I recommend your attention to the first 45 minutes or so of this This Week in Tech podcast. The episode begins with comments on several major “music” sites paying for exclusive rights to popular podcasts and then focuses on these same services purchasing RSS sites. RSS feeds allow the collection of new content from several media types, but an RSS feed is necessary for the distribution of podcasts. The core concern was that users would have to go through fewer and fewer services to access content.
The conversation then moved on to the entire consolidation process moving audiences toward accessing fewer and fewer points of access for information and entertainment. Obviously the popularity of Facebook as replaced how many offered their content and to a lesser extent the same is true of Twitter. Along with this consolidation come the algorithms that exercise poorly understood control over the content that is actually consumed.
If you are not an RSS user, I recommend Feedly. Google’s termination of the Google Reader did a lot of harm in limiting the use of RSS but there are still some good readers out there.