Innovation in podcasting
Back in 2006, I built an open-source web app called Podcast Generator, which quickly became one of the most popular content management systems for self-hosted podcasts, with over 1 million downloads and hundreds of thousands of self-hosted shows during the first few years from its launch. At the time, I could not imagine in my wildest dreams what a unique and powerful medium podcasting would become.
Fast forward a decade, when my co-founder Ben reached out with the idea of creating a podcast hosting company and call it RSS.com, the timing could have not been better. The podcasting industry was evolving into maturity and soon it would witness several strategic acquisitions, starting with Anchor acquired by Spotify with an unprecedented investment in the space.
The Anchor acquisition made a lot of sense from a business standpoint given that Spotify’s revenue was being severely impacted by music royalties. Adding podcasts to Spotify would allow the company to offer new and original audio content free from royalties. A minute of podcast listening was a minute less of music with royalty fees to pay. A no-brainer.
One of the reasons why Anchor, and later Spotify, flourished in the podcasting industry is the open nature of podcasts. RSS was key to the success of podcasting because it addressed a potentially complex challenge with a very simple solution. RSS empowered the podcasting industry so everyone could focus on what really mattered: creating great content and building the best user experience.
I attended a talk by Michael Mignano (Anchor’s co-founder and former head of podcasts at Spotify) at The Podcast Show in London, where he spoke about RSS feeds as an outdated technology. Later, he collected his thoughts into a broader article about standards and innovation.
I learned a thing or two about innovation when I was CTO at Alpha Moonshot Factory, Europe’s closest equivalent to Google [X] backed by the telco giant Telefonica. Alpha offered us blue-chip resources with the mandate to innovate and build disruptive technology. This experience taught me how innovation really works, this includes corporate innovation, IP, and proprietary technology.
In his article, Mignano attempts to explain innovation using a very naive approach. He shows a hand-drawn graph to illustrate his, so-called, theory of the “Standards Innovation Paradox”, where standards over time prevent growth (i.e. they are asymptotic) whereas proprietary technology grows exponentially.
To further support his argument, Mignano makes several analogies that explain the trade-offs between standards and innovation. For instance, he uses the example of SMS (the standard for sending and receiving text messages) which took a decade to get all the stakeholders on board and that took another decade to innovate and evolve into MMS to support pictures, and then he compares these standards to iMessage (Apple’s proprietary messaging service) to demonstrate that innovation is faster in the absence of standards because there is less need for consensus.
He continues with a number of other examples, all of which make sense when taken in isolation, but they present one important caveat: none of them applies to RSS. That is, Mignano builds his entire argument on wrong assumptions.
RSS is not a “technology” but a data delivery format that is expressed in XML (i.e. Extensible Markup Language), which by definition is… extensible. The benefit of RSS feeds is that you can add additional namespaces, which can power additional features without breaking the standards.
The most popular example of extensibility in RSS is the Apple iTunes namespace, that added new and universally adopted tags such as cover art and categories. A more recent example is the Podcasting 2.0 namespace, an initiative led by Adam Curry (a.k.a. “the Podfather”) and Dave Jones, to introduce new modern tags into RSS feeds including transcripts, funding, chapters, soundbites, geolocation, and payments among others. An increasing number of applications and services are already supporting Podcasting 2.0 new tags and innovation flows fast via Github conversations and Mastodon channels, where there is no need for a quorum: companies and products can opt to use one or more among these new tags, or to simply ignore them. That’s the beauty of RSS!
Similarly, by adding a new namespace or leveraging podcasting 2.0, Spotify could — and should — bring innovation in podcasting via RSS to deliver both open and proprietary technology. But there is a plausible reason why this has not happened so far: it is more convenient for Spotify to foster a closed podcasting ecosystem and gain more control over an industry that is only at the beginning, with a projected 20 billion dollars market in the next few years.
The advantages of this approach for Spotify are evident, and a successful entrepreneur like Mignano is crucial to promote a positive narrative and bring gravitas to this conversation in an attempt to gain the blessing from the community. From a mere business perspective, Spotify’s strategy to gain more control of the podcasting market is understandable, yet it lacks the right motives thus resulting in poor overall execution. And the shareholders have noticed that.
For all these reasons, Mignano’s entire argument on RSS as an outdated standard that slows down innovation in podcasting is entirely unfounded, it may be driven by some vested interests or biases because it is not based on any factual evidence and none of the examples he makes effectively corroborate his thesis.
Using innovation as an excuse to justify corporate strategy is never a good choice and it can be very detrimental to a company’s reputation.
RSS is here to stay. Long live RSS!
