Lets say in a town there is a McDonalds. Its open for 10 years with no competition. Someone might claim that McDonalds has a monopoly on the burger market because they're the only game in town. Now lets say the population of that town grew 2x in that time. If Burger King then opens up across the street, was there ever a monopoly or was there simply no incentive for competition to show up?

For at least a decade - nobody made any significant money off podcasting - neither service providers nor the shows themselves. It wasn't until probably 2015 that it really started taking off (with the likes of Joe Rogan) and Apple did not truly monetize it until 2019 when they introduced subscriptions.

Now that podcasting is a multi-billion dollar industry, its easy for people to point the finger and cry that Apple has had a "monopoly" on podcasting since 2005 when in reality it was a very niche market for a very very long time and there was no competition simply because there wasn't much money to be made.