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.
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The problem is that both creators and consumers see value in algorithmic suggestions. For RSS feeds, users have to find the feed to download the podcasts. In contrast, a walled garden provides most users with an ability to discover new podcasts which gives creators more exposure.
It’s like when they say “we have apps for your phone” when they mean “we have an app on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store”.
I’m sitting here clutching my Nokia Lumia 640 yelling at them.
Sad Treo 680 face
“Wherever you get your podcasts” should mean an audio version is available on a public RSS feed that any podcast service, web player, or RSS reader can receive. Spotify and Apple Podcasts are the most commonly advertised because they cover the vast majority of listeners, while the rest are divided among a dozen other sources.
Many podcasters use a podcast publishing service that pushes to apple and spotify and whatever other podcast RSS feed. It’s just not worth naming them at the end of every episode.
A lot of podcasts use RSS, would recommend. I use an opensource app called Antennapod to aggregate them. It will even find them for you if you use the search function
Even with the annoying notification shade bug, Antennapod is still far and away the best podcatcher in town.
I switched to Antennapod a couple of months ago and it has been amazing. It offers per-podcast audio boosting, great for those quiet podcasters that expect their listeners to use headphones in a sensory deprivation tank as they whisper from the room across the building from their microphone.
It’s at least pretty cool that the statement is true enough most of the time to be in wide use. The walled gardens continue to expand, and the situation will get worse. But by and large podcasts are pretty open and accessible in a decentralized way.
I know Spotify is grossly proprietary, but is Apple’s new service too? For a long time it seems like being on iTunes or whatever meant they also had an open RSS feed for podcasts clients?
I couldn’t quite say but finding the RSS feed has always been a massive pain for me, whenever the only source someone gives is Apple Podcasts. That said, maybe it’s my fault and I’m just not looking carefully enough; always possible.
There are podcast aggregators out there that aren’t just Apple-ify, although now that I’m doing a cursory search, maybe a use for Google’s silly search engine to waste Google’s servers for good.
Search:
"podcast name" filetype:rss"podcast name" filetype:xmlWhat do you use for podcasts? The software should be handling it so you don’t have to think about it much.
I’m on AntennaPod (FOSS podcast client), and looking at the Add Podcast screen, I see it does include Apple Podcasts. You can add RSS feeds for other sources, but mostly I search the name of whatever podcast I want and it finds it.
For now at least you don’t need accounts to subscribe (I use Focus Podcasts from f-droid to manage my podcasts) but I wish more podcasters would self host and have no doubt that eventually Podcasts will end up behind the paywalls.
A pay for a handful of podcasts, but at the end of the day they’re all still just mp3s on an rss feed. None of them have any way to control how I download or play those mp3s
eventually Podcasts will end up behind the paywalls.
It already sort of happens. For a while, a couple podcasts I used to listen to went behind a paywall as Spotify exclusives. I guess I don’t know for sure if they required a Spotify subscription, but since I didn’t want to install an app just to listen to two or three podcasts, it might as well have been a paywall.
Apple was the first big aggregator with then iTunes. Spotify is the biggest streamer that also hosts podcasts. I suppose it helped highlighting the ease of subscribing through these services to get subscribers.
I absolutely hate this triad of “you can find us on [insert propriatory source like Spotify], Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.” The last third includes the two preceding ones. Both Spotify or Apple are places where one can find podcasts. It is illogical to say it like that and I find it annoying. I don’t think it is necessary to remind people any more how podcasts work in 2025. They will find you. Stop giving free ads to other services. Especially services that have proven to be hostile to the open RSS architecture, like Spotify.
Apple doesn’t actually host podcasts. They only run a directory. You provide your own hosting for your files.
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.)
I think my wording might not be the best as I didn’t mean proprietary in the sense that they could or were able to paywall things right now, as things are.
I just think that putting more control into infrastructure that we don’t control always leads to monopolization, where feasible, by corporations. So relying more on this infrastructure owned by Apple and Spotify is inherently bad.
