I can only chuckle when I read things like this. There was another post on the homepage today talking about how podcasts in general are still growing in popularity. But Google fumbled the bag yet again!
There's some consolidation here. Podcast support in YouTube music is a real thing.
There is SO much overlap between YouTube Music videos and listening to music.
There is also overlap between YouTube podcasts and listening to podcasts.
Trying to align here makes a lot of sense.
Tricky to pull off, sure, but it's not a dropped ball.
There are many podcasts that exist on Google podcasts but aren’t listed on YouTube music. Maybe around 20% of my podcast collection doesn’t exist on YouTube music; and they aren’t fringe podcasts either. Many are very mainstream. This makes YouTube music an inadequate replacement
Consolidating products makes sense to an engineer, but in general companies seek to create many redundant brands to confuse the market. For example Faceboot+Instagram, or how entire store aisles are filled as a simulation of more choices than just P&G and J&J.
It's rarely mentioned, but a major casualty of the Reader shutdown was Google Listen, a perfectly good podcast app which I think was just somebody's side project. It used Reader as a backend, so you could also manage your feeds in a browser. Really cool.
It's just another example of Google failing to even keep their options open to take advantage of future developments. "Serial" would make podcasts mainstream just a year or so later.
Honestly, at this point I hope the shut down most of the company. They tried to do everything, but ultimately they just showed that their corporate structure couldn't scale to that many employees.
