The Early Days Of Podcasting

I was an early adopter of podcasting, not necessarily making them back then, but listening. I got into them before Apple incorporated the concept of podcasting into iTunes and it blew up the first time around. I was using some RSS reader of some kind, but don’t remember which one. They were pretty clunky. I was probably only a few months into it when Apple came along and cleaned it up into something usable. I know the geeks love their code-ridden UI, but the rest of us like a more intuitive user interface. 

At the time, there were no famous podcasters. It was all people in their basements in the middle of nowhere talking about weird shit. It was closer to pirate radio than anything you see today.

Marc Maron is considered by many to be the godfather of podcasting, being one of the first prominent voices to make it big. In many ways, he invented what we have come to think of as the podcast. Two or more people talking in an audio environment. Of course now, it’s become just a low rent television show with half a dozen fixed high-definition cameras capturing the people on the show. Maron, to his credit, kept his show audio only to the end, refusing to incorporate video into the mix.

What Apple did was make finding shows much easier for the listener. They could search for topics they liked and see who was being featured. If you knew who you were looking for, you just searched for their name and subscribed when it came up. The most significant thing Apple brought to podcasting was the name and that wasn’t even theirs. The word podcast was a portmanteau of the words iPod and Broadcast, and coined by the British broadcaster Ben Hammersley in 2004, to describe audioblogging, which was what it was called at the time.

It was the idea that you could listen to what was essentially a radio show, but on your iPod, and the beauty of it was, you could listen whenever you wanted, and re-listen whenever you wanted. It was a fascinating bit of creative invention that grew out of RSS technology, which stands for Real Simple Syndication.

In my memory, the first wave of podcasters were nerds who had a very specific niche they wanted to talk about and the technical know-how to put together a low-tech show. There was the Dawn and Drew Show, a husband and wife team talking about married life.

It was probably five years before people like Marc Maron came along, who had a background in radio and comedy and were professional entertainers. Comedians Ricky Gervais, Joe Rogen, and Adam Carolla all had backgrounds in radio and were early adopters of the format.

A lot of the early podcasts were essentially re-broadcasts of radio shows, and were often distributed through companies like Audible, with shows like This American Life. In 2014, they lunched a show called Serial, which launched the true crime format, and in 2017, The New York Times launched The Daily.

It didn’t take too long for the big guys to take notice to the leakage of listeners to the world of podcasting and studios began lining up talent with listeners. Soon you had big name celebrities and talk show hosts with their own shows and before you knew it, they had added video and turned them into cable access television programs with A-list guests and celebrity hosts. YouTube has increasingly become to the go-to platform for many users, because they can both listen and watch the long form interviews.

Soon you had big name celebrities and talk show hosts with their own shows and before you knew it, they had added video and turned them into cable access television programs with A-list guests and celebrity hosts.

Last month, Marc Maron announced that after 16 years, he was shutting his long-running podcast WTF down. He said he felt like there was nothing left to do and now he had to compete with every Hollywood studio in town, now that everyone had a podcast.

I’ll be curious where the format goes next. At what point will we get tired of hearing people talk to one another? I had a podcast some years ago, for about six months, but found it to be a lot of work for no reward. I keep thinking of starting one up again, but only if I could figure out how to do it alone. I hate having to wrangle other people or stick to a schedule. 

But we’ll see.