“My feeling is that traditional media in America is stuck,” audio journalist Christopher Lydon told Ben Hammersley of The Guardian back in 2004. “Let’s think of a new kind of media.” Lydon was talking about radio programming that could be accessed via the internet and downloaded as MP3 files. The medium didn’t have its own name yet—it was most often referred to as “audioblogging”—but Hammersley inadvertently came up with one while riffing in the second paragraph of his article: podcasting.
It’s possible that many of today’s most popular podcasters are too young to have ever owned an iPod, the pre-smartphone Apple device from which the term “podcast” originated (a portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcast”). But even for those of us intimately familiar with the sleek white MP3 player and its candy-colored descendants, it’s unlikely we would have engaged much with podcasts when the term was first coined in 2004. For months, podcasts remained the purview of developers, who had no commercially available mechanism for downloading them and thus developed their own applications to do so, publishing how-to guides for accessing the content.
In June 2005, though, Apple’s iTunes music store released an update that supported podcasting for the first time. The graphic user interface, it turns out, was exactly what podcasts had been missing. As The New York Times put it at the time:
“Until Apple got its mitts on podcasting, the finding, sampling and managing of podcast audio files was time-consuming and scattered. First you had to find a podcast worth listening to, using directories like www.podcast.net or www.podcastalley.com. Then you had to find, download and (in some cases) pay for a podcast-management program like iPodder (for Mac, Windows or Linux).”
With the support of iTunes, users could suddenly search for podcasts, download them, and transfer them to their iPods, all for free. This update bolstered the nascent medium by pairing it with a platform the wider public could understand; after all, they were already using iTunes to rock out to Rob Thomas’ “Lonely No More” on their iPod Minis en masse. It wasn’t just the iTunes update, either. In 2005, a lot of elements were converging—cheaper recording tech, the rise of alternative podcatchers, and the monetization learning curve—to make podcasts a phenomenon. In podcasting’s first big year, some trends were already taking shape that carry through to 2025.
Already, we were questioning the profit model. In the iTunes store at this time, each song cost $0.99 to download, but podcast subscriptions cost zip; in other words, no money was coming in, neither for the creators of this new sea of audio content nor the platforms hosting them. Almost immediately, tech journalists were skeptical of how podcasting would fit into our traditional capitalist model of consuming media.
“The more we listen to free programs, doesn’t it stand to reason that we’ll have less time for paid ones?” asked The New York Times just weeks after podcasts hit iTunes. It explained that Audible was exploring subscription-based models alongside “ad-supported podcasting” (yes, the Times used quotes around that heretofore foreign concept), an idea presented as obviously repellent.
Andy Bowers, Slate‘s executive producer of podcasts, laid it out much the same way: “Whenever podcasters gather in numbers greater than one, the talk inevitably turns to the question of how to make the medium pay,” he wrote in December 2005. “Some podcasters… including Slate, have tried placing ads in the audio files. Others ask for donations. Still others charge for access, although that stretches the understanding most of us have about what a podcast is. Big companies… are plotting ways to aggregate and ‘monetize’ the medium… But no one, at least no one I’ve come across, is getting rich from producing podcasts alone.”
The dam holding back podcast commercials did eventually burst, of course, but 2005 remained an energetic and optimistic era in which savvy creators (and the platforms hosting them) were merely getting out ahead of whatever the medium was going to be. And some parties had a vested interest in making it a tool of the faithful.
Organized religion seized on podcasts early. Even before the barrier to entry was lowered on podcasts in the summer of 2005, faith leaders were flooding the zone with religious content to be ready when the world started browsing en masse (no pun intended). The Washington Post reported on the trend in March 2005, using the term “Godcasting” to describe this rise in faith-based content.
“Pod preachers, including Christians, Buddhists and pagans, are among the most prolific users of the new technology,” wrote Kathleen Murphy for the Post. “Just as sermons were among the first type of broadcasts when radio caught on in America in the 1920s, podcasting is creating a new form of wireless parson.”
Murphy is right to draw the line from radio to podcasting—and it’s a trendline we see rising again with the advent of the latest AI technology. Sermons are getting the AI treatment, and generative AI service Midjourney is being tasked with pumping out endless iterations of Jesus, some more crustacean than others.
But faith-based content did not remain at the top of the podcast pile for long before a different type of fanaticism took its crown. In the early 2000s, Harry Potter fan sites had long been the original social media for a certain type of millennial internet nerd, with hubs like MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron fostering lively conversation. Both juggernauts were quick to launch podcasts in August 2005: MuggleCast and PotterCast, respectively, two series so early onto the scene that they predated the release of the final Potter novel and five of the eight original films.
Over the years, both podcasts were sustained by J.K. Rowling’s endless expansions of wizarding IP, from the stage show to theme parks to video games—and by guest appearances by Rowling herself. PotterCast shifted into broader TV recaps during the pandemic, but MuggleCast remains a vital resource for fans to this day. As the show has aged, so have its hosts, and their fandom has evolved to contend with Rowling’s escalating anti-trans bigotry; it’s a shift that shows Potter lovers holding two truths at once to continue embracing the community they’ve built.
As the medium outgrew its status as a mere novelty, major news outlets began alleviating themselves of the need to continually explain to their audiences what podcasting was and instead report on why it mattered, who its major players were, and where podcasting as a whole was headed. In February 2005, The New York Times described podcasts as “audio files that range from living-room ramblings to BBC newscasts.” That remains true 20 years later, but the Times got it half wrong. In our modern media landscape, the podcasters of true import identify much more with “living-room ramblings” than the output of a traditional news organization—and get paid far more than any traditional journalist could dream of.
In December 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary named “podcast” the 2005 Word Of The Year. Editor-In-Chief Erin McKean said at the time that the word was considered the year prior, but that not enough people had heard of it, or knew what it meant, to warrant inclusion. “This year it’s a completely different story,” she said. “The word has finally caught up with the rest of the iPod phenomenon.” Indeed, it wouldn’t take much time for podcasts to leapfrog over iPods altogether.
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