The vast majority of podcast listeners subscribe a channel on YouTube, Spotify or Apple.
The vast majority of podcasts are served from similar centralized media companies.
Which is why "JRE is moving from YouTube to Spotify for $200 mil" is a thing. If podcasts were decentralized you wouldn't "move" from one content company to another.
Spotify signs new deal with Joe Rogan reportedly worth up to $250m
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/02/spotify-j...
Sounds like they got a deal.
Idiotic if you ask me. He’s just like any dimwitted everyman: every single pub in the UK has at least two Joe Rogans. I was sat with my back to one in a coffee shop the other day.
At the end of the day, the podcast is served by one of these hosts, regardless of how it was discovered. It can be observed that they’re centralized when media companies make exclusive deals as Spotify attempted with JRE.
I wouldn’t disagree that podcasters are in control of distribution; that’s not actually exclusive with the distribution being centralized. The point I was making about the exclusivity deals is just that these platforms have started to try -- and likely will continue to try -- to entice some of the more popular productions into such deals, which would necessarily increase centralization if they go through.
It’s a cynical perspective so maybe best kept to myself but I see all the right pieces for a UX bait-and-switch. I suspect the parent commenter (to whom you asked the initial question) sees the same thing. I think it’s seemingly intentionally misleading to call this decentralized; like “that’s what they want you to think” as a paranoid way of putting it. Regardless of any motives, it seems to serve certain interests that this is seen as decentralized, and I don’t think they’re the interests of podcast fans. Food for thought, I guess.
(Spotify is trying to break the openness of podcasting but they mostly haven’t managed to do so, yet.)
I mean, Android is still the largest platform in terms of users and it doesn't have a dominant podcast app. Spotify for a long time didn't offer podcasts and it still offers only very poor experience for podcasts.
It's really not. They bought his regular anti-intellectual dribble not because podcasts aren't decentralised, but the opposite: because the inexplicable draw of his particular brand of common-sense-insulting prole-feed might convince people that podcasts are something only big services can do, and to compete with other big services trying to do the same things. They want to give the impression that big content is "locked up" by services, when it's not.
In my estimation it hasn't really succeeded (in his asinine, consistency-free, bloviating world or anywhere else).
All they really did is associated their brand with his twaddle.
It’s not content distribution.
> get RSS feeds direct from the source.
But what is the source? Who is typically hosting these? Audio is easier to distribute than video, but aren’t most podcasts hosted on a handful of large services?
There are also a handful of essentially CDNs that host the .mp3 files themselves, but these are more or less completely interchangable. They're just infrastructure for hosting files.
But thanks for posting this! Occasionally, I can't find a particular podcast on my preferred site.
The only player in town that seems to really make a dent in the openness is Spotify which have been aggressively buying out podcast teams and taking them off the open web, and that's one of the prime reasons I cancelled my subscriptions.
Then there's smaller losses like the BBC4 which made most of their podcasts have a 1 month delay vis-a-vis their own app. I have no interest in that. In effect, this just served to curb some of my compulsive newsy consumption. If something isn't important enough to still be heard a month later, maybe I didn't need to hear it in the first place.
Anyhow, I very much agree with the article and I'm happy someone made the point so much more eloquently than I've managed in my many debates about the matter.
Yeah, this is what I thought. RSS will give a URL to a sound file, which is hosted by someone, somewhere. It doesn’t sound like there’s anything inherent to podcasts -- not even RSS even though it’s so ubiquitous -- which prevents the content distribution to be more centralized.
If a podcast recording is exclusively hosted by Spotify, that is where everyone gets that podcast; even if they got the URL for it elsewhere. It’s a bit like saying I get my articles from HN (disregarding that I don’t use RSS for it).
Top Podcast Hosting Companies by Episode Share: https://livewire.io/podcast-hosts-by-episode-share/
Top Podcast CDNs by Episode Share: https://livewire.io/podcast-cdns-by-episode-share/
The sad part is this used to be completely normal. I remember browsing the web and most sites would show that little RSS icon in my browser indicating they have a feed available.
But people are happy to let companies like apple run their lives for them and decide what they are allowed to consume, so now we have to act like this perfectly normal and reasonable thing is special.
Yes, Siri. Thank you, Siri. May I watch another podcast, Siri?
there's the weird email newsletter format (say, Matt Levine's column) which completely ignores RSS, but that's probably tangential to the argument. the biggest offenders i see are less $BIGCO and more individual developers who roll their own blog and overlook RSS. but in that latter camp, every off-the-shelf publishing system or static site generator gets RSS support by the time i'm liable to encounter it in the wild, whether the operator knows it's there or not.
Being able to look up almost any podcast in any podcast app and find its RSS feed and subscribe to it directly without requiring any intermediary is a huge thing in this era of proprietary silos. That's the point he's getting at.
Apple could go rogue tomorrow and start rehosting all podcasts in its directory, which most apps depend on, and I would still have my list in Overcast to go and get RSS feeds direct from the source.