Scout FM

» see scout.fm as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The instruction was "Alexa, open Scout FM", and then audio started. No search box and no subscribe button, which in 2018 was an argument rather than a shortcut. Podcasting had spent a decade asking people to go and find shows before they could hear one, and Scout FM's position was that this was why most of the population never got past the first step. Radio does not ask. It plays, and you either stay or turn the dial.

Cara Meverden and Saul Carlin started it in San Francisco in 2017 under the name Subcast, with Dan McCartney as the third founder, and raised seed money from betaworks and Bloomberg Beta. The stations were hand-picked first and personalized afterward from what you listened through rather than what you clicked. The catalog read like a cable lineup: Bachelor Nation Radio next to True Crime Radio, with separate stations for conservative talk and progressive talk sitting a few rows apart. It took a Google Play Best of award for 2018 and it worked in a car, which was more than most podcast apps could say.

Smart speakers were the bet. Scout FM's own pitch was that the Alexa sessions ran twice as long as the phone sessions, which is the sort of number that reads as a product discovery and funds another year of work. The problem with building on somebody else's speaker is that the speaker's owner is also building.

~ the record ~

~ the last station ~

The crawl record dates the ending more precisely than anything the company ever published. On 19 October 2019 scout.fm was still the Scout FM homepage. By 12 November the same address read "Coming soon from the makers of Scout FM", with a beta signup form and a copyright line crediting Subverse Corp. In under a month the product had started referring to itself in the past tense on its own front page.

The service outlived the website by about two months. On 12 December 2019 the player at radio.scout.fm was still serving episode pages for the stations. On 21 January 2020 the same paths returned 404.

The holding page was captured for the last time on 28 January, and by February the host had stopped answering at all. There was no farewell post and nothing about it in the trade press.

~ what apple actually got ~

On 24 September 2020 Bloomberg reported that Apple had bought Scout FM earlier that year, and Apple confirmed the deal in the way it confirms these things, which is to say it confirmed nothing else. The coverage treated it as Apple acquiring a podcast app. By then the app had been off the stores for months and the stations had been dark since January.

Apple did not buy a running product here. It bought a group of people whose product had already stopped, which makes this the unusual version of a story the podcast industry had seen before. In 2014 Apple paid around $30 million for Swell and took it off the App Store within days, and that sequence is the one everyone remembers: the app dies because the buyer arrives. Scout FM went the other way around. The app died, the team spent a year on something else, and the buyer turned up afterward to collect what was left.

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