I heard a YouTuber say today, "We are now available wherever you get your podcast; that means that an audio format of the show is now available on both Spotify and on Apple Music/Podcasts,“ and, like…isn’t the contradiction of the first half against merely 2 (technically 3) locations not glaringly obvious?
Like, I get that most people don’t conceive of things on their computers, anymore, in terms of files and there’s a convenience to going to a centralized service to browse for a particular thing (podcasts, in this case) but…it’s still annoying that we’re shoving things which still, currently, – with relative frequency – can be accessed not behind proprietary, paywalled locations into these locations that’re beyond collective control.
For now at least you don’t need accounts to subscribe (I use Focus Podcasts from f-droid to manage my podcasts) but I wish more podcasters would self host and have no doubt that eventually Podcasts will end up behind the paywalls.
A pay for a handful of podcasts, but at the end of the day they’re all still just mp3s on an rss feed. None of them have any way to control how I download or play those mp3s
It already sort of happens. For a while, a couple podcasts I used to listen to went behind a paywall as Spotify exclusives. I guess I don’t know for sure if they required a Spotify subscription, but since I didn’t want to install an app just to listen to two or three podcasts, it might as well have been a paywall.