Spotify is rolling up the internet audio market, which their CEO, Daniel Ek, thinks will grow from $100 billion in revenue a year to somewhere near the video market, which is $1 trillion. People spend about the same amount of time consuming audio as video content. “Are our eyes,” he asks, “really worth 10 times more than our ears?”

I can see a similar future for podcasts: Spotify, if they are successful, may end up being the biggest player, but that doesn’t mean new and different business models that directly link suppliers and consumers won’t emerge. It will, in other words, look like everything else touched by the Internet: very large winners on one end, and small niche win... See more

Podcasting is a medium made for this kind of storytelling; if journalism is, as someone once said, “the first draft of history”, then maybe podcasting is the second. As a medium, it has a wider intellectual bandwidth than broadcasting, which has to address mass audiences, whereas podcasting can serve niche interests and make more assumptions about ... See more