Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

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Podcasting is a unique business. It's the talk radio of the internet. In 1996, the Telecommunications Act [1] passed and that allowed ClearChannel to buy every radio station in the country and consolidate it up into a boring homogenous product. No longer were there local DJs promoting bands that would create completely new types of music every decade. All the music genres froze in place and that was that.

Now we have podcasting which is incredibly cheap to run. It's incredibly cheap to host. Anyone can do it. It's even less cancelable than telegram channels. There's no app store. It's an audio file. There are plenty of independent podcast apps that do not go through a cloud provider. It's the greatest use case ever for RSS! It's also deeply intellectual, or stupid, or controversial, but it's a million different things to a million different people. In my opinion, it's as close to the true promise of the internet realized as any media that has come along since the 90s.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

> It's even less cancelable than telegram channels. There's no app store. It's an audio file.

This is actually my problem with modern podcasting, or at least Spotify's attempt at it.

As fair as I'm concerned, Spotify does not have podcasts because you cannot give it an RSS feed. They want to redefine what podcasts are so they can be that app store, take their cut, and control what was previous a great open landscape.

Yeah, this is fairly accurate, spotify don't do podcasts. Spotify run a custom audio streaming service that they hoped would kill podcasts (by gaining market share and then fucking people around). Fortunately, the business model looks like it was totally misjudged and they're failing.

Spotify's handling of local files in general is pretty lackluster, even in comparison to Apple who you might assume would lock things down heavily. So it makes sense their podcast and audiobook handling has also been disappointing.

>> "All the music genres froze in place and that was that."

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it sounds like you're saying music hasn't evolved any since the late 1990s. There is an incredible blending of rap, breakbeats, punk, metal, and rock happening as we speak. And that's just the last few years. Places like Bandcamp, Mixcloud, and Beatport are rich with new kinds of music and new takes on the past. Even Soundcloud is still holding on in its bot takeover era.

1996 was the year before MP3.com. Napster two years later.

I think it makes sense to say that all of the music genres that were on the radio in the 90's are pretty much the same genres today. Radio country music in particular has been remarkably stagnant. The names of the artists change, but with a few notable exceptions (Old Town Road front and center), the styling is remarkably unchanged.

There are certainly newer and more innovative country stylings, but radio and Nashville catering to radio hold a very strong, very conservative center.

It's speaking with respect to radio. It's why you wonder who is listening to Ed Sheeran and Imagine Dragons but they're somehow so popular.

I 100% agree, any time someone reminisces about the past, take what they say about new music with a grain of salt! But like you said, a lot of innovation is driven online (but absolutely penetrates popular culture), not by local DJs, which is one of the changes the above poster said

On the other hand, how much of that is actually making it into the mainstream? Although, it's debatable how much of a "mainstream" there even is, any more.

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