How Spotify Broke Open Podcasting #podcasting #streaming

Name: How Spotify Broke Open Podcasting #podcasting #streaming
Uploaded: 2025-04-13T19:48:23+00:00
Duration: 2 min 6 s
Channel: Rob Greenlee
Description: In this monologue, Rob Greenlee argues that open podcasting’s future hinges on modernizing the decades‑old RSS standard. He notes widespread criticism…

13 Apr 2025 · 2 min

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2:06

In this monologue, Rob Greenlee argues that open podcasting’s future hinges on modernizing the decades‑old RSS standard. He notes widespread criticism that RSS has stagnated and that platforms like Spotify, through its acquisition of Anchor, position themselves as the sole innovators while dismissing external ideas. Greenlee reflects on corporate cultures that favor building everything in‑house, citing his own experience at Microsoft. He stresses that RSS, despite its age, remains the backbone of podcast distribution and must be updated collaboratively by the industry. He warns that if each platform pursues isolated innovations, the ecosystem will fragment into competing, incompatible solutions—a chaotic “quagmire” that harms creators and listeners alike.

Chapters

I think we all want open podcasting to survive. And one of the things that RSS has faced is criticism because it's not innovative. It's not innovating. It's not improving. It's not getting better. And lots of people have criticized even a company like Spotify back in the early days. The guy that worked and actually founded Anchor, which was acquired by Spotify, wrote many articles kind of criticizing RSS is that, well, a proprietary platform like Spotify can innovate, right? But RSS is old and outdated. And in some ways that was just kind of scapegoating the issue is that Spotify and these big walled gardens want to be the innovators. They don't want to adopt someone else's innovation or idea necessarily. They oftentimes have a, you know, a structure and an organizational culture that everything has to be invented by them. And I understand that. I used to work for Microsoft. I get it. You know, the concept of adopting someone else's idea is not exactly normal. So, so the power of this really is that this is a standard that's existed for over 20 years, and it is getting a little dated and it needs to be improved. It needs to be updated, and the industry needs to really come together and really apply these innovations to podcasting, be proactive about it. And everybody wins if each of us takes a position on this that Well, I only want to be the one that wins. Then we're going to get stuck in this quagmire of one platform doing this, another platform doing something else. And we just create this, what I'm starting to call is kind of chaos is because everybody is kind of competing against each other.