If the open web had a good lawyer we could stop Spotify from calling their radio programs "podcasts" because it's a fraudulent claim.
— Dave is tweeting in Markdown (@davewiner) February 17, 2022
It's like saying a car gets 800 miles per gallon when it gets 30 mpg. It's a lie. People expect podcasts to work in any player. Spotify is lying
Read the thread. There is so much confusion around who coined the term Podcast and what defines a Podcast.
Apple didn’t invent podcasting, they just have the most well known directory of podcasts. Think of it as a phone book of sorts, or a map, for finding the source of Podcasts.
I wish Indie Podcasters would band together to create an Open Podcast Directory. It’s only purpose would be to find the source of Podcasts. Podcasting apps could then use it to locate the source RSS feed and subscribe.
Podcasting and the technology that makes it possible were invented by Dave Winer, with help from others, including Adam Curry and Christopher Lydon.
A Podcast is audio, its source, and the means of distribution via RSS.
To be a podcaster all you have to do is record some audio, make that audio an enclosure element in an RSS feed(hey, guess what, it’s just a URL!), and let folks subscribe to the RSS feed.
In every Podcast player I’ve ever used this open standard is fully supported. If I want to subscribe to a Podcast in my favorite player I just get the URL for the Podcast and paste it into my player — for me it’s Castro — and it does the rest.
Sure, it supports finding Podcasts using Apple’s Directory, but that’s just icing on the cake. When it subscribes it doesn’t use any tech from Apple, it just uses the Podcast’s RSS feed, which is supplied to Apple by the Podcast creator.
All of that to say, what Spotify calls a Podcast, is not a Podcast. They’re not public and not delivered to the user via RSS, in a Podcast player of their choosing.
I don’t think making money from your work disqualifies it as a Podcast, but I’m sure many folks would disagree with me.