The thing is, these aren’t podcasts. Podcasts are like web pages—anyone can listen to any podcast in any podcast app, just like you can view any web page in any browser. While Audible (and also Spotify) might call its audio shows “podcasts,” they are not. “The danger could be that shows born as podcasts morph into a conceptually different format that can be processed and packed as an exclusive show,” Andrea Nepori, podcaster and writer for Italian newspaper La Stampa, told Lifewire via message.
Defining Your Terms
A podcast is any audio show that can be automatically downloaded by a podcast app. That’s it. Behind the scenes, it uses something called RSS, which is a standard for letting apps check websites for new articles. RSS powers news and podcast apps, and it’s an open standard usable by anyone. The key is that, even if you subscribe to a paid podcast, you can still listen to it in any podcast app. Most podcast apps use Apple’s podcast directory, but this directory is itself open. Anyone can submit their show, and as long as it doesn’t contain anything abusive or dodgy, it goes in. More importantly, anyone who makes a podcast app can access this directory to provide search features. “The key is that if you make a podcast player, the only thing your app needs to know about any particular podcast is the URL to the RSS feed for the podcast,” writes podcaster and Apple pundit John Gruber on his Daring Fireball website. Networks like Audible, Luminary, and Spotify only allow users to listen using their own apps. “Would a website be a ‘website’ if it only worked in one company’s browser?” writes Gruber.
Why Are Audible and Spotify Doing This?
Every time you play a song on Spotify, Spotify has to pay the copyright owner. It’s not much money, but it all adds up. If you instead spend your time listening to a “podcast,” then it costs Spotify nothing. That’s reason one. Second, by offering its own content, Spotify locks you into its service. “I don’t worry too much about deals like the one between Joe Rogan and Spotify,” says Nepori, “as they don’t appear to be scalable enough to become the general rule.” But put enough of these together and they have you locked in. Audible itself promises “over 68,000 hours of content and 11,000+ titles from across the content spectrum.” Third, controlling the app you use for listening lets a company track what its listeners are doing, as we’ll see in a moment.
What Does This Mean for Listeners?
More important is the issue of tracking and privacy. So far, podcasts have resisted the worst practices of the internet ad industry. Podcasts are counted by downloads and that’s about it. Ads are sold based on the number of shows downloaded. There’s no way to know if somebody even listened to a downloaded show, which has worked just fine since podcasts began, back in 2004. Advertisers, of course, want more detailed tracking. If a service controls the platform, the content, and the player software, then it can track whatever it likes. And this will result in significant privacy violations for you, the listener.
Walled Gardens and the End of Open Podcasting
Dave Winer, inventor of RSS and arguably one of the co-creators of podcasts, is less kind: “We need a new name for podcast-like things that have no feeds, are locked behind a paywall, can’t be archived, cited or shared, and don’t create any kind of record,” he wrote on Twitter. “Something like ‘Dead-end-cast.’ Or ‘Business-model-cast.’ Or ‘VC-friendly-cast.’”
