in iTunes.

4:12As you know, the podcasting phenomenon is exploding right now. And podcasting, of course, is a concatenation of iPod and broadcasting. And what is podcasting? It's been described a lot of different ways. One way has been TiVo for radio. You can download radio shows and listen to them on your computer or put them on your iPod anytime you want. So it's just like television programs on TiVo. And that's true. Another way it's been described is Wayne's World for radio, which means that anyone without much capital investment can make a podcast, put it on a server, and get a worldwide audience for their radio show.

4:49And that's true, too. We see it as the hottest thing going in radio. A fun fact from that one, by the way. Jobs talked about how there were 8 ,000 podcasts available at that time in 2005. And that was a huge number. He was really excited about it. Now, that number is somewhere between 3 and 5 million podcasts. Lots changed. Anyway, a lot of people credit Jobs with mainstreaming both the word and the concept of podcasts, which is probably at least a little true. Podcast was the Oxford Dictionary's word of the year in 2005. It beat out, in case you're wondering, bird flu, reggaeton, life hack, a whole bunch of other stuff.

5:28But Jobs didn't create the concept or the word. The concept, I think, is one of those two that is trickiest to figure out. Technically, you could argue that the idea of a podcast is just like radio, and we've had that around forever. But I think you can make a pretty good case that the thing we now know as a podcast became a thing in about 2003, and it involved a guy named Chris Lydon. It was a very exciting coincidence for me. For one thing, I had been ignominiously bumped out of a wonderful job in public radio and looking for something new. Charlie Nessen at Berkman Center said, come and think with us.

6:07Dave Weiner arrived a few weeks later, and he said, well, Charlie told me David Weiner was coming. Charles Nessen, by the way, was the creator of the Berkman Kline Center for Internet and Society, which was kind of an early internet think tank at Harvard that actually still does a lot of really interesting digital work. Dave Weiner is one of the internet's earliest and longest tenured bloggers. His blog just turned 30 last week. He's also a key creator of RSS, which is the technology that spreads feeds of content around the internet. And he's just a guy who cares a lot about web publishing standards.

6:40At the time, if you wanted to start a blog, calling Dave Weiner was like calling Gordon Ramsay for tips on how to open a restaurant. And Chris Lydon, hit him up. I wrote to Dave Weiner saying, six months ago, I couldn't spell blog. Now I want to be one. And we went through the blog cycle very, very quickly. But then he said, you know radio, I know programming. What the world needs is an MP3 file that can go worldwide instantly. I said, sounds good to me. And we got to work. It only took, oh, a couple of months, I'd say. And he said, I think we got it. I said, now what day? He said, well, that's obvious.

7:18You're going to do a conversation with me and we're going to put it out. And we did. Leiden and Weiner ended up publishing that conversation in July of 2003. And I just want to play you the first 30 seconds or so of it, which I found, by the way, thanks to James Cridland over at podnews.net. He did a great whole big thing on the History of the Word podcast, and we're actually going to talk to him about the future of podcasts later in the show. Anyway, here it is. Dave Weiner, I feel like a new immigrant in this blogger world where you're a kind of founding father. Walk me around it. And I'm not talking about the technology.

7:50I want to know what kind of democratic experiment this blog idea really amounts to. Well, gosh, it changes all the time. I mean, when we first started doing this, it was just a bunch of people sort of writing Hello World and being amazed that it was possible to do that. And then the next step was recognition of other people and say, wow, there's somebody else doing this. and learning how to communicate. And gosh, I don't know how to answer that question. I mean, it is what you make of it. Everybody brings something different to it and different set of expectations and everybody molds it to be whatever it means to them.

8:35They don't call what they're doing there a podcast, but I mean, that's a podcast right there. Like it's two dudes talking tech. It's all very meta. The sound quality is good, but kind of messy. That's all the hallmarks of podcasts all in one place. And I think the thing that Weiner says at the very end, it is what you make of it, turned out to be more prescient than maybe either of them realized at the time. But still, they weren't calling it a podcast. Nobody was. They were calling these things audio blogs, if they were calling them anything. There were a handful of them out there, but none of them were podcasts.

9:10Until Ben Hammersley showed up. Ben, I should say right up front, is not exactly psyched that he is part of this particular slice of podcast history. It's a fucking bane of my life. Because there's absolutely no honor in the origin story, right? That, you know, when I die, I want to be remembered for, I don't know, a 20-year project or something, or saving orphans from a burning building, or something like that, rather than a word that was invented in a sort of deadline frenzy that I didn't even realize I was doing until a few months later. In 2004, Ben was working on some early RSS and publishing tech and was also writing about the burgeoning tech industry for The Guardian.

9:57And in February of 2004, he published a piece called Audible Revolution, all about the cool stuff people were doing online with audio. At the time, there were people building software that could automatically record radio streams over the internet and make them available for listening later. The iPod, obviously, was everywhere, and people were also building software to take all those streams that you had downloaded and put them onto your iPod. One step at a time, all of this stuff was starting to come together. Ben actually interviewed Chris Lydon for the piece that he wrote, and Lydon talked about how audio over the web was going to change people's relationships with their audience.

10:33It was going to democratize media. They had all these big, high-minded ideas about what audio might do. But it's right there in the second paragraph of the story that Ben Hammersley does the thing. Actually, let me just read you the first two paragraphs. With the benefit of hindsight, it all seems quite obvious. MP3 players, like Apple's iPod, in many pockets, audio production software cheap or free, and weblogging, an established part of the internet. All the ingredients are there for a new boom in amateur radio. But what to call it? Audio blogging? Podcasting? Guerrilla media? There it is. That.

11:09almost everyone agrees, is the first published use of the word podcasting. It's a big moment. Of course, Ben had absolutely no idea what he was doing when he wrote that word. The Guardian at the time was a print-first paper, as in you wrote for the paper and you had a print deadline when the physical printing presses would run at six o 'clock. And if you missed that deadline, the words weren't going to go onto the page. and that meant that every day the sort of working rhythm was that there was this big rush to get everything done by quarter to six or whatever. And I'd written this article and about 5.30 or so, just before the print deadline, I go to an email from my editor saying, we've put it on the page and it's very nice, but it's kind of a line short and it doesn't look very good on the page.

12:03You know, the text hasn't gone green in the typesetting program. Can you write me another sentence? Just to pad it out, right? Just to make it fit beautifully on the printed page. And so I wrote an extra sentence and emailed it over. And the sentence is this sort of like mildly meaningless sentence of, but what do we call this new phenomenon? And then I sort of invented three words and put them in there and then sent it off. And then I went to the pub. Look, on the one hand, thank God we call it podcasting and not guerrilla media-ing. You know what I mean? But Ben doesn't even remember how he came up with podcasts.

12:36Everyone now says it's a portmanteau of iPod and broadcast, which is what Steve Jobs said in that clip earlier. And Ben basically just said, yeah, that seems reasonable enough. But he doesn't even remember coming up with it. He also, at the time, had no idea, truly no idea what he had done. And it was only a few months later that I got emails from the Oxford English Dictionary saying, where did you find this word? we're trying to find an earlier citation for it than your piece and we can't where did you get it and i you know pulled it out the back of my head on a deadline panic i had no idea and i looked on all of the rss related development mailing lists and so on which which is what the place where it would have been and i couldn't find any trace of it either and so i said well clearly i just must have made it up and then i said great because it's word of the year and then you know and then it became the thing that Apple took on and that's what they called their app and that's what it became known as and, you know, the rest is history.

13:38Ben made very clear several times when we talked that he didn't invent the idea of a podcast and nor does he deserve credit for what podcasts eventually became. But all these years later, he does seem to kind of like the word he came up with. It's got that nice plosive P. You can use it as a noun or a verb pretty easily. it's a good useful word that way. But also that within it there are context clues that normies could understand. So, you know, the iPod was the biggest thing in the world at that time. That's where the pod bit comes from. And although it was super fiddly at the beginning to take these podcasts and put them onto your iPod pretty rapidly some software came out there and made that simpler and then soon after that Apple made it possible within iTunes.

14:27and to say it's kind of like TiVo for radio that you listen to on your MP3 player is a pretty good sentence in 2002, 2003. Yeah. Right? To sort of not necessarily just hugely techie circles or even like super early adopters but to sort of, you know, whoever comes after the early adopters, those people, you know, they can understand it. And so I think it becomes one of those things where it's a fun word to say but also it kind of has meaning within it that somebody who's used to new technologies um can kind of understand straight away and and so and it becomes a self-evidently good idea right and then when you have a few years later you have these very successful professionally made podcasts which take full advantage or start to take full advantage of the fact that they're at liberty to use as much space or as little space as they need, as much time, as little time, different episode lengths, all that sort of thing, that people started exploring that and being able to self-commission and make programs that were something you would never ever have heard before on regular broadcast radio, then suddenly it becomes its own thing very rapidly and people start to see the value of it hugely tied in with the coolest gadget on the market at the time.

15:53So I think it sort of catches that lightning of all of those different things happening at the same time. Most people do seem to agree that Ben coined the term podcast, or at least used it first. But there is one other person in the equation who definitely deserves credit. That's Danny Gregoire, who's a software engineer who used the word in an email to a list of folks working on and with an app called iPodder. iPodder was one of those things that could automatically take recorded audio and put it on your iPod. The list at the time was brand new, and iPodder was an app started by a guy named Adam Curry, who had an audio blog of his own at the time called Daily Source Code.

16:31Adam was a longtime radio guy. He'd also been an MTV VJ for years, and he'd also been an early internet entrepreneur. And for years at this point, he had been chatting with Dave Weiner and others about the whole concept of putting audio files in RSS. but Adam was one of the very first people to have kind of a whole vision of how this on-demand internet radio thing should actually work. Now it was end of 2003 when a friend of mine said, look at this cool thing I have. I said, what do you have? And it was the iPod. And I looked at this iPod and it was like literally like lightning bolts because it looked, I don't have it, it It looked exactly like this transistor radio my grandmother had given me when I was seven years old.

17:19This little Sony transistor radio, nine-volt battery. I'm like, yeah, you can call this a digital Walkman or whatever you want. But this, to me, was a radio receiver. And right away, I'm like, oh, let's hook it up to this RSS thing. So, again, with my very poor scripting skills, I tried to rig this together with AppleScript. and then Kevin Marks, who I think worked at, I don't know if he worked at Google, he worked in Silicon Valley somewhere. He basically said, oh, here's the script that you need. And boom, I was like, okay, it works. So I could create a blog post and then this little script will be looking to find a new item in my blog post with a file attached to it.

17:59It would download the file. You still had to sync your iPod back in the day to your computer. And so it would trigger an update. And then in the morning you'd walk in And there would be your iPod with as the album would be basically we didn't have the name podcasting yet. It would be, you know, kind of the blog name or the show name. And then it would have these episodes under it. And I immediately started to just get the word out there because I needed software developers who could create this for real. That thing he's describing, that script was iPodder. It would watch RSS feeds for audio files.

18:35It would download them, sync them to your iPod, and you're done. That's just a podcasting app, right? Adam Curry made a podcasting app. That's all it was. And in fact, his show, Daily Source Code, was in part a podcast for its own sake, you know, entertainment and content and whatever. But it was also in part sort of an ongoing beta test of how all of this podcasting technology stuff might really work. So I'm like, okay, I have an audience. It's these guys and a couple of gals at the time who develop software. How do I keep them engaged in this process? Well, I need to give them content every single day.

19:13And it has to be about the stuff they're doing, which is programming. What do you do in programming? You create source code. So I did it every single day for a long time. And I missed one from time to time. And they became more spaced out over time. But we kept daily source code. And I would literally talk about the developments they had done the previous day. So they needed something to test on. There were no programs. So they needed something daily that sounded like a show that they could use so we could figure out, well, where did show notes go? And, you know, when someone first subscribes to a feed, do you give them the most recent one?

19:52Do you download all of the archives, all of this stuff? And so I know from my radio background, when you talk about people on the radio, it makes them feel good. So when I was talking about Andrew Grumet and, you know, the guys at iPod or X and, you know, one was in Australia and the other one was in, I don't know, somewhere in Vienna, that motivates you. And so it was both a feedback loop because I was the ultimate user, both from the content creation side and from the listener side. So you can hear this flywheel going at this point. The programmers are making podcasts. They're listening to each other's podcasts.

20:30They're building better software for listening to and making those podcasts. They're making new stuff to test it. And round and round and round it goes. And a lot of that conversation was happening on the iPod or Dev email list, which is where we come back to Danny Gregoire. In September of 2004, he wrote to the iPod or Dev list that he could imagine a world in which people would want to be able to subscribe to one of these audio programs and get access to older stuff. He didn't know whether to call that older stuff posts or episodes or shows. He actually suggested calling them pods or sodes, which I'm very glad did not catch on.

21:06And he thought they might want an easier way to go through the archives. But then he wrote this. I guess one could argue that this is simply an RSS slash server side issue and that the podcaster, yes, I like making up words, should be responsible enough to offer a page of separate feeds of old sodes by month, year, season, etc. He kind of made up podcasts again. Dave Weiner and others have over the years given Gregoire credit for, if not making it up, at least making the term podcast a thing. Adam Curry in particular is pretty forceful about it. And for my money, Danny Gregoire is the one who showed up with that name.

21:43I know Ben Hammersley feels he invented it. He used the word a long time before that, but I'd never heard it. So Danny showed up with podcasts. It made a lot of sense because we were doing this on the iPod. And so it was obvious where it came from. However it came into be, Weiner and Curry both bought into the word immediately and did a lot of work promoting the word podcast once it had been sort of unofficially decided on. As usual, there is no clear story about who did exactly what, who knew what, when, where the word came from. and if anyone is singularly responsible. I don't know that it matters, to be honest, but I do know this.

22:22After Gregoire's email to the iPodder group, the word podcast caught on really fast. I think the first podcast to ever refer to itself as a podcast was probably Dave Slusher on Evil Genius Chronicles, which had been around in blog form for a couple of years and was becoming an audio blog at the time. Three days after Gregoire's email in September of 2004, like all good early podcasts, Slusher spends a long time talking about how all this newfangled technology works for making and downloading audio, talking about his servers and BitTorrents and bills and all this stuff. And then he talks about what he calls it.

23:00And I saw somebody. Somebody has registered podcasting.net. And I saw podcaster or podcaster.net. And I saw podcaster 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's doing and what Dave Weiner is doing and what IT Conversations are doing, that's podcasting. I think that is the term. I am using that from here on out.

23:39So I am a podcaster. And they are podcasters. And I am podcasting right now. and you listen to my podcast. Fucking A. Think about how quickly that changed. A few months after Ben Hammersley haphazardly wrote the word in a story, a few days after Danny Gregoire brought it up to that super influential mailing list, podcasts were being called podcasts. One really fun thing about listening to some of the podcasts from this era is hearing these podcast hosts actually reckon with the idea of being podcast hosts. Like, here's a clip from a show called The Dawn and Drew Show, also from September of 2004.

24:18This is their very first episode, and you can hear them kind of trying on the term for size. All right, now. Wait, what is podcasting? We're broadcasting to pod devices, which an iPod would be an MP3 player. But we don't have an iPod. Well, that's why we're podcasting. The term has been coined. Is someone going to give us one for free? It would. Dear Inker Nut, please give me a pod. Because Drew has like a little machine, this little tiny thing that he puts music in. And I don't have one. It's a Lyra from RCA. But see, now that would technically be considered a pod in this regard. I think we should crawl inside of pods to do this.

25:03I have some right here. Let me unzip it. Get out of my pod. Oh shit, there's someone in there. At this moment, it has still only been a few days since the word podcast hit that mailing list. And already it's just the accepted term. They're broadcasting to pod devices. They're podcasts. That is how quickly it happened. And now, for better or for worse, 20 years later, they're still podcasts. All right, we got to take a break. And then we're going to hit the skip button and go all the way forward to today. And we're going to talk about where podcasts are now and where they might be headed. We'll be right back.

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Read the full transcript

27:51Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. All right, we've talked a lot about the history of podcasts. Let's talk a little bit about the future and kind of where we are now as a way to understand where we might be going. 20 years after a podcast became a podcast, podcasts are bigger than ever, right? Like the podcast revolution kind of worked. There are people out there doing amazing things. There are whole companies being built around podcasts. More people are listening to podcasts than ever. But podcasting hasn't killed radio. It hasn't become the future of the media business or democracy or whatever high-minded stuff those folks were talking about 20 years ago.

28:30It's doing really cool work. But how important are podcasts? And how big is this industry going to be? And how is it supposed to work? Even after two decades, so much of that stuff feels like it hasn't been ironed out yet. So to help me figure out where we are and where we're headed with all of this stuff, I invited James Cridland from podcastnews.net back on the show to talk about it. I mentioned James up top. He did a great piece a while back about the history of the word podcast that I got a lot of really great information from. He's also been in and covering the podcast industry for longer than almost anybody and knows this space incredibly well.

29:08He's super fun to talk to, so I figured I would just sit here and throw some of my questions slash existential crises about the future of my life and career and all of my favorite podcasts at him and see if together we might be able to figure out where all of this audio blogging stuff is headed next. Let's get into it. I think if we had had this conversation a year ago, it was like doom and gloom everywhere. The golden age of podcasting is over. Everything is a disaster. You know, this was all fun while it lasted. Goodbye to everybody. It feels like we're in a slightly different place in the podcasting universe.

29:43Like, at the risk of asking a needlessly broad question here at the beginning, where do you feel like we are right now? I think we're in a pretty good position. I think what happened between probably 2019 and 2022 was that a lot of new money came into the podcasting world. It was new money that was really destined for TV and instead was diverted into the podcasting existence. And really, that was there. I think a lot of TV execs got into podcasting because they felt that it was an easy win for them. And I think that they didn't properly understand anything about audio and anything about making great shows because it's a very different world to TV.

30:32Audio is a very habitual thing. You listen to a particular show, which you'll listen to every single week. So limited series shows, by and large, don't work too well. So I think that we saw a lot of people who were coming at this with a different media understanding of how TV works, trying to apply it to the podcasting world, and they're not really understanding why it wasn't actually working. And that's really what stopped happening at the end of 2022, beginning of 2023, and why we all of a sudden saw lots of layoffs and lots of bad things happening, coinciding, of course, with whatever's going on in the media industry as a whole anyway.

31:12Right. So does it feel like, to a certain extent, we're back to where we were with podcasts, I don't know, pre-serial? Like, there was a moment where it was like, serial happened, and then it was like, okay, podcast is going to go through its peak TV era, and maybe 10 years later, we're at the end of the peak TV era in the way that in the TV world, we're at the end of the peak TV era. And we're going to go back to, I don't know, the like sitcoms and reality TV version of the podcasting universe. Well, so I think, you know, podcasting has always had two kind of separate industries. You've got the industry of, you know, the serials of this world, big, high budget shows with a lot of people working on them.

32:00And, you know, that has been always a part of podcasting. podcasting. And then you've had, you know, a show which is put together by, you know, two people and a computer program, and that's it. And those shows seem to have weathered the storm, obviously, because the costs for making those shows are much, much lower. But those shows are typically around sort of, I would say, 80-90 % of all shows out there are things that are put together, you know, at relatively low cost. It isn't a massive staffing thing of, you know, 20 people involved in one particular show, as some of these shows are. And I think podcasting has always done very well because of that, because it's an open medium that anybody can actually get into.

32:50I think that's been the real benefit. So I think, yeah, there have been ebbs and flows in terms of that top 10 % in terms of the revenue coming in from advertising. But I don't think podcasting itself has changed that much, to be honest, in the last 20 years. Oh, okay. So that brings me to one of the things I was going to ask you, which is a question you asked a Spotify executive very recently that I really liked and want to hear your answer to, which is what is a podcast in 2024? Because I think you could argue it is both the same and diametrically different than what it was 20 years ago. So how would you define what it is now?

33:25I think a podcast, the easy answer is a podcast is anything that the audience thinks it is. Whatever the audience wants to claim is a podcast. That feels like cheating. I don't like that answer. Yeah. And it's a cheat answer because I don't think it necessarily understands what the benefit of a podcast is. But if you ask somebody whether they're watching a podcast on YouTube, what's the difference between a podcast and another YouTube video, then typically you will get the answer, you can see the microphones in a podcast, which is a really weird, weird answer. But I think, you know, from a, you know, overarching thing of what is a podcast, I think that a podcast is a piece of on-demand, audio-first content.

34:12That's basically all that it is. Now, there are a lot of people who will turn around and say, RSS is massively important and enclosures are important and all of the technical detail that makes a podcast a podcast. I'm not so sure that that's as important as we think it is. And actually, at the end of the day, it's whatever somebody thinks a podcast is. Okay, let me just press on that slightly. You're a person who covers podcasts. So, you have to draw a line somewhere. Where is that line for you? Well, so the podcasts that I write about are podcasts that are open, that are available on every single platform and available in that phrase, wherever you get your podcast, is an important thing.

35:01Because that, to me, is what a podcast is. So if a podcast is only available on Audible, I typically won't write about it because it's not – I don't think a podcast. Similarly, if it's only available on Wondery Plus or on the BBC Sounds app or whatever it might be. So that's where I draw the line. But I think, you know, it all differs. If you ask people, you know, what their most favorite podcast app is, there's a lot of people that answer YouTube. even though YouTube doesn't satisfy any of the technical elements of what a podcast is, an audio file in an MP3 without DRM, available to download via RSS with an enclosure.

35:45All of that stuff YouTube does none of, yet I think it's perfectly acceptable to say that you can listen to a podcast on YouTube. Speaking of things that had a moment and feel like they're fading, this idea of the non-open podcast feels like it has started to go away. There were a few years there where there was a real sense that a bunch of companies, Spotify and Audible and Sirius and whoever else, were going to sort of build themselves a library of exclusive audio products and would use that to win in some large way. Wondery, you mentioned, has been pushing towards that. that idea seems to have, if not disappeared, then at least gone away.

36:33And there are a lot of folks doing, you know, the advertising and distribution deals. But the idea of like the platform exclusive podcast seems like it is fading. Do you think that that era is just behind us and that openness in a certain way is going to win going forward here? Yeah, I mean, I would hope, put it that way, I would hope that exclusivity is going away. I mean, Daniel Ek was very clear earlier on in this year when he was doing his earnings call. He was saying that some of those exclusivity deals worked, but generally it wasn't aligned with what the creator wanted. My understanding, for example, is that there was a big author who she put her show as an exclusive onto Spotify.

37:20and she saw that the amount of books that she was selling went down because the amount of people who were listening to her show went down because it was an exclusive and only available on one thing. So clearly, if you want both large audiences, but also you want to be able to get your ideas out there and have influence, then exclusivity doesn't necessarily work too well. We are seeing a few hold-ons in terms of exclusivity. I mean, some of the large broadcasters in the world seem to be pulling, you know, some of their shows into exclusives on their own apps. And the BBC is doing a little bit more of that, which I kind of wish that they wouldn't.

38:07And we're still seeing a few sort of windowing type of things where you can hear a show first on a particular, you know, exclusive platform, Wondery Plus being a good example. But I think that those are relatively few and far between. And I think that people now understand that reach and influence is just as important as trying to build a particular app. That doesn't necessarily work too well. Why do you think that is? I think it's so different than the way that streaming TV and movies has shaken out. And I think, again, the bet five years ago was that the podcast world would look a lot like the TV world in that it would be a bunch of competitive platforms all competing on their libraries, right?

38:52Why do you think podcasts didn't go that way? Yeah. And there was Luminary, for example, which tries to, I think it was one of the first companies that was trying to do all of this. And interestingly, I mean, there are still quite a few large companies in Europe, which have a big exclusive amount of shows as well. But I think, you know, at the end of the day, it doesn't necessarily work because we are used to the status quo of having all of our podcasts available in one place. And, you know, I mean, way back in time when I was working in a radio station and looking at radio apps, I used to always say to people that a radio app was downloaded by your fans, your P1 listeners in radio world.

39:40You know, you wouldn't necessarily get people downloading an app just in case there was something worthwhile, you know, tuning into on it. And I think that podcasting is exactly the same way. So there's no doubt, for example, that Joe Rogan moving as an exclusive to Spotify helped grow the amount of installs to Spotify. But Joe Rogan is, I think, different to most shows. And I think if you were to say that about pretty well any other show that Spotify had, I'm not sure that you would see a massive increase in the amount of installs of that app just because a podcast happened to be on it. There are, you know, three million shows out there.

40:21If one of the shows isn't available on your chosen app, then guess what? There's another three million for you to go and have a listen to. So I think from that point of view, the exclusive should hopefully have gone. It wasn't good for anybody really. But as you say, it was exactly the point that TV executives, you know, looking at Hulu, looking at Macs, looking at all of these weird and wonderful things, thought, well, that will work in the audio world. And I think, you know, again, that was one of the mistakes made during the big excitement of 2019 to 2022. And what about YouTube? I think YouTube is, in a lot of ways, not a platform for podcasts and also kind of by far the most interesting platform for podcasts.

41:09And as a person who makes podcasts, I have an awfully hard time thinking about how I should think about YouTube. What is your sense of what YouTube means to the podcast industry, especially kind of over the next few years? I think YouTube is fascinating. I think that there are a couple of things going on. Firstly, as we have established, people don't really know what a podcast is. And so therefore, if you ask the general public, where do you listen to your podcasts? Quite a lot of them will say YouTube. But YouTube, so far as I can see, is not delivering the amount of plays, the amount of listens to most shows than you would expect from a very large platform for a podcast listen.

41:55It seems to be delivering an incremental amount of plays and downloads to a show, but it isn't the number one place where people are going to have a listen to a particular podcast. That said, I think what YouTube has is it's clearly got a lot of people who use it every day. I pay for it and I use it pretty well every single day. The algorithm is very good at surfacing new content that I might want to go and have a listen to, and that's a fantastic opportunity for the podcasting world. We're always told, aren't we, that podcast discovery, you know, it's a real problem and blah, blah, blah. I'm not necessarily sure that it is, but certainly YouTube and YouTube's algorithm can actually help fix all of that.

42:43So I think that that's one sort of side of it. I also think from the creator's side, they look at some of the big YouTubers and they go, wow, I can get some of this money. you know it's it's a way of earning me cash and perhaps this is the right way of earning money out of the show that I do but I also think that it's putting an awful lot of creators off because all of a sudden we have to talk about cameras and lighting and we have to talk about video editing which is way more complicated than audio editing which is why my definition of the word podcast starts with audio first. It's something that you can enjoy with your ears while your eyes are busy.

43:27That's the benefit of a podcast. And so YouTube on that, I find it absolutely fascinating to watch what is going to happen with that particular platform. But I think it's still very much, you know, let's wait and see what YouTube actually offers. I mean, you know, It's a Google thing, so therefore Google will probably lose interest in about 18 months, I would have thought. Historically speaking, we're, I would say, over time on some of those things right now. YouTube music not exactly innovating at all speeds right now. But no, I think you're right. I think, again, to the kind of what is a podcast question, audio first is a good one.

44:08And I think yet another place where the line is really blurry, right? I hear people all the time who talk about getting YouTube premium just so you can listen to videos in the background. And they just listen to videos. What is a good YouTube essay if not a podcast episode? And there was a YouTube TV announcement the other day that you can now listen to TV in the background with your screen off. And it's like, did they just turn every TV show on earth into a podcast? Maybe. I don't know. All these lines are so blurry and so interesting. But I do think the video piece of it is important and complicated for both of the reasons you just said.

44:50One is that I think the thing that YouTube has going for it is it is the best content discovery engine on the internet. And podcasts are hard to find. It's hard to find a new podcast. It's hard to get into a new podcast. Like the bar there is very high and YouTube is very good at that. but it also it also requires video right like we we've had this experience and we've seen at other places that if you do the thing that it's just like the the audiogram on youtube it doesn't work nearly as well as if you have video like the algorithm likes video because youtube is a video platform and so we hear this from creators all the time who are feeling somewhat forced into becoming if not video first then sort of video level shows yeah and it's changing the things that people make, because suddenly when you're on camera, you start thinking differently about the whole thing that you're making and you can make different kinds of stuff.

45:42But it does feel like for better and worse, just because of like the way the business of all of this works and how you find people, video is not going, it is more and more attached to the idea of what a podcast is than ever. I'm curious if you agree with that. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned serial earlier on, Would Serial have existed as a podcast if they had to make video? No. I would probably argue no. You just couldn't do it. I mean, they were making that show week to week as they were doing it. You can't make a Netflix show like that. That's not how that works. Yeah, exactly. So I think that there are certain things that you, you know, a chat cast or a chum cast or whatever you want to call an interview podcast, that is relatively easy to slap a couple of cameras on and, hey, presto, you've got some video there.

46:34It becomes much harder if you want to produce something a bit better. And I think that's the thing which is scaring creators away because all of a sudden they don't want, you know, quite a lot of us went into the audio industry because you can do amazing things with audio. You can paint incredible pictures just using audio, not having to worry about what the video actually works. And in fact, the pictures are better with audio in many ways, because you are tapping into people's imagination. And, you know, I might look, if you don't know what I look like, I might look completely different to one person in their mind's eye to someone else.

47:15that's an amazing thing that audio can do that video can't and it worries me slightly that we are having people who are being put off the whole podcast world because they have to think about the video side and it's not just youtube doing this of course spotify's big big big push right now is video video is still exclusive um on spotify's platform so spotify certainly isn't sharing that out, even though you can do video in a podcast RSS feed if you want to, that is most definitely still an exclusive on their side. But it is interesting seeing some of the data that's coming out of Spotify and seeing that, for example, people are just listening to the audio during the day, but in the evening they might watch the video.

48:03I think that there's some really interesting things there around how people are consuming content and the different ways that people consume content. Video is not always right. When I talk to audio people, people who deeply believe in public radio and audio, the thing they're worried about is that video just eventually eats all of this because it's easier to monetize. But then there are a lot of cool things you can do in audio and cool things you can do with both. Is it a better world when these two things kind of exist separately or is sort of smooshing all of these things together on the internet going to lead to good stuff?

48:40Yeah, I mean, I was reflecting the other day that everything now that we listen to audio on has a full quality color screen. That never used to be the case, but it is now the case that, you know, literally everything that you have, you have that beautiful color screen. What are you going to do with it? Including like the dashboard of your car? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I mean, I have been in Ubers where the driver has been listening to, and I think watching a YouTube video. Same. Yes. So I've been going, you know, so I think that there will intentionally be that blurriness. I do think, though, that there is a real opportunity for audio in this world, a real opportunity for something, you know, for your ears when your eyes are busy.

49:29I think that that is the thing that podcasting has always been very good at using. And if we get rid of that unique selling point that podcasting has and turn it into another form of video, then I don't think that the world is a richer place for doing that. I think that there is something to be said for something which is specifically there for audio that you can enjoy while you're going out for a walk, while you're doing the dishes, while you're driving a one-ton truck down a highway. I think all of those are really important things. And we should be very careful about whether or not we want to lose the benefit of a podcast as being an audio first medium, just because somebody at Spotify or at YouTube has told us that we ought to have the video side, because as you rightly say, they earn more money from it.

50:23That's how they know how to sell ads. That is like you can boil so much of it down to that's how they know how to sell ads. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So what about the user experience of being a podcast listener? I mean, especially if you think about some of the open apps, it's still RSS feeds with enclosures, right? We're dealing with not terribly dissimilar distribution technology to what we had 20 years ago. Yeah, I think RSS has changed and is changing. So we've seen very recently, for example, transcripts appear in a bunch of podcast apps. Apple is doing transcripts for everything. But if you want to do a decent transcript and a transcript that you can trust, you can write that transcript for yourself.

51:12You can put that in the RSS feed and the app will pull that creator-made transcript in, whether it's Apple Podcasts, whether it's Pocket Casts, AntennaPod, you know, so on and so forth. So I think one of the problems that people like Spotify have been trying to convince us of is that you can't get some of the new features that audiences would like into RSS. And that really isn't the case. When podcasting started, podcasting didn't have thumbnails, didn't have categories. There were a lot of things that podcasting didn't have. And Apple came along and said, we want podcasting, but we want it to look better.

52:00This is what we would like to add to the spec. And one of the benefits of RSS is that it's extensible with a namespace, so you can put that additional stuff in there. And so I think this is the exciting thing that I'm seeing with the podcasting 2.0 piece of work, which is being done by a bunch of geeks, including, by the way, one of the co-inventors of podcasting itself, Adam Curry, where they've actually gone, let's add a new namespace with some new ideas for how podcasting can work. So not just a transcript tag, but tags in terms of micropayments, tags in terms of locations, tags in terms of cast lists, all of the stuff that we have missed from the podcast world in the last 20 or so years.

52:49And I think it's actually a very exciting time now, seeing some of these new ideas coming in and seeing some of the more brave apps using some of the data which is now available in them. My last question, to go all the way back to the beginning of what is a podcast, 20 years later, did we name it the right thing? Should we have just never called it a podcast in the first place, call it a show, move on with our lives? Was podcast right? Did we get that right in 2004? I think the podcast is a useful word because it says a few things. It says that it isn't a broadcast, it's a podcast, it's different.

53:30And actually, I think, you know, to come back to some of the mistakes that perhaps were made between 2019 and 2022, people were assuming that podcasting was another form of broadcasting and you could reach tons and tons and tons of people. And that really isn't the case. It's more niche casting or niche casting, if you like, rather than anything else. So I think it's useful that it has a word. I think it's also useful that it actually, the word helps define a little bit in terms of what a podcast is in that the pod bit talks about portability, talks about being able to take that audio with you.

54:07And a large amount of podcast listening happens in a mobile environment, whether that happens to be on a car or public transport or going out walking the dog. So I think that it is useful to have that word. But I think that that word is becoming less and less like, by the way, the word radio is becoming less and less about the technology and more and more about the type of programming that it happens to be. A podcast is very clearly a different thing to live radio, but it's certainly also a very different thing to a music track. And so I think that the word podcast, whoever invented it, whether it was Ben Hammersley or whether it was Danny J.

54:48Gregoire or both or neither, I think that it's still a very useful thing for us to have. And there are lots of weird and wonderful words in the English language, which don't really mean what they are anymore. And I think that that's absolutely fine. I mean, media is changing so, so quickly now. And, you know, the fact that you can't even go out and buy an iPod anymore, I don't think is a real issue. So, yeah, no, I think it's all good. Agreed. That said, they should bring back the iPod. But that's a whole separate thing. We'll talk about that some other time. Well, I agree. Yes, the iPod shuffle, that USB one.

55:24I liked that one. All right. We've got to take one more break, and then we're going to do a question from the VertiCast hotline. We'll be right back.

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57:45Welcome back. All right, let's get to the hotline. And before we do, I should confess something. I was supposed to ask all of you a couple of weeks ago for hotline questions about 2004. I don't know what those would have been. Maybe you have like a 20-year-old iPod you're trying to repurpose for something really cool. Or you're, I don't know, trying to like get all the files off your old spinning hard drive and having trouble. I don't know. I'm sure it would have been fun. And still, if you have 2004-E questions that came up reading our package or listening to this podcast, I want to hear them all.

58:19the number is 866-VERGE-11 the email is vergecast at the verge.com send them all my way give me your 2004 questions i'll put on my time machine hat and we'll we'll see what we can do for now we have something completely unrelated it's about ipads here we go hey vergecast i was wondering uh the ipad mini 7 i've got an ipad mini 6 and i freaking love it uh i've also got a switch that i've been playing Tony Hawk Skater on for a little bit. And I just thought like, well, if they put a arm shift into the iPad Mini 7, would it be a Nintendo Switch killer? Would it be like a Steam Deck kind of competitor?

58:59Or are we not there yet with gaming on the iPad yet? I don't know. Let me know what you think. Thanks. Bye. This is a super fun question, and it's actually really timely right now because I think we're about to get a new set of iPads, potentially as soon as like this week, because there's been a bunch of reporting that a new mini is coming. There's been a bunch of reporting that it's going to be early November. Like, this is the time that would be if it's going to start shipping in early November. I also love the iPad mini and desperately would love it to be a Nintendo Switch. It's the right size.

59:34It does all the other stuff. Like, if that could be the thing I carried around with me all the time, I'd be super into it. I think there are two ways to look at this question, and I want to get to them both. One is just a question of like, would ARM compatibility make the iPad a more useful gaming machine? And I think to some extent, the answer to that is yes, right? Like if it were easier to take some of the games that run on other chips and just run them on an iPad. Sure, that would be fine. I don't think in any way, shape or form that is the main problem here, right? Like for one thing, the M series chips inside of the iPads are ARM chips.

1:00:19They're very good ARM chips. They are vastly more powerful ARM chips than the stuff that's currently running inside of the Switch. Like, I was actually just looking at these benchmarks today after I heard this question. If you go back, the Nintendo Switch on Geekbench 6, which is just one sort of normal benchmark of what it's like to use a system under a little bit of load. The Nintendo Switch scores 702 on Geekbench 6. Again, none of these are perfect benchmarks, but they're just useful illustrations, right? So the Switch, 702. The M4 in the iPad Pro scores a 14 ,621. Like, night and day. The M4 is actually closer in score to, like, high-powered gaming PCs than it is to the Switch.

1:01:13And yet the Switch is awesome, right? The processing power is not the problem. One, it's availability of games, which is, I think, the iPad's main problem. There are lots of structural reasons for that. Over the years, Apple, until very recently, didn't want you to use gaming emulators, for instance. There was no way to have game streaming services inside of the App Store. Apple went to court with Epic over whether Fortnite was allowed to be in the App Store. That's been a whole thing, and I think will continue to be a whole thing. Apple loves games and has had lots of games in the App Store. But particularly on the iPhone, these are just not the games, by and large, people want to play.

1:01:56And so Apple hasn't really focused on them. On the iPad, to be honest, I don't know exactly what it is. I have been surprised over the years to see Apple not make a bigger push into trying to make this a really great gaming machine. And I think it's possible that as gaming emulators become more important and as game streaming services grow and come onto this, it will start to happen. But it's just a lot of work to make a game available on a new platform. And you just don't see Ubisoft being like, our game is now available on PlayStation and Xbox and PC and iPad. Like, it doesn't happen. It doesn't work on Mac either.

1:02:38And Apple has been desperately trying to change that for years to make the Mac, which again is very powerful, into a genuinely competitive gaming platform. It's really hard to do that because supporting any new platform is a ton of work. And these companies, by and large, just don't get on board with a new one until there is vast evidence that it is going to be a good business. And no Apple product has provided that evidence. There's also the way that Apple polices the App Store and the way that it oversees things like in-game transactions and the way that it wants its cut. There's a business side of that that is very real.

1:03:16I think that's starting to get stripped away a little bit, which I think might make Apple products in general, but especially the iPad, a more interesting gaming platform. But all of that aside, I think the thing missing from the iPad mini in particular is not a really great chip or even a really compatible chip. It's a controller. And this is kind of a weird thing to say. But I think if you look at the Steam Deck and you look at the Switch and you look at even some of these other game streaming devices, they have dedicated controllers for a reason, right? If you're building a game for the Nintendo Switch, you know exactly what people are going to be doing.

1:03:58Whether they're using a controller or the Joy-Cons, whether the Joy-Cons are detached or attached, you know the controls that are available. And you see a lot of games use those things in a way that makes sense. There is an assumption that you're playing this game with a controller and I can do that. You can't do that with the iPad. Most people using an iPad, I would say virtually everyone using an iPad, is not using a controller. And the iPad's technical controller support has actually gotten very good over time. You can connect a PlayStation controller, you can connect an Xbox controller. There are a bunch of really good third-party controllers out there.

1:04:35I have a SteelSeries one that I really like. But no developer can build one of those games on the assumption that you're using a controller. And so not only do they have to build their games differently to work with a touchscreen, they have to build different kinds of games. You just can't build a game as successfully into a controller-less ecosystem as you can into a controller one. You're just by definition going to build different kinds of games for a touchscreen. It's why you see games that are much more swipe based and they're about tapping things and inventories become really important and lots of turn based stuff as opposed to the kind of quick twitch controller stuff.

1:05:16There's some of that out there and more of that all the time. And especially as products like the Backbone get more popular on the iPhone in particular, you'll start to see that stuff kind of grow. I think Backbone has actually done really interesting work growing the gaming ecosystem on the iPhone just by being something like a targetable default controller. But in the broad scheme of things, and again, especially on the iPad, that doesn't exist. I think if Apple were to make its own controller, that would go a really long way towards solving this. Because then you say, okay, this is the default thing, and accessory makers would build to something like that spec.

1:05:55there would be a way for developers to say, okay, this is probably what people with controllers will be using. They can start to target the one thing in the way that if you're a Nintendo developer, you can target the Switch's control set. The amazing thing, obviously, would be if Apple built a gaming handheld and actually just gave me an iPad with detachable Joy-Cons. That's the dream. I would like that very badly. That is a device I would use for many hours every single day and would upgrade alarmingly quickly all the time. I kind of don't see that happening. I think if Apple were going to build a dedicated gaming device, it probably would have by now.

1:06:29So I think there is a great gaming device inside of the iPad, but I think because it's been so long and hasn't existed yet, because of the way Apple runs the App Store and because of the pieces of what makes a great gaming console around the chip don't exist, I just don't see it happening. But I hope I'm wrong. And if you have an awesome gaming setup for your iPad, I would love to hear about it. Whether you've figured out the wired controller, the setup that works, or you've found a thing that plugs into the iPad mini and makes it feel like a Switch, I wanna hear all of your iPad gaming setups because there is an amazing game console in there and I wanna figure out how to make it work.

1:07:09I have a backbone for my iPhone, I love it, but the mini should be the one. So if you have a setup, let me know. I am all yours, but for now, I hope that helps. Chips aren't everything, but they do help. All right, that is it for The Verge Cast today. Thank you to everybody who came on the show to talk about the history and future of podcasts. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on all of this stuff at theverge.com. You should read podnews.net if you care about this stuff. I'll link to a bunch of the stuff that we used to get all of this research and all of these people in the show notes.

1:07:40There's a ton of fun history to mine through there. Also, check out 2004 Week. Our team worked incredibly hard on trying to figure out the legacy and history and future, frankly, of 2004. You could make an argument that the internet is headed back to where we were 20 years ago. Tons of fun stories all over the site this week. Make sure you go check them out. Watch the videos, look at the photos. So, so much cool stuff. Cannot recommend it highly enough. As always, if you have thoughts, feelings, questions, or other really old, outdated podcasts that you totally think we should listen to, you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com.

1:08:16call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. There's an innovation for you. There are a lot of people I talk to, by the way, who want call-in podcasts to figure out how to really become a thing. Big fan. Keep all your questions coming. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nila and I will be back on Friday to talk about all kinds of news. We got a bunch of Tesla stuff to catch up on. Lots of gadgety things going on this week. Some Apple news. Lots to do. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

1:09:04We'll see you next time.

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From the publisher

Before a podcast was a “podcast,” it was… well, it wasn’t really much of anything. It was in 2004, though, that many of the earliest names in on-demand audio began to smush “iPod” and “broadcast” into the word we’ve come to know as the way we all download and listen to shows now. In this episode, we go back two decades to the first days of the podcast. Then we hit the skip button to today and look at where podcasts are headed next.
Further reading:

From PodNews: The history of the word 'Podcast'

From The Guardian: Audible revolution

From Wired: The First Podcast: an Oral History

From The New York Times: An MTV Host Moves to Radio, Giving Voice to Audible Blogs

Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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