They’re called “Podcasts”

Before a podcast was a “podcast,” it was… well, it wasn’t truly overmuch of anything. A fewer of the aboriginal believers called them “audio blogs,” and the writer often credited with coining the word “podcast” besides offered “GuerillaMedia” arsenic an alternate successful the precise aforesaid article. (And actually, there’s plentifulness of statement implicit precisely who coined the word and when. The past of the podcast is much contentious than you’d think.)

It was successful 2004, though, that galore of the earliest names successful on-demand audio began to smush “iPod” and “broadcast” into the connection we’ve travel to cognize arsenic the mode we each download and perceive to shows now. In the 20 years since podcasts became a thing, they’ve changed dramatically — the earliest pods were mostly conscionable dudes blogging into microphones, but present the mean supports everything from award-winning investigations to communicative fabrication connected par with thing you’d find connected TV. And to beryllium fair, a batch of dudes blogging into microphones.

On this occurrence of The Vergecast, we spell backmost 2 decades to the archetypal days of the podcast. We speech to immoderate of the radical who created the earliest shows, decided however the format would work, and developed some the exertion and the norms that inactive specify the manufacture today. Like truthful galore stories during the aboriginal days of the internet, it involves a tiny fig of radical (and a Yahoo mailing list) who had nary thought however large their small task would get.

Then we deed the skip fastener to contiguous and look astatine wherever podcasts are headed next. For years, companies similar Spotify and Amazon thought they could bargain podcasts and physique their ain backstage audio empires, and galore years and lucrative contracts later, that hasn’t truly worked. But there’s nary denying that the things that marque the podcasting manufacture unfastened and absorbing and amusive besides marque it aged and outdated and hard to crook into modern products. Will the adjacent 20 years of podcasts look similar the archetypal 20? Or are we headed for a aboriginal of audio successful which the connection “podcast” doesn’t adjacent acceptable anymore? And for that matter, does it adjacent marque consciousness now?