I have been out of town the last two days to celebrate my anniversary and, of course, plenty of stories break that I'd love to write about ASAP. It all started with a notification from the podcast Serial.

"Where to Find Episodes 3-16 of Serial Season 1"

At first, I read that as a new episode and assumed the show would be behind a paywall from here on out. I was half right. The New York Times and Serial Productions has put almost all of the episodes of Serial and other shows behind a paywall: even the now ten-year-old episodes of Serial Season 1, which kickstarted the entire thing.

Except, even that is not entirely true—that's just what The New York Times wants you to believe and its why they sent out a flood of 19-second episodes saying to go subscribe to the news institution—and not in the "go subscribe to my podcast" sort of way.

To get full access to this show, and to other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts

The platforms mentioned are the key—Apple Podcasts and Spotify. See, if you use another podcast player like I do, you can still download and listen to all of Serial Productions shows for free with the usual creepy dynamic ad insertion, but they won't tell you that.

Why? It's really quite simple. The New York Times cannot give up the Serial podcast feed. It was set up in a time before member-only podcast feeds and the subscriber count is (likely) astronomical. They need those subscribers. It's why they have dumped every single Serial Productions non-Serial show in their entirety into the Serial feed. And since RSS is ubiquitous and these are legacy shows, those feeds are open to everyone.

What The New York Times has done is leveraged Apple Podcasts and Spotify as middlemen to "lock" episodes behind a NYT membership. Link accounts (more data and money) and get all the episodes. Truthfully, the Times really wants you to use the NYT Audio app, but they know the two dominant players are Apple and Spotify.

My biggest gripe with this turn of events is that it didn't happen four years ago when the Times bought Serial Productions. That would have made total sense and paved the way forward for season four and beyond. Instead, we are getting the rug pulled out from under us as the companies break trust and forsake the medium that skyrocketed them to begin with.

I have no beef with member-only shows and these people getting paid. I have a problem with them hoarding their archive behind a paywall. Serial (and all their shows) could be so much better, but instead have opted for anti-listener behavior.1 Thankfully, they haven't figured out a way to forsake the feed and lock everyone out from the archive. Thank goodness for the open nature of RSS.

Footnotes

  1. And I have ranted about simple tweaks they could make in their production pipeline to enhance user and advertiser experience that already exist within the ID3 standard. The Disney Vault approach to the archive was not one of my suggestions. ↩