I heard a YouTuber say today, "We are now available wherever you get your podcast; that means that an audio format of the show is now available on both Spotify and on Apple Music/Podcasts,“ and, like…isn’t the contradiction of the first half against merely 2 (technically 3) locations not glaringly obvious?
Like, I get that most people don’t conceive of things on their computers, anymore, in terms of files and there’s a convenience to going to a centralized service to browse for a particular thing (podcasts, in this case) but…it’s still annoying that we’re shoving things which still, currently, – with relative frequency – can be accessed not behind proprietary, paywalled locations into these locations that’re beyond collective control.
And yet, annoyingly, these podcast platforms hide the podcasts’ URLs as hard as they can, even though these providers don’t host the podcast or files, and a “podcast” is just an XML file pointing to mp3 or m4a file URLs. (Not disputing you, just that the increasing non-openness of something they don’t even have to pay storage or bandwidth for is pretty ridiculous. They are nothing but a man-in-the-middle attempting to extract profit.)