RSS is still the default distribution system for podcasts. It's probably the thin thread that is keeping Spotify from building a walled garden for audio.
> […] The company spent a good portion of its presentation specifically focused on podcasts, which it said had been “largely unchanged” for years before its entry into the market, due to the limitations of RSS.
> Spotify cited how unbundling podcasts from RSS technology has paved the way for Spotify to generate revenue through these popular audio programs — a sentiment that’s not universally beloved by those who support an open podcast ecosystem. Spotify has disrupted that market by bringing some podcasts in-house, where they can only be heard on its service, and competitors have followed. This has fractured the ecosystem and left consumers at a disadvantage as some shows are no longer broadly available.
> “We’ve been able to replace RSS for on-platform distribution, which means that podcasts created on our platform are no longer held back by this outdated technology,” Maya Prohovnik, Spotify’s head of Talk, told investors.
The entire framing of this (esp. re "unbundling") is pretty gross. Unbundling is associated with disintermediation. What Spotify is doing is the opposite. What organizational dysfunction led to the circumstances here—where the writers and editors of the linked article uncritically publish and more or less legitimize this kind of shameless corporate spin?
The whole article is pretty much just re-wording Spotify's press release.
There seem to be no sources in it except for Spotify's press release.
So, a very old form of organizational disfunction in journalism: The cheapest and quickest way to write an article is to use someone's press release as the only source, as it doesn't actually require, well, any journalism.
Spotify has never used RSS, other than for Roach Motel-style ingest.
The plan was to embrace, extend, and extinguish the podcasting medium, and the hard part of that is done. "Podcasting" was a standards-based, open medium. Now it's any audio show, and we've lost the unique name for the open medium. As Spotify incentivizes more and more creators to not publish an RSS feed, standards-based podcasting will become a fond memory.
I also boycott them for a more practical reason: I can’t listen to them in my normal podcatchers! I’d have to switch all my podcast listening to Spotify to change that, and that’s a pain.
Spotify has started and rapidly escalated a program to pay podcast producers for spotify-only podcasts. (with no rss feeds). Several podcasts I used to listen to and enjoy have become spotify-only.
When I recently asked friends for podcast suggestions... several were spotify-only, i don't think the suggestors even realized it, cause they just listened on spotify anyway regardless.
So I think Spotify agrees with you and is working on it...
> […] The company spent a good portion of its presentation specifically focused on podcasts, which it said had been “largely unchanged” for years before its entry into the market, due to the limitations of RSS.
> Spotify cited how unbundling podcasts from RSS technology has paved the way for Spotify to generate revenue through these popular audio programs — a sentiment that’s not universally beloved by those who support an open podcast ecosystem. Spotify has disrupted that market by bringing some podcasts in-house, where they can only be heard on its service, and competitors have followed. This has fractured the ecosystem and left consumers at a disadvantage as some shows are no longer broadly available.
> “We’ve been able to replace RSS for on-platform distribution, which means that podcasts created on our platform are no longer held back by this outdated technology,” Maya Prohovnik, Spotify’s head of Talk, told investors.