How Apple Shaped Podcasting
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This is On The Media's Midweek Podcast. I'm Michael Loewinger.

Back in November, I reported a piece about the layoffs, show cancellations, and shrinking revenue streams that have plagued the world of podcasting over the past year and a half. The Cliff Notes version? Ad revenue dried up, shows became too expensive to make, and one outlet after another closed podcast departments or cut their long-form narrative shows.

Over the past nine months, things have stabilized a little, I think. But there was a small technical change, an iPhone update rolled out last September that compounded the problems. The update to the Apple Podcast app also included a tweak to how podcast downloads work. It's a small change that might mean fewer automatic downloads of a podcast's back catalog.

As a podcast user, you're free to shrug and move on. But for podcast creators, this has been a big deal. According to data from PodTrack, overall downloads across the industry were down 15% as of February. This American Life lost 20% of their downloads. Some shows at NPR saw a 30% dip. Lower numbers, while a more accurate reflection of listenership, has meant less ad money.

Podcast companies Acast and Audioboom lost $7.2 million and $9 million, respectively. To understand how a small change in Apple software sent ripple effects across an entire industry, we're going to revisit a story from last November about how the podcasting medium became a thing in the first place and the company at the center of it all. Producer Molly Rosen has the story.

It's impossible to tell the story of how podcasting came to be without Apple.

And about a month ago, the company rolled out a new operating system. iOS 17 for iPhone is now out for everyone. And some of the updates might have an impact on how you're listening to this show right now. And there's actually huge changes to the Apple Podcast app. You can now create custom episode artwork that's prominently featured on the Listen Now and your show page. The update to the Apple Podcast app also includes a tweak to how podcast downloads work.

It's a small change that might mean fewer automatic downloads of a podcast-backed catalog. As a podcast user, you're free to shrug and move on. But for podcast creators, this could be a big deal. Lower numbers, while a more accurate reflection of listenership, could translate into less ad money. Less ad money means fewer podcasts. We'll get to that later in the show.

But I wanted to know how a small change in Apple's software is capable of sending ripple effects across an entire industry. The story starts in the early 2000s. The same year the iPod launched in 2003, when I was still working at Apple, there was this group doing audio blogging. Kevin Marks is a software engineer. He worked at Apple from 1998 to 2003. He was trying to solve the problem of streaming audio and video on the Internet.

The problem being, it didn't work. The files were too big. They needed too much bandwidth. More than early 2000s internet could handle.

So he became very interested in what those audio bloggers were doing. The daily source code, hosted by the DJ Adam Curry, was one of the first podcasts ever made.

The term itself was coined by a Guardian journalist, mashing up iPod and broadcast. Podcast. Adam Curry, with Dave Weiner, a software engineer, came up with the idea of sending sound files like a blog post down an RSS feed.

In the early days, you'd listen to these podcasts on the computer, like reading a blog. But then in October 2003, the programmer and blogger Kevin Marks wrote a script that would download podcasts, copy them to iTunes, and sync them to his iPod so he could listen on the go, like people do today. He demoed the script at a blogger conference at Harvard. I mean, there was a dozen people in the room. They were like, oh, that's a good idea. Yeah, interesting. And then in 2005...

Apple launched integration of podcasting to iTunes. Podcasting started off as Wayne's World for radio. This is Steve Jobs on a stage at the All Things Digital conference in May 2005. He's in his trademark look, jeans and a black long-sleeve shirt, brimming with founder energy. He pulls up iTunes.

Can you tell me about your experience before Apple really got in the game and then how Apple changed things?

There was no guarantee that podcasting was going to succeed before Apple got into it. Rob Walsh is the VP of Podcast Relations at Libsyn, one of the first hosting platforms. I always say there's three inflection points in podcasting. The first inflection point was September 2005, and that was iTunes. The second big inflection point was 2007, which would have been when the iPhone was released.

And then the third inflection point is not serial. It's iOS 8 going native on the iPhone. When you say native, what do you mean? You buy a phone. What's on that phone?

native? What apps are on there? iOS 8 went native about a month before Seale came out. And you can look at the numbers of where podcasting grew. It grew on the iOS side. It didn't grow on the Android side. If it was serial, it would have grown on both sides. But it grew on the iOS side. Android has never had a native podcast app. They still don't have a native podcast app. Apple podcast app

This past week, 56%, 57% of downloads directly across all Libsyn's platforms went directly to Apple Podcasts app.

Spotify was 15%, number two. And then there's YouTube. More and more podcasters are posting their interviews to YouTube as videos, and more and more listeners, or viewers, are finding them there. But whether YouTube videos actually count as podcasts depends on who you ask. People don't like it, but my definition of a podcast is you have an RSS 2.0 compliant feed, and it is in Apple Podcasts.

Because if you're not in Apple Podcasts, then you're not in all those different apps. He's referring to Apple's directory, which they made public back in 2005. It's like a centralized podcast library. As long as you meet Apple's specifications, you can submit your podcast to it. And then the podcast is there for any potential listener to find in any app. Without Apple, none of that would be possible. Now, I'll say this. It's

Steve Jobs and Apple had an ulterior motive and people don't realize why Apple did support us. And that was because they would want to sell iPods. So if you're going to sell an iPod in all these countries around the world, you have to have something to put on it. Well, in a lot of the countries, they didn't have rights yet. And here is this medium called podcasting, which has universal global rights. So they could have iPods for sale in Albania and have an Albanian iTunes store that has nothing but podcasts because they don't have the rights yet for music.

I hear what you're saying that overall with Apple's role, it's generally been a very open ecosystem and they've been good custodians of the medium, you would say. Yes. Does it ever concern you that things could go a different way in the future and that one company has this kind of power over the standards of the medium? I'm not concerned it's Apple. What I'm concerned is other companies haven't been able to move up. And I felt that Google Podcasts was going to be the next inflection point. Once Google made that

native, I felt we would see a bump like we saw with iOS. And I was obviously dead wrong. So Apple's going to continue to be that dominant player in this space. And people have to remember, podcasting ecosystem is such a tiny percentage of Apple's revenue. The amount of revenue that Apple makes from podcasting, even with the subscriptions, is

is less than the interest they earned while we've been talking for this hour. That is part of what's interesting to me, though, because I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing, but I do see this imbalance. How much podcasting matters to Apple? In terms of making money, it's just not that important, I think. But how much Apple matters to podcasting is a lot. I would be more concerned if Apple cared about making money from podcasting. That would be my concern.

As long as Apple goes with podcasting is a great thing for our consumers, and we like podcasting because people that own iPhones like podcasts, I think we're fine. And Apple's been a really good steward in this space.

And I believe they're going to continue to be a very good steward in the space, as long as they don't want it to become a profit center. Now, in 2023, podcast technology works pretty much the same as when Kevin Marks wrote the first code to feed podcasts onto iTunes 20 years ago. You have a feed and the feed links to a file on a server, you download the file. Do you feel like its development was a little bit random and then it just stuck? Or do you think that...

there was like a logic to why the RSS MP3 combination is still what we use today. It's a little bit random. Yeah. I mean, I think the point was it fitted neatly with the episodic nature of blogs anyway. And there was a huge, ridiculous standards war between different kinds of feeds. And you could make a serial length drama about that. Standards do tend to persist. And a big chunk of that is that they become harder to change when you've got lots of people both writing and reading them.

We've interviewed Cory Doctorow on the show somewhat recently about his theory of the internet, which we always have to bleep because it's public radio. But he said that there's one part of the internet that it's internetification resistant. Well, I've got some good news for you, Brooke, which is that podcasting has thus far been very internet.

Really? Yeah, it's pretty cool. Which isn't to say that people aren't trying. Do you agree with that? And why do you think it's remained such an open ecosystem? Yeah, it was this fairly simple standard that anyone could adopt. So there was a large ecosystem of people doing different bits of it. And every now and then somebody does try and privatize it. And there's been lots of attempts to replace feed formats with new feed formats, but they're still there and they still work.

The same thing that's made podcast technology a little wonky and a little random has also kept it on this different path than other digital media. It was coded by techies to solve a delivery problem and then given a home by Apple to sell hardware. And for listeners, well, we can subscribe to a gazillion podcasts for free from the app of our choice. What could possibly go wrong? For On The Media, I'm Molly Rosen.

For more on what went wrong, go back and listen to our show from November 10th, 2023. It's a good one. And by the way, if you're using the Apple Podcast app, search on the media and click plus follow in the top right-hand corner.

If you see a checkmark, that means your phone will download new episodes automatically, which, you know, is convenient for you and really helps us. Thanks for listening to this week's Midweek Podcast. Be sure to check out the big show dropping on Friday. I'm Michael Loewinger.