I’m not an evangelist for either podcasts or radio. My business is in podcasting so my primary concern is accelerating the growth of podcasting, which I think has actually been painfully slow and still — in an era when Variety is doing mag covers about how Conan O’Brien is here to take it to the stratosphere — has so many foundational problems.

Obviously radio and podcasting can co-exist peacefully. It’s what’s happening. But equally, I think that the balance is such that podcasting is still a subordinate medium when I think, objectively, it has some real strengths over radio. (There are obviously plenty of reasons for radio’s success that will be hard for podcasting to replicate or gazump; such as the technology of radio waves and the ability of live radio to showcase music).

But I do think it’s a net negative that the leading producers of podcasts globally are still seeing their products as radio first, podcast second. And I think this is because podcasting has failed to either present itself as Radio 2.0 or as something completely different. At the moment it’s fiddly, on-your-phone radio for young people.

When I (flippantly) say ‘go to war’ my points are, I think, quite clear: podcasting needs to steal the professional standards from radio. It needs to try and make a case to radio advertisers that it’s a preferable medium for them (which it is). It needs to make a pitch for radio listeners that it’s a) an enhancement of the radio listening experience, but b) not a radical diversion from the radio you know and love OR c) pitch itself as something with a more profound separation from radio codified into its DNA.

At the moment, I’m not sure how much the ‘booming’ (apparently…) podcast industry is making radio stations sweat, and I think that’s weird and disappointing.