Will Audible’s new “original audio program” tier of content kill the podcast? These exclusives, locked to their respective apps, could blow the podcast world apart.
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Amazon’s audiobook business now offers a subscription service that doesn’t include audiobooks. For $7.95 a month, you can subscribe to Audible Plus, which gives you just podcasts and other original audio programming. It marks Amazon’s push into a slice of the podcast market, which is red-hot and growing.
The thing is, these aren’t podcasts. Podcasts are like web pages: anyone can listen to any podcast in any podcast app, just as you can view any web page in any browser. While Audible (and Spotify, too) may call their audio shows “podcasts,” they’re not.
“The danger could be that shows that are born as podcasts turn into a conceptually different format that can be processed and packaged as an exclusive show,” Andrea Nepori, podcaster and writer for Italian newspaper La Stampa, told Lifewire in a statement.
