Blurred lines. When is a podcast not a podcast?

When BBC Radio 4's Soul Music won a silver at the British Podcast Awards in the Arts & Culture section this week (Ocotber 2nd 2025) I was delighted but also confused. It is probably my favourite radio show, produced superbly and almost every episode makes me cry. It is a show that explores just how powerful music is and why certain songs will always have a connection for people.

But one thing I have never considered Soul Music to be, is a podcast. It has been on Radio 4 since 2000, before the word podcast had been 'invented'. It normally runs as 4 or 5 episodes in the spring and autumn on linear radio. It is then made available for listen again on all the platforms (music rights seeminigly covered by some magic BBC admin). I have never listened to it live - only ever on-demand. But I still wouldn't have ever called it a podcast.

Converstions have been taking place regularly over the last few years about exactly what the word podcast means. With the focus now on visualisation, what is the difference between a well-filmed podcast and a piece of video, or even television? At the same awards, The Traitors: Uncloaked won in the Entertainment category. It really is excellent, but I never listened to it, I watch it. Because it is basically a TV chat show with microphones you can see. So now we have vodcasts, or vizpods (visualised podcasts) as Graham Norton recently called his own terrific Wanging On. So basically it is a video.

A key question here for many people will be. Does it matter? And it is true that in the industry we can spend too long talking about things that consumers really do not care about. All they want to know is, can they find it on the platform they choose to use. But I do think language around content is important. And it is also right that we should recognise 'podcasts' for being good, not content repurposed from other platforms. How about categories for content originally produced on - and for - linear platforms?

Soul Music should have won numerous radio awards over the last twenty years, I am just not sure calling it a podcast is useful or even truthful. It is like putting Conclave on BBC1 and it then picking up best TV drama of the year. Plenty of radio can be turned into on-demand listening, but most of the time it is not a podcast in the traditional sense of the word. For me, a podcast is a unique piece of content made for the ear, a video is something to watch. Yes I might sound like a dinosaur saying this, but when you are marketing products, it is really important to have a clear definition about what you are making. Increasingly the word 'podcast' is encompassing so many things, that it may soon become redundant.