Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - A Podcast About Podcasts

Episode Date: April 4, 2021

I’m a podcaster who makes podcasts. You are a podcast listener who listens to podcasts. This is a podcast by a podcaster about podcasts for people who listen to podcasts. Because a podcast about podcasting is the ultimate podcast for podcasters. Learn more about podcasts on this episode of the Everything Everywhere Daily….Podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm a podcaster who makes podcasts. You are a podcast listener who listens to podcasts. This is a podcast by a podcaster about podcasts for people who listen to podcasts, because podcasts about podcasting is the ultimate podcast for podcasters. Learn more about podcasts on this episode of the Everything Everywhere Daily podcast. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thuline podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Skillshare. I've mentioned before about how Skillshare has videos to cover almost any subject you'd wish to learn. Well, if you're interested in launching your own podcast, Skillshare can help you out there as well. They have videos on every aspect of podcasting from how to pick up.

microphone to how to get everything set up on the back end to how to edit your shows. With Skillshare Premium, you can have unlimited access to everything for as low as 825 per month. Go to everything-dash-everywhere.com slash Skillshare to get a free two-week trial of Skillshare premium membership or just click on the link in the show notes. Believe it or not, the history of digital audio goes back to before the advent of computers. If you think of a sound wave as something like a sine wave or the squiggly line that you see on an the method of making that digital was developed way back in 1937. The technique called pulse code modulation basically involved breaking up the wave and individual parts and representing each part

digitally. Digital audio recording didn't really begin in earnest until the 1970s, and it was finally used in commercial audio with the release of the compact disc format in the early 1980s. None of this really has anything to do with podcasts, however, because digital audio can take up a lot of space, and the file sizes can be quite large. With the rise of the internet in the 1990s, it was possible to deliver any manner of digital files over a computer network. However, sending large audio files was simply not practical. A CD could store about 700 megabits of data. The music on a CD was uncompressed and trying to send 700 megabits over a 9600-bodd modem was a time-consuming prospect to say the least. Working on compressing digital audio files to make them

smaller, was begun before we even had a thing called the World Wide Web. The Moving Pitchers Experts Group, known as MPEG, is part of the International Standards Organization or ISO. They set standards for media encoding. The end result of their efforts was MPEG 1 Audio Layer 3, or as we know it today, MP3. There is a whole lot about the MP3 format and how it came about, but it's a very long story and not really relevant to the episode, so I'll leave it for another day. I will, however, point out that the song they used to really work out the kinks in the format was Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega.

Suffice it to say, the MP3 format was able to compress digital audio files anywhere from 75% to 95%. It became the most popular audio format in the Internet in the 1990s, and it still remained so today. There are many other audio formats out there, but they aren't really central to the story of podcasting. As proof, I offer the fact that these words that you are hearing right now are being delivered on an MP3 file. MP3 became the format for digitizing music and MP3 players became popular. The most successful and popular MP3 player was released by Apple in 2001, the iPod.

Around the release of the iPod in the late 90s and early 2000s, there developed the trend of weblogs, also known as blogs. Some people began taking the blogging concept and adapting it to audio, and it was known as audio vlogging. The term podcasting was first used in February 2004 by Ben Hammersley, who was a journalist for the British newspaper The Guardian. The term was eventually picked up by former MTV Vijay Adam Curry, who popularized the term. Curry has subsequently been named the godfather of podcasting or the podfather. The term podcast is what's known as a portmanteau, which is when two words are combined to create a new word.

In this case, it's a combination of iPod and broadcast. The term iPod was created by Vinnie Chieko, who was a freelance copywriter working for Apple. When he saw the first prototype device, it reminded him of the small pods from the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. The white color of the player in the circular interface looked like the pod bay doors in the ship in the movie, the Discovery One. Likewise, the pods were smaller extensions of the main ship, just like the iPod would be an extension of a computer that managed the files for the device. The term broadcast obviously refers to a widespread message sent over an electronic medium like radio or television. However, the original meaning of broadcast came from agriculture. To cast means to throw.

Broadcasting was throwing seeds by hand over a wide area. Downloading an audio file from the internet does not quite a podcast make. There's one other thing that has made podcasting into what it is today. RSS. RSS stands for really simple syndication. An RSS file is a text file that's designed to be read by applications or devices. It's a single file that's updated whenever the site it's tied to is updated. The RSS file sits at a URL just like a webpage.

When you subscribe to a podcast, your podcatcher or podcast app will store that URL and then periodically check to see if it's been updated. Your podcatcher might automatically check several times a day or you might be able to manually update it. The file will then have a URL that will direct the appell. to where can find the audio file to download. So to put it all together, in the case of this show after I record it, I'll upload an MP3 file to my podcast hosting site. Once the audio file is uploaded, along with other descriptive information about the episode, the RSS file for my podcast will be updated as well.

Your podcast listening application, which might be Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Podcasts, Republic, podcast addicts, Spotify, or many others, will at some point check my RSS file if you are following my podcast. When the application sees that the RSS file was updated, it will then download the audio file for the latest episode where you can listen to it at your leisure. Companies like Apple or Spotify do not actually host the vast majority of podcasts, even though you can find podcasts on their apps. There are simply directories that catalog all of the podcast RSS feeds. There are many directories that catalog podcasts, and they're all just directories of RSS feed URLs. Despite the fact that only a few companies have apps which most people use,

podcasting is highly decentralized. You might listen to 10 podcasts, and all 10 might be hosted by completely separate companies. There is no one company that controls podcasting. There are currently over 2.2 million podcasts according to podcast index.org, which is trying to be the most comprehensive list of podcasts. However, the vast majority of them have been abandoned. Only 13.1 8% of podcasts have been updated in the last 30 days, and only 17.2% have even been updated in the last 60 days. Only 3% have been updated in the last 3 days, which means that only about 1% or less of all podcasts are actually updated daily. Humble Break. There are a small number of shows which get the vast majority of listens.

Over half of all podcasts don't get more than 26 downloads seven days after release. The top 1% of podcasts get over 3,000 downloads per episode at least seven days from release. Podcasting has basically been growing every year for the last 15 years. Currently, 28% of all Americans are weekly podcast listeners, and 62% listen to some form of online audio every week. Advertising on podcasting is still rather small in the big scheme of things. The amount of advertising spent on the entire podcast industry, and that is all the advertising on every episode of every podcast is only about twice the amount spent on the 2021 Super Bowl. So if you're driving in your car or out walking your dog right now and you're enjoying a podcast,

take a second to appreciate the history behind this phenomenon and the global online ecosystem, which is podcasting. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson. If you'd like to support the show, please donate over at patreon.com. There is content only available to supporters, merchandise, and even opportunities for a show producer credit. If you know someone you think would enjoy the show, please share it with them. Also remember, if you leave a five-star review, I'll read your review on the show.

Open the pod bay doors, Hal. I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.