The Fall of Podcasting As We Know It
Right now, podcasting is going through a boom. Listening to spoken audio is as prevalent in people’s lives as watching TV or listening to music, and with shows like Serial and The Joe Rogan Experience gaining mainstream attention, people are flocking to the format in unprecedented numbers.
The initial growth of listeners is a direct result of the democratized design of podcasts. Anyone could sit down with a microphone and record whatever they wanted. They could then publish their audio and anyone could download an MP3 and play it however they wanted.
Recently, big money entered the industry. Venture capitalists are investing in “closed” podcasting platforms like Luminary and Spotify. These platforms are attracting talent to publish exclusive content to their platforms. Instead of this content being freely distributed in a format in which anyone can listen, it is distributed behind a wall and only made available to those who are in their system.
Ultimately, this will change what makes podcasting great: if all of the top-quality content is behind a paywall, the barrier to entry for new podcasters will become too high to compete.
The current podcasting landscape
Podcasting is possibly the last democratized area on the Internet that still has value. You can name any communication medium (news, video, blogging, social media, music, email, etc.) and there are already a small handful of major players that control a large majority of that medium.
Podcasting is, so far, unlike any of these industries. There is virtually no barrier to entry, and no single source to which you have to visit in order to get your thoughts out to the world.
A podcast, in its truest technical form, is a feed of entries with a link to an MP3 file. A podcast player can check your feed for new entries, and if there is one, they will download the MP3 file and play it. Or, if you’d rather, you could download that MP3 file and put it wherever you want. You could throw it on a flash drive and listen to it in your car. You could burn it to a CD and listen to it on your kid’s CD player.
What makes podcasting different from all these other entities? Apple.
If there were a dominant player in the podcasting space, it is surely Apple. Apple created an infrastructure to support the podcast industry by building a directory of podcasts for the iTunes app and the ability to easily sync podcast episodes with the iPod. They also took the time to make this directory available to the public.
That move is really what is propping up the entire industry. Most prominent podcast players scrape Apple’s directory and use that as their directory. Many podcast players don’t have their own directory; rather, they use Apple’s directory.
That is why there is a robust market of podcast players, which gives the ability for anyone to come in and create a good listening experience. This is good for both podcast creators and listeners.
Besides the infrastructure that Apple provides to podcasters, the medium itself has a very low barrier to entry. With podcasting, the startup cost is a microphone (typically built into your phone or laptop), your time, and someplace to host your feed and MP3 files online.
Best of all, there is no need to involve a middleman. Yes, most people submit their feeds to Apple’s directory, but you don’t have to! As long as you have a link to your feed, most podcast apps will let your users paste that link in and begin listening.
The premise of no labels or gatekeepers (except Apple who seems to be hands-off) makes the podcasting space open and free with so much opportunity to work in it. You post a feed and it goes out everywhere. There’s no one place for your users.
Being able to listen to audio whenever and wherever you want is the heart of podcasting.
What’s been happening in the last few years
If you are unfamiliar with the venture capital industry, here is a simplified procedure for how they make money:
Step 1: Find a product or industry with mass-market appeal
Step 2: Sink a ton of money into several businesses who are trying to capture that market
Step 3: Watch 99% of them fail
Step 4: Keep growing the 1% which becomes the dominant market player
Step 5: Control the entire industry
This is the process that has played out across the tech industry for decades. When you think of search engines, you think of Google. When you think of social media, you think of Facebook. When you think of ride-sharing, you think of Uber. What do all three have in common? They were funded with venture capital.
The same story is starting to play out in the podcasting space. Businesses like Luminary want to become “the Netflix of podcasting”, meaning they want to be the one place to go for spoken audio content. They raised $100 million to give to content creators in order to produce shows that are only available if you pay for their subscription service.
Spotify, another venture-backed company, is pursuing a similar model. Spotify recently acquired popular podcast producers Gimlet and Anchor FM. Both organizations are still releasing podcasts in the traditional podcast arenas, but soon there will be new shows that can only be found on Spotify.
So what?
I hear you saying: what’s the problem here?
If someone wants to start a company where they charge access to premium content by desirable hosts, why is that a bad thing?
If your only motivation is profit, then sure, this model makes a whole lot of sense.
The problem is that the ecosystem as it stands today seems to work well for those who are in it.
People are finding new content through the Apple Podcasts directory (or their podcast player of choice).
Producers are making money off of advertisements.
Listeners are getting tons of free audio content and using that content to entertain themselves, start new businesses, see life from a different perspective, and gain new skills.
The system works just fine for the vast majority of those involved.
Sure, it’s fine for the mega-successful shows to move to a walled garden. They’ll bring their audiences and be just fine. But for the 99.9% of us who don’t have a million downloads per episode, how will we compete in this industry?
The harm in this trend of venture-backed podcasting platforms is that more ideas are blocked off from the greater good. With no one big player in town, podcasting offers a diverse landscape of ideas. But we’re approaching an era where big podcast players like Spotify, Stitcher, and Luminary are building closed gardens of content to take hold of the podcast market.
I am sure someone will come into the podcasting landscape someday and dominate it like Netflix or Facebook did to their industries. Maybe I’m just an old man yelling at a cloud. I just want the Internet to be open and accessible to as many voices as possible, and that doesn’t happen when a few players have a stranglehold on podcasting.
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Tim Bornholdt is host of Constant Variables, a podcast that takes a non-technical approach to mobile app development.
