Apple celebrates 10 years of podcasting

Apple is celebrating 10 years of podcasting in iTunes, and like many podcast fans I've taken this as an opportunity to look back on the last decade of radio in mp3 format.

A lot has changed in those 10 years. I'm no longer refreshing iTunes in the morning to sync the latest episode of Buzz Out Loud before my bus, or trying to work out what music needs to be jettisoned to make way for a few more episodes on my 4GB iPod mini. These days I just let Pocket Casts download new episodes whenever they arrive, over Wi-Fi or 4G. And while podcasting is still considered a niche medium to some, Apple estimates its customers listened to 7 billion podcasts via iTunes and iOS devices in 2014 alone.

Of course, the nerds will tell you that podcasts have been around longer than 10 years, and while they're right, you can safely ignore them. Sure, a few smart people combined mp3s with RSS feeds — the two ingredients that allow podcast episodes to magically appear on your phone each morning — but podcasts didn't hit the big time until Apple added a podcasting section to iTunes. And it was the iPod that gave the medium a name.

It was iTunes 4.9 that first introduced myself and many other soon-to-be podcast fans to shows like This Week in Tech, Diggnation and The Dawn and Drew Show, and it's great to see those "two ex gutter punks from Wisconsin" are still together and podcasting 10 years later. But it was Ricky Gervais, fresh from The Office, who brought podcasting into the mainstream. Gervais' podcast became a hit faster than you can say "monkey news". The buzz surrounding the show convinced many non-tech people to find out what podcasts were, and how to load them on an iPod.

I personally feel that podcasting was just the right medium at the right time.

Podcasting hit midway through the iPod era, just before the dawn of smartphones. We spent those years of the iPod listening to nothing but our own music collections, over and over again. We were starved of human interaction. Not starved enough to pull the white ear buds from our ears, but enough to want to hear conversations again, and perhaps seek a little more variety from our iPods. Podcasts answered these needs.

As podcasting matured, independent shows have been replaced by repackaged radio programs. For many years now the top charts in iTunes have been dominated by shows from Triple M, Radio National and the like.

Traditional media outlets have in turn spawned high quality podcast-only shows. Last year's smash hit Serial was podcast only, but it was produced by the team behind award-winning radio program The American Life. Serial was an instant hit, and became the fastest podcast to reach 5 million downloads and streams in the history of iTunes. Still more producers from the This American Life stable have gone on to create the podcasting network Gimlet Media.

But despite the dominance of traditional media brands, independently produced podcasts still manage to find a wider audience, especially in the tech and comedy genres.