The End of Podcasting’s Innocence

We should stop calling these exclusive deals and shows as podcasts and instead call them with the right name: “online radio shows”. John Gruber had written about this a year ago in a post titled “All Podcasts Are Shows; Not All Shows Are Podcasts”. [1]

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/2019/04/not_all_shows_are_podcast...

I don't really understand why "innocence" is used here; I know that it can be used to denote novelty rather than naivete, but I'm not really sure that podcasts were ever so innocent. After all, podcasting draws heavily on over a century of public radio broadcasting for its media encoding and tropes.

It's nigh-impossible to take this sort of posture seriously when podcasts like "Behind the Bastards" spend their time either talking about horrible people, or talking about the evil of iHeartRadio and how terrible their sponsors are. This isn't the "end of podcasting's innocence;" this is mass media moguls realizing that they missed out on squeezing money from Joe Rogan.

It's interesting that Michael Moore is constantly promoting Anchor, which is owned by Spotify, like it's some nonprofit, benevolent savior. I guess it's to be expected when he says numerous measures to meaningfully combat climate change are also destructive with glaring false equivalencies, implying the only remaining purist moral high-ground is mass omnicide/suicide. Really? I lost all respect for him for this sort of dangerous unreasonableness and dishonest hawking of commercial wares.

Podcasting is still innocent.

What these bad dumb losers opt to try to call podcasting but which is some bad new capitalist horsepucky? I'm not worried about it. It's a bad look. For everyone involved. It's not innocent, it's dull & diluted & money grubbing. And it sure as shit ain't podcasting! Sayonora losers! Your ability to take a decades old pure thing & suck at it, make it bad- that does not degrade the thing itself. It's just better than you, whatever you are.

Why is this news? Anyone who thought podcasts weren't going to be commercialized probably also thinks netscape navigator is a good browser in 2020.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and have never heard of Joe Rogan, or any of the other people in the article (except Howard Stern).

Hopefully the podcast market dynamics are sufficiently different from syndicated FM radio to make this consolidation play fail.