What the hell is a podcast?

5 min readMay 2, 2015

Source: http://thingswemake.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/20111023_ipod.jpg

A podcast enthusiast attempts to explain

The word “podcast” carries some baggage. Until recently, Silicon Valley insiders viewed podcasts as a vestige of a time we can barely remember — the ancient pre-iPhone era. An expired opportunity with no fast-moving, hyper-growth potential like Snapchat or Instagram. For normal people, ‘podcast’ was an odd word that alluded to some kind of internet audio obfuscated by RSS Feeds and inaccessibility. That is, if it conveyed anything at all, because who the hell listened to podcasts? At the time, probably just hobbyists and tech savvy audiophiles, but now a significant and growing cross-section of modern society. According to Edison, 46 million Americans listen every month, an increase of more than 10 million within the past 2 years. iTunes recently crossed the 1 billion podcast subscriptions milestone and breakout shows like Serial are suggesting that audio can go viral after all. And for good reason, because podcasts are awesome. They possess the potential to enrich our lives by informing us, making us laugh, and entertaining us to an extent that has never been possible with terrestrial radio.

http://www.edisonresearch.com/media-research/podcast-research/

So what the hell is a podcast?

A simple definition borrowed from Mike Judge’s humorous Silicon Valley (S2E3) is “radio on the internet”.

Image source: http://sdtimes.com/silicon-valley-season-2-episode-3-a-big-check-with-bigger-strings/, modified, referencing: http://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley#/

In actuality, the word “podcast” is an amalgamation of “iPod” and “broadcast” and loosely refers to any recorded audio program that contains episodes and can be accessed digitally. Podcasts cover nearly all topics and interests imaginable: from space & science, comedy, sports, public radio, sex and relationship advice, fictional stories, history, rock climbing, food, feminism, table top gaming, and niche interests with cult-like followings such as video game League of Legends, or the The X-Files (kudos Kumail!). There are even podcasts about podcasts (e.g. The Serial Serial, Startup) and fascinating people are creating new podcasts all the time! A few recent highlights include: Upvoted by Reddit (hosted by Alexis Ohanian), Hot Takedown by Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, and The Russell Brand Podcast.

Upvoted by Reddit, Hot Takedown by FiveThirtyEight, The Russell Brand Podcast

While iTunes holds the most robust catalog (285,000 shows and counting), podcasts are independently owned and controlled by their creators, not by Apple. Generally speaking, podcasts:

Represent the non-musical side of audio (e.g. spoken word interviews, discussions, stories, etc. rather than music tracks or albums)
Are consumed on-demand, rather than broadcast live
Have standalone, non-serialized episodes that last 15–60 minutes
Post episodes on a scheduled recurring basis; typically daily, weekly, or monthly
Are ad-supported, accessible, and free for individuals to consume
Are typically audio (not video)
And are hard to categorize because the most popular shows break all of these rules (see below)

So what the hell is a podcast? It’s digital audio, that’s not music, that’s kind of like radio, except for when it’s not. Simple, right?

Why do podcasts matter?

Although “podcast” carries baggage and even invokes a strong negative reaction for some, it also conveys a complex and colorful representation of how millions of people are changing how they interact with audio.

Podcasts represent the inevitable evolution of radio from an analog to digital world. In fact, in 2011 NPR experienced a new inflection point where on-air listenership decreased as digital consumption increased, and Norway recently announced it will be the first country to shut off FM radio.

Put another way, “software is eating the world” and media is no exception. Just as newspapers had to digitally evolve and our daily habits for consuming news have shifted to personalized feeds on Twitter, Facebook, and other apps, and just as we increasingly cancel our cable bills and watch TV on-demand rather than live, a major shift for radio is coming too.

I’ll conclude with two viewpoints I feel strongly about:

The internet, not AM/FM/XM, will be the primary distribution channel of audio content in the future
Radio will evolve, not die, because the listening use case —downtime in our daily lives, typically while driving— isn’t going away anytime soon. According to Mary Meeker, 144M Americans spend 50min+ in the car everyday (and that was in 2011, just in America, and just in our cars; think about all the other downtime in our daily life not spent in cars). The near universal appeal of this use case is evidenced by radio’s historical and prolonged highly saturated tech adoption (95%+); the big questions are: when will mobile internet “eat” radio and what will this new experience look like?

KPCB’s Mary Meeker’s State of the Internet 2011

It’s an exciting time for radio and podcasts, because no one knows what the future holds or how this experience will be redefined, but when it happens, it’ll be huge.

Topics I plan to blog about soon:

The challenges of podcast discovery: what makes a podcast ‘good’?
The history and evolution of how users consume podcasts
What will the podcast app of the future look like?
Tips for creators: how to make your podcast more appealing
The future of podcast metadata: making podcasts social

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