You know, I almost called this article “How Podcast Apps are Failing Us” but I had a good breakfast, the sun is shining, and I’m not going to start in the bad place. Still, I’ve been neck deep in a brand new research study that we will be debuting at Podcast Movement Evolutions in Chicago, and I’ve got a few concerns.

First, I want to revisit something we published last year, in Podcast Landscape 2024:

When I presented these data, I made the point that I didn’t really love this look for podcasting – the ratio of awareness to trial to regular usage was lower than I have seen for many other media channels. So a big part of our next study is a thorough benchmarking of this data with as many other media channels as we could fit into the questionnaire. And I can tell you two things: one, we have a definitive answer as to whether or not this is a “good” ratio, and two, it isn’t.

Exactly how far down the pecking order podcasting is in converting casual consumers to regular listeners/viewers, I’ll save for Chicago. But let’s take this as a fact: podcasting hasn’t (yet) cemented its place as a daily driver for people – something they reliably fit into their spare time, work time, or commute in the ways that some other media channels have.

Part of this may be down to cadence, of course: unless you are a habitual consumer of daily news or sports podcasts, most podcasts deliver at a weekly cadence, which inadvertently may have conditioned people to a weekly consumption cadence. If the thing you are looking for is not there every day, you don’t look for it every day.

However, I think some of this also has to be laid directly at the feet of the various dedicated apps we have for podcast consumption. I have been talking in this space for over a year (since we released Sound You Can See at the end of 2023) about how a big part of the rise of YouTube in podcasting is not endemic to video, necessarily, but to the quality of the app itself. It does a lot of things, and really well, that dedicated podcast apps simply aren’t providing.

There is, of course, the loose initiative that we call “Podcasting 2.0,” which has the intention of making the podcast experience better, but the initiative’s outcomes have been spotty. I’ll direct you to In and Around Podcasting, with Mark Asquith and Danny Brown, who poked at this in a recent show, and a recent episode of the Podnews Weekly Review, with James Cridland and Sam Sethi, which among other things makes the point that some things have worked, some things haven’t, but there’s no steady hand on the tiller.

I agree with all of that, and I’ll toss in this: Podcasting 2.0 hasn’t been firmly seated in improving the listener experience. The last time I made this comment, I got slapped with “but we are also listeners” by some of the Podcasting 2.0 contributors, but no, no they aren’t. Not normal listeners. The listeners aren’t crying out for V4V or a duplicative images tag.

The good news: we don’t need to guess what they find valuable or sticky. They are telling us with their daily behavior. All we need to do is examine the platforms and channels they are using daily, and ask ourselves, honestly, what do we find wanting about how podcasting is delivered to those audiences? In all cases, the content is great. We have great radio content, great content on Facebook, great content on YouTube, and yes, amazing podcast content. It is the applications that deliver that content, however, that interest me, even the “application” that is a piece of hardware (AM/FM radio, for instance).

I do not want (as in DO NOT WANT) to brand this as “podcasting 3.0,” but here are 3.0 things that the best “daily drivers” in content provide that so many dedicated podcast apps do not. We may not need all of these to improve the listener (and yes, I mean listener) experience, but we can’t accept having none of them, or we risk podcasting becoming marginalized by the platforms that continue to deliver these basic, user-focused benefits. The good news, I believe, is that a lot of these things can be accomplished by AI without having to overhaul RSS.

1. One Button to Joy

This is a big one, I think, and one of the supreme advantages of “apps” like your good ole’ five-button radio. You push a button, you get the thing you want. You push the Facebook button on your phone, you get the thing you want. And if you push the TikTok button on your phone, you get the thing you want. Even Netflix struggles with this one – you don’t always get what you want when you click that button. Sometimes you scroll and click for hours, hoping for that thing you want, but find it elusive.

Podcast apps don’t always give you one-button joy. You click the one button, and you get a bunch more buttons and the “opportunity” to find the content you want. Even if you have a one-button listening queue, what order is that in? Not the order you want. It’s likely in reverse chronological order of release. Which means if you get in your car to commute to work and push that one button, you might be getting your board game podcast instead of the news, traffic, and weather that would really suit in that moment, because that episode on the 65th expansion for Settlers of Catan JUST DROPPED.

I do think that AI can help here. If we want podcasting to be a “daily driver” for people, the technology exists for an app to ascertain that we are in the car, it’s 8:15 in the morning, and we probably need to know a few things in 20 minutes before we start our day. Radio does this reliably every day. Social media also reliably delivers a friction-free, “digital vacation” at our desks or elsewhere whenever we want to take it.

2. Structured Serendipity

Closely related to the one-button experience is the promise of consistent, reliable delight. This is another way of saying “the discovery problem,” I suppose, but it’s closer to something rhetoricians would call “the known-new contract.” Consistent, reliable delivery of novel experiences, wrapped in the comfort and structure of expected experiences.

Certainly, social media gives you this every day (and with one button): you have curated your feed, you know generally what you are going to get (and from whom), but still – your feed surprises and delights you every single day without you having to “program” it. Again, radio does this, but let me give you an example of something even better that I wish were still around: my Slacker G2 Portable Personal Radio Player.

I used to love this thing. It combined the one-button convenience of an MP3 player with the serendipity of a radio station. Basically, you would “seed” a playlist with a few songs, and on-demand Slacker would build you a discrete playlist that was then downloaded to the device for offline, on-demand consumption. The “station” mimicked the programming of a commercial radio station, with consistent delivery of new and novel songs, anchored by the presence of your favorites. The only “programming” you needed to do was to occasionally press thumbs-up or thumbs-down on songs, but otherwise, the software did the heavy lifting every time you synced the device to provide you with a reliable source of discovery.

Yes, modern on-demand music services like Spotify have replaced the hardware with software, but there was something pure and simple about the Slacker G2 – it provided structure AND novelty (and one button to joy) without the user doing much, if any work.

Contrast that with the experience of discovery in a podcast app, and you’ll see something very different. Can I listen to whatever I want, whenever I want? Yes, if I build it. When people open YouTube, Facebook, or hit a preset on their radio, they don’t have to build anything. They get structured serendipity – the reliable delivery of discovery. This, again, is something AI could help with. I could imagine, for instance, pushing my one-button-for-joy and getting an audio digest of what is new in my podcast feed, along with a simple verbal input to play which one of those new episodes I’d like to hear in the moment. Truly, the realization of one of the greatest ideas of the 1997 classic, Starship Troopers. Would you like to know more?

3. Acknowledgement

We know from Sound You Can See and other studies that the comments section is a big driver for YouTube. Whether you actually leave a comment or not, you know that you could. You can also just “like” or react to something on LinkedIn or BlueSky and there it is: your name in lights, next to a big thumb.

What most “daily drivers” in media today do is allow people to feel seen. I first learned the Zulu greeting “sawubona” from my friend Chris Brogan YEARS ago. It’s a term that means “I see you,” and as a greeting it is intended to impart a sense of dignity and worth. More than just, “hey, what’s up,” sawubona signals to your fellow human that you are present in the moment, you really see them, and you acknowledge that presence. It’s a delightful phrase, often answered with “yebo, sawubona” (Yes,  I see you too).

We need dedicated podcast apps that tell our audience, every day, sawubona. We need them to feel seen, heard, and acknowledged. This, by the way, is something that the current Podcasting 2.0 initiative is trying to address (with a “socialInteract” tag in RSS that links to a root comment thread), and there are some early implementations of this that are promising. But this really needs to be front and center in podcasting apps if we want to encourage daily use and habit.

Those three characteristics are evident in many of the platforms and channels that we are addicted to, the ones that have quickly converted from trial to usage to daily habit. Incorporating these aspects of observed consumer behavior into how we consume podcasts is, I believe, an existential concern for podcasting (certainly for RSS-driven podcasting). We’ve got to get them right.