They’re called “Podcasts”

Before a podcast was a “podcast,” it was… well, it wasn’t really much of anything. A few of the early believers called them “audio blogs,” and the journalist often credited with coining the term “podcast” also offered “GuerillaMedia” as an alternative in the very same article. (And actually, there’s plenty of debate over exactly who coined the term and when. The history of the podcast is more contentious than you’d think.)

It was in 2004, though, that many of the earliest names in on-demand audio began to smush “iPod” and “broadcast” into the word we’ve come to know as the way we all download and listen to shows now. In the 20 years since podcasts became a thing, they’ve changed dramatically — the earliest pods were mostly just dudes blogging into microphones, but now the medium supports everything from award-winning investigations to narrative fiction on par with anything you’d find on TV. And to be fair, a lot of dudes blogging into microphones.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we go back two decades to the first days of the podcast. We talk to some of the people who created the earliest shows, decided how the format would work, and developed both the technology and the norms that still define the industry today. Like so many stories during the early days of the internet, it involves a small number of people (and a Yahoo mailing list) who had no idea how big their little project would get.

Then we hit the skip button to today and look at where podcasts are headed next. For years, companies like Spotify and Amazon thought they could buy podcasts and build their own private audio empires, and many years and lucrative contracts later, that hasn’t really worked. But there’s no denying that the things that make the podcasting industry open and interesting and fun also make it old and outdated and hard to turn into contemporary products. Will the next 20 years of podcasts look like the first 20? Or are we headed for a future of audio in which the word “podcast” doesn’t even fit anymore? And for that matter, does it even make sense now?