The definition of a podcast

I originally posted this as a comment a few weeks ago on LinkedIn. This week I co-presented the Edison Research Infinite Dial 2025, which this time around was careful to ask whether people have watched (but never listened-to) a podcast. It discovered another 8 million Americans who have consumed what they consider to be a podcast. I thought my original comment was worth a wider audience. (But before that, let’s put it on my blog too, ho ho.)

Twenty years ago, the US radio industry decided to fight internet streams and Sirius and XM satellite by claiming that it wasn’t “radio”. The word “radio” should only be used, they argued, for AM and FM broadcasts. Nothing more was worthy of the word “radio”.

Twenty years later, audio listening is up. Listening to Sirius XM is big. Listening to Pandora (“internet radio”) and to Internet radio streams like Soma FM continues to drive significant audiences. Even Internet simulcasts account for, in some markets, almost 20% of all listening. But the US radio industry would have you believe that it isn’t radio.

Twenty years later, the US radio industry is seeing ever declining numbers for AM/FM listening and ad revenue. The audience has moved away from those platforms to digital platforms. But they haven’t (in the main) moved away from radio. It’s still listened-to by nine out of ten people every week. Just not the narrow definition that the US radio industry wanted.

In Europe or Australia, where radio has a multiplatform definition, it continues to grow - in revenue and audience.

We should resist any efforts to narrow the definition of “podcast”, less we copy the US radio industry, and define ourselves into irrelevance.

• I wrote an article on the definition of a podcast for Podnews in 2021, which is almost, but not quite, entirely different.