Until "Heavyweight" by Jonathan Goldstein (he used to be on American Life, and now has a brilliant show in which he resolved unresolved issues for people) moved to Spotify only. He did this right in the middle of a shocking, cliff-hanger episode -- meaning part 1 was on Gimlet, available in my Apple podcasts, and part 2 was only available on Spotify.
That's when I had to go look it up -- is it just an app I can download? Turns out it's a music app which also streams podcasts. They have both a free version and paid/premium version. Seems simple enough, right?
But then I discovered they're swallowing up podcasts so they can get listeners signed up to their service, and therefore better control tracking you. Acquiring the data on individual listeners is lucrative, for obvious reasons.
And apparently their interface for listening to podcasts sucks, according to people who like and pay for the service for music. But instead of improving that interface, they're more interested in spending that money to acquire as many popular podcasts as they can, and making them exclusive to Spotify.
Well EFF that! As much as it pains me to lose the ability to listen to my favorite podcasts, I refuse to download Spotify on principle. (Well, at least until all the RSS-fed podcasts are acquired by a few greedy big companies and I have no choice. Capitalism sucks, sometimes. *sigh* )
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