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August Trometer, developer of iPodderX, likened Apple to a high street coffee shop chain.

'Podcasting is like cappuccino,' he said. 'Gourmet coffee was around for a long time, but it took Starbucks to put it on the map. Apple is like the Starbucks of podcasting and advertisers will take us more seriously now.'

Will Lewis, management consultant for KCRW, said that Apple has achieved something that no-one else could have accomplished.

'Our servers have been swamped with a stratospheric increase in traffic,' he said. 'In fact, downloads have increased tenfold as a result of the iTunes 4.9 launch.'

iTunes enables users to find and subscribe to podcasts automatically downloading new episodes and uploading them to an iPod or iPod mini.