I recently signed Podcasters Declare, an open letter to Apple designed to pressure the tech-giant into adding Climate Change as a top-level category inside of Apple Podcasts. 

I had reservations about signing the petition. Not because of the topic. Climate change is real. No, my reservations were much more mundane. Was a new top-level category warranted? There are already over 100 categories inside of Apple Podcasts. Can the categorization system handle the pressure of giving every category its due?

No. No, of course it can’t. And therein lies the problem.

We’re not approaching the problem from the correct angle. Your average bookstore only has a few thousand titles on its shelf at any given time. Yet those bookstores have categorization systems that are incredibly expansive. 

But in podcasting, we do have millions of titles. Yet only around 100 categories to sort them into. That’s never going to work. 

If the Podcasters Delcare petition showed me anything, it's that we clearly need more awareness around this issue. Climate change, sure. But also, we need more awareness on the fact that that we’ve ceded control to Apple on how podcasts should be categorized and stored. That’s untenable.  

I was pleased to learn that the Podcasting 2.0 initiative is considering re-defining podcast categories as part of its third phase. But even that only lists 112 categories currently. 

The solution isn’t to add more categories. The solution is to ditch categories altogether and do something fundamentally different.

Or maybe you and your fellow podcasting compadres have a novel notion worthy of consideration? Discuss this topic the next time you’re on a virtual call together. Or share a link to the article in an online discussion group to seed the conversation. Because what we have right now hasn’t worked for a while, and we need a better way.

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Podcast Pontifications is published by Evo Terra four times a week and is designed to make podcasting better, not just easier.

Mentioned in this episode:

Support For Abortion Rights

While Americans overwhelmingly support the right of an individual to make their own decisions about abortion, unfortunately, that right is no longer protected everywhere in the U.S. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade on June 24th.