Podcasts: How they emerged from audio blogs of the pre-internet era 

Spotify, Apple Podcast, Audible and Google Podcasts: These names have become a part of your everyday life, isn’t? The podcasts or audio programmes that these digital platforms offer are not only entertaining but also highly informative. Moreover, they can be played anywhere, starting from your smartphones to laptops and iPods. Currently, there are over five million podcasts with more than 70 million episodes between them, with the number exponentially growing with each passing day. Ever wondered how your favourite digital pal came into being? Let’s dive deep into the backstory. 

Emergence of audio blogs 
Traditional podcasts or ‘audio blogs’ emerged before the internet in 1980. Through these blogs, people used to share their thoughts and experiences using the process of audio recording. Unfortunately, these were short-lived as there were no means to distribute the recordings.  

Now, fast forward to the 2000, a US-based MP3 player manufacturer called i2Go launched a service called MyAudio2Go.com that enabled users to download stories and their new episodes to listen on their MP3 player or PCs. However, with i2Go’s own demise in the following year, this too went into oblivion. Luckily, Apple unveiled its first portable music player, the world-renowned iPod around the same time, which ushered in the age of podcasts. 

The world officially welcomes podcasts 
From 2001 to 2004, the music industry was being revolutionised with the introduction of cutting-edge technologies. Experts were also busy evolving audio blogs. The first goal in this regard was to transfer them into an audio player as MP3 files. With this in mind, in late 2004, Adam Curry, a retired MTV video jockey in collaboration with American software developer Dave Winner coded a program called the ‘iPodder’. Its purpose? To let iPod enthusiasts download audio blogs to their iPod.  

Now, even before this got a chance to go mainstream, a BBC journalist cum The Guardian columnist named Ben Hammersley coined the word “podcast” in one of his articles that became an overnight hit. It was a portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcast.” While the word caught on almost immediately, it further became popular in the hands of audio-blogger Danny Gregoire who used it while coining a text for the iPodder mailing lists. This in turn inspired Adam Curry (known as the father of podcasts) to launch live the first podcast service provider Libsyn.com in early 2005 during his hit show Daily Source Code. While many suggested that the “pod” in podcast referred to “portable on demand” or “play on demand”, Apple ensured that the due credit went to their iPod. In fact, by the end of that year, the term “podcast” was used more than a million times on Google.  

The rest, as they say, is history. By 2006, Apple too rolled out its first official podcast into the iTunes Music Library. In fact, their co-founder and the then CEO Steve Jobs even demonstrated during an interview how anyone could create a podcast using their Apple devices and share it with the rest of the world.