Hey, this is Tom Webster for Sounds Profitable for Wednesday, March 19th, 2025. A real sob story about podcasting. As podcasting veers towards becoming a subgenre of video rather than a thriving audio industry, today I'm going to look back at an example of what happens when you strip everything unique from a beloved icon. But first...
If you couldn't make it to South By, well, we've got you covered. The Sounds Profitable YouTube channel now has a playlist of sessions held on the official podcast stage, filmed and edited by Nomano with marketing by Opus Clip. Most of the sessions are available now, with the rest coming very soon to the playlist linked in the show notes.
Well, last week's podcast prompted considerable feedback from folks in the trenches of making podcasting better. I think most understood what I was trying to do, although some framed it as a critique of Podcasting 2.0, mainly due to the title. Well, fair play. But I want to focus on the state of podcast apps and why I think the industry needs to collaborate on how we present our art to the world. Podcasting 2.0 is a volunteer effort making
this particular conversation uncomfortable. There have been positives from the community's work. The transcripts feature was a huge win, and I was complimentary about the social interact tag last week. Critiquing a labor of love triggers responses, both rational and irrational. But you know, the following things are true. Podcasting 2.0 has brought useful new features to open RSS podcasting. True.
The community working on it is wonderful. True. It isn't getting here quickly enough, and it's not widely distributed enough. True. And open podcasting loses share yearly to closed systems. Sadly true. Now consider this. One reader responded to my article last week with a YouTube video. Now I'm not going to link it here because I'm not trying to pick on him and I don't really want to have that debate. But let's examine that action.
He read my piece, had a reaction, and then took the shortest path from idea to audience. He turned on his camera and posted to a closed system. Now he did nothing wrong. But if we don't see that as an indictment of open podcasting's current state, I don't know what else to say. YouTube has made every part of this process easier for both creator and audience. For anyone who watched that video,
Without reading my original article or listening to the good old-fashioned RSS delivered podcast version, congrats! You're proving my point. Podcasting might be on version 2.0, but YouTube... Last I checked on Android is on version 20.10.36. And we can't lay that at Podcasting 2.0's feet. Open podcasting is getting lapped by closed systems, and I don't think we appreciate the urgency of that.
If someone new wants to consume a podcast today, they never need to download a podcast client ever. And increasingly, they aren't. Nothing Podcasting 2.0 is working on will see the light of day. if no one uses podcast clients. And I'm not merely worried about this. I'm petrified. I want our community of audio creators to have their work showcased with the same polish and engagement as video creators.
You know, I'm increasingly starting to think about podcasting as the sob of media channels. Do you remember sobs? As a native New Englander, I grew up seeing a lot of sob 900s in Maine and Massachusetts, barreling through the snow and the ice that... Eight-year-old me recalls being well over my head. Saabs had a certain mystique. They were manufactured in Trollhattan, Sweden, which sounds like a place where frost giants make cars for Odin.
My father, who was an absolute ace car mechanic, would have never bought one or allowed me to have one because, he maintained, they were a nightmare to work on. Swiss watches that required constant tuning. In the mid-90s, my co-worker Glenn used his first big raise on a Saab 900. Through him, I learned the true measure of brand loyalty, when customers will suffer inconvenience just to keep using a brand.
Glenn dreaded regular tune-ups because they weren't $29.99 Jiffy Lube specials. The entire Rube Goldbergian apparatus of the Saab had to be reset. A simple oil leak meant nearly dismantling the engine. The fuel sensor would jump from full to zero while driving. What would drive my father insane was just a quirk to the Saab Loyalist. Well, I know the tank is mostly full, so the gauge doesn't really bother me. Really?
From the center console mounting of the ignition key to the welcome lack of information that night drivers had access to thanks to Saab's night panel feature, these cars were the ultimate test of brand loyalty. Devotees would tell you that if you followed Saab's scheduled maintenance without deviation, the result was a magnificent, sure-footed beast and the proof could be seen in the parking lot of many New England ski resorts. But those maintenance appointments...
over time, rendered the Saab a veritable ship of Theseus. With every part replaced over five years, is it still the same car? Podcasting used to be exactly like this. When I started 20 years ago, I had a Mac PowerBook, iTunes, at a Diamond Rio before upgrading to a Zoom and then finally an iPod. Finding, downloading, and syncing content involved some Saab-esque quirks. But we were fans of the medium itself. We loved
podcasting, not just podcasts. And so we suffered gladly. Over the last eight years, podcasting has grown beyond medium fans to include show fans, however they get the show. Smartphones and cheap wireless broadband eliminated much of the friction, but YouTube and Spotify refined the process even further, helping reach larger audiences.
Both platforms are enormously important to podcasting's present and its future. But neither has podcasting as their main focus. YouTube is video. Spotify is music. And Apple, the largest pure podcast player, isn't implementing the kinds of features that I talked about in the podcast last week. Although their adoption of Podcasting 2.0's transcripts feature was a real win for the medium.
At the risk of being a little too on the nose with this metaphor, I want to close the loop on the Saab story. Pun intended. General Motors took a 50% ownership stake in Saab in 1989 and gradually... increased that to 100% by the year 2000. In an effort to improve the efficiency of Saab production and to iron out some of the nuisance maintenance that they required, GM removed the Saab guts from their vehicles.
and replace them with rebadged Chevy Trailblazers and Subaru Imprezas. Well, as my native Mainer father would say, if a cat had kittens in the oven, that doesn't make him biscuits. By slapping a Saab logo on the hood of a trailblazer, GM made a more reliable car, a car with lower maintenance costs, and a less expensive car. It also made a car devoid of anything special.
The quirks were the point. Saab disappeared by 2011, and all the frost giants in Trollhotton were laid off. If you recall from the first Thor movie, unemployed frost giants really get up to no good. So what am I really asking for here? Well, I guess I'm trying to manifest to the universe how important it is for the business side of big podcasting and the open source community to collaborate, build.
and put some muscle behind a consolidated, universally great experience for podcasting that showcases podcasting. This requires mutual respect and acknowledgement of what both sides can contribute to the effort. but I think it's a really important initiative for the future of spoken word audio period, which is my ultimate concern. With commercial radio declining and spoken word audio content increasingly in the hands of video and music platforms,
I worry about people developing the audio habit. We can't assume that they'll just pick it up without exposure. Over my 20 years in podcasting, I've tried to bridge independent and big podcasting and this is when both factions
need to pay attention to the quirks that make podcasting special while still acknowledging that we just aren't there yet with the full listener experience. And I certainly want to help. Otherwise, We risk turning podcasts into rebadged GMC trucks, just content instead of premium content. Thanks again for listening to this week's podcast, a real sob story about podcasting. For Sounds Profitable, I'm Tom Webster, and I'll see you next week.