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AI-generated summary
On the Apple 🍏 side
When Catalina launched, Apple blew up its iTunes monolith into several separate apps, including Apple Music and Apple Podcast.
Apple has been managing podcasts for ages, but never realised the revenue potential it could extract from them. Like Apple TV, Apple left Podcast to tick along on its own without paying it much attention.
But with its new services-focused strategy, Apple is trying to get back in the game. Yet by separating Podcast and Music into different apps, I don’t think it’s making the right call.
I also think that by leaving audiobooks in the dedicated Books app, it’s failing to see the potential of centralising all audio in a single application.
Spotify’s siege of podcasting
While Spotify threw itself wholeheartedly into podcasting this year in 2019, its strategy is somewhat different. You can access the same podcasts from the Spotify app as from Apple’s, but unlike Apple everything happens in one single app.
The point of bringing it all together is to let users build shared playlists combining their favourite music with their podcasts. Imagine radio on steroids: you leave in the morning, launch your favourite playlist, and you get your first tracks to get you pumped, followed by a show giving you the day’s news.
It’s not yet possible to build that kind of playlist today, but I think the demand is there — and in a market-driven society, it’ll happen sooner or later, and much faster at Spotify than at Apple.
The radio of the future
Today’s radio format already interweaves music and cultural programming. The problem? The listener has no control over what they’re going to hear. Soon, we’ll be able to create — or let algorithms create — playlists that chain a Queen track, followed by a health podcast like votre forme , then maybe 10 minutes of your current audiobook.
Ultimately, in this near future, it’ll be easier to do all of this in a single platform-independent app than inside Apple’s ecosystem. For power users, it will always be possible to cobble something together with the Shortcuts app — but that’ll remain accessible only to a certain category of people formerly known as “geeks”.
