American multinational technology company Apple will soon no longer be allowing its users to ‘subscribe’ to podcasts, rather they will now be ‘following’ them.

According to Mashable, this new change to Apple podcasts will roll out along with the release of iOS 14.5. However, the beta version of the iOS update already has the change available in it.

Though it may look like not a big change but Edison Research, a market analysis firm had found that 47 per cent of people who don’t listen to podcasts, actually thought that it costed money to ‘subscribe’ to podcasts.

In a recent newsletter, senior vice president of Edison Research Tom Webster stressed that the reason for this is because of the word ‘subscribe’. This is a big issue if nearly half of the people surveyed associate ‘subscribe’ with paid subscriptions. How many people would have been listening to podcasts over the years if they knew it was free to do so?

Apple, which has long been the leader in podcasting platforms with iTunes then its Apple Podcasts app, really faced competition when music streaming giant Spotify entered the podcasting world. Interestingly Spotify used the word ‘follow’ to describe the feature that adds favorite podcasts to the playlist.

Other major podcasting platforms such as Stitcher, Amazon Music, and Audible all use ‘follow’ instead of ”subscribe”. As per Mashable, after this official switch by Apple, it seems YouTube and Google Podcasts will remain as the final giants in the podcasting industry to keep the ‘subscribe’ button.

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