As reported by The New York Times, Apple held a meeting a month ago with the most representative iTunes podcasters to try to find a solution to the complaints that this small community has. This meeting was held at Apple's offices in Cupertino and they were offered the opportunity to express their complaints, doubts and suggestions to the company's employees.
According to the newspaper, most podcasters expressed their discomfort at not having the possibility of earning income through some type of subscription with iTunes. There is no way to earn income because there is no way to know which is the audience of the recordings through iTunes even though Apple does have access to that data.
Another problem that podcasters stated are the few, not to mention null, possibilities to share recordings via iTunes. But this is common in all the services that the company offers us, where the social media buttons are conspicuous by their absence. Another complaint is that podcasters are limited to dealing with a single employee at the company whenever they have a question or problem with their recordings.
As usual, Apple has not promised any improvement to the 7 podcasters who came to the call of the Cupertino guys, despite the fact that it was the employees in charge of this section who wanted to hold that meeting. Eddy Cue, head of this service, did not attend the meeting, but the company employees who held the meeting later informed Cue on all the subjects that had been discussed behind closed doors. As Cue commented in subsequent statements to The New York Times:
We have a lot of people working on podcasting, including engineers, editors, and programming. Podcasts have a reserved space at Apple.
It remains to be seen what improvements will implement Apple of which the podcasters exposed who attended the meeting. Perhaps with the presentation of iOS 10, Apple has prepared something new for those of us who are dedicated to podcasting.
