Welcome to Podland Podland is sponsored by Buzzsprout the easiest way to host, promote and track your Podcast [email protected]. It's Thursday, February the 18th, 2021. I'm James credit and the editor of pod news here in Australia. And I'm
Sam Sethi the extra Sam Talks Technology here in the UK. And now I'm.
To make. And later I'll be talking about licensing music for your
podcast and I'm Tom Rossi, co-founder and partner at Buzzsprout. And I'll be talking later on in this show about some of the things that we've got going on. If buzz Brown
very well Podland is a weekly podcast where Sam and I delve deeper into the week's podcasting news, which I cover [email protected]. Now no longer seen on Facebook.
I'll be sending you pigeon news whenever you need it. Yeah. Please get involved with this podcast. Send us a voice message like Harry did this week to questions at Podland or news, or you can tweet us at Podland news. This week's big story. The first one up I heart media is to buy Troyce and digital for 230 million from EWS scripts. Triton digital owns a podcast host. Omni studio Podcast metrics, analytics services, and dynamic advertising.
It's in a series of podcasts and ad tech acquisitions that we want to talk about. Now, James, tell me more. This sounds really interesting, but I have no idea what's going on
lot of money, $230 million for Triton. So yeah. an interesting company. They own a bunch of things around the Podcast space, including Omni studio, which they bought in June of 2019 and EWS scripts, which used to own them essentially spent $158 million and have sold it for 230. So that's a bargain after a year and a half. Well done them. It's almost as good as their deal that they did with Stitcher, who they also used to own.
They paid 54.5 million for it and sold it for 325 million, which is quite an improvement. So EWS scripts, clearly buying stuff, investing in it a little bit, maybe, and then selling it on at a nice profit, which is nice. I'm curious because I, heart media owns lots and lots of things, including. Some Podcast hosts already. They own VOCs nest and Spreaker, which is the same company. But Vox nest is the B2B brand. It's BRCA being the B to C brand.
And Spreaker is massive in places like Italy and Spain and other countries as well. I'm curious to see what I heart does. With both the Vox nest and speaker companies, and also Omni studio, because that's two large Podcast hosts that one would assume is better to merge into one. The other thing that
grade noticed this week was the owners of global also made an investment into. IHeartMedia.
Yeah. I wish I knew so global is a, sorry, you weren't given their press release. I don't think anybody was given a press release for this particular one other than the SCCs stuff, but essentially there are some quite money to people who own global, which is a large. Radio broadcaster in the UK, but also in things like Dax in North America and various other things. And it owns a large poster company as well in the UK, the table family own that.
And the table family have just spent a lot of money. To own 8.8% of iHeart media. I don't know whether that is just as a favor for a mate to basically say to Liberty global who are interested in buying iHeart media, hands off. Cause we, are nearly 10% of it now or not. I don't quite know what the deal is, but it's quite interesting having a look. the one thing that any coverage has been very careful to point out. Is that it's not global buying into iHeartRadio.
It's a table family buying into iHeart radio, which is slightly different, but still quite interesting in terms of whether global might actually end up being global. Who knows.
Do you think this is just. More acquisition. Do you see any other acquisitions like this?
Ashley Carmen wrote a really good piece in the verge, which was basically saying that the big deals in podcasting is now ad tech, not exclusive content, so you can sign as many Joe Rogan's as you like, but. Actually it's the Antech stuff, which is the most important. And I think I would certainly agree with that. I think it's also interesting to point out that now this means that, the CBC in Canada will be hosted by iHeart radio in the U S by theoretical competitors. And the same goes for.
I think Entercom also host with Omni studio. And so therefore Intercom's podcasts will be hosted by their big competitor. So that's going to be interesting to have a look at. So there's all this kind of stuff going on. The one thing that is just worth pointing out is that art 19, which is reinventing its company at the moment to being, not just a podcast host, but a podcast host that also sells advertising and stuff like that. Aren't 19 is not owned by anyone.
If I were Amazon. Then I would be circling around art 19 very fast because Amazon may be dead in the water if they don't have any Podcast tech to actually bolster up their acquisitions of Wondery and of course their new Podcast service. okay,
let's watch this space. We'll be following those stories. Now, another story that was pushed out to you is that Spotify has announced a new live streaming event. On Monday, February the 22nd. It's not clear what Daniel X came to say, but you have a little hint of what you think.
Yes. I don't even know whether Daniel Lac is going to talk by X. So it's 11 o'clock in the morning, New York time. Now, interestingly, the PR person from Spotify. Emailed me and said I hope you'll be watching live. And my response was it's two o'clock in the morning for me mates. And now I won't be, but I'm interested given that Spotify is PR company is key in that I'm watching. Maybe it's got something to do with podcasting and Daniel.
Did say something recently in a investor call, which I thought was interesting. He said, and I'm going to do my best annual lack impersonation. Now we're very bullish on the opportunity to provide. It's just my normal voice. We're very bullish on the opportunity to provide meaningful ways. For Podcast is to monetize through the platform. And I hope to be able to talk a little more about what our plans are in the near future on that. And that was what a couple of weeks ago.
So I think we are now officially in the near future. So who knows might be interesting. What I do know is that on this podcast next week, we will have an interview from an unnamed. Person at Spotify to tell us more.
I tell you, I couldn't tell the difference between you and Daniel back then. it was uncanny. It won't be Daniel. I'm guessing then next week on,
we would have thought I would have thought that's highly likely, but yes, you're absolutely. Right. so last week we talked about fair use and about how to use commercial music. And the quick answer is no. No, there is another way though, to go to a record company and license it through them. That can be quite hard though, but there is a new tool out there which allows you to search through thousands of songs and to arrange a full and legal license. It's called songs for Podcast has.com.
I've seen loads of these, but this is the first one that is actually doing what they've promised. So I caught up with a CEO and the CTO of the company, Kurt to beak to learn more. And I. Started by asking his background.
I
worked in technology for a long time. I've worked at Microsoft and doing software engineering and software architecture for different segments multimedia communications, cryptography, mobile productivity, a lot of different kinds of things there. And then. I spent a significant amount of time running a small independent music label here in Seattle. And so that's really introduced me to that world of the music business and the opportunities around sync licensing.
And during that period is where I saw this opportunity to address a gap that I saw generally speaking for the independent music ecosystem to get access to opportunities. And those opportunities are just exploding. As we see what's happening in modern times, our own productions and UBD experiences.
So using commercial music in podcasting, some people say that there's a 32nd rule that you can use anything you like, as long as you don't use up to 30 seconds. Is that true?
I won't speak to that from a purely legal perspective, but I will say that I believe the best. One thing that somebody could do is to find a solution like ours, where you can get great commercial, independent music licensed properly for use in your Podcast.
So how does songs for Podcast is.com?
We built songs for podcasters because we saw this really important need. For independent and small business podcasters who want to lift their narratives. Do you know, you're making a creative thing and music is an important part of telling that story and great commercial music is the best thing at helping you tell your story. And we found that people had a lot of confusion and a lot of difficulty trying to find music and go through a simple, straightforward process for licensing that music.
So songs for podcasters was built with one. Simple intuitive, fun music discovery in mind, being able to use mood, sentiment, references to artists, references, to songs, things like that as a, to, to find the music that you might want to use. And then a really straightforward licensing process built around the fact that we work with commercial independent entities, that how. But broadest access to the rights to be able to grab them to you in the context of a transaction.
And so we bring those things together and you get a really beautiful experience to get the right music
for your podcast. So there are some companies who offer music licensing for really large Podcast is like NPR and Gimlet who are two really bad examples, obviously. But in terms of. Songs for Podcast is.com. You've approached it the other way. Haven't you? So it's very much for large Podcast companies It's also very much first smaller Podcast is to that's right. And
it, and
in fact, I, you know I'd even go further and say that for the large commercial podcasters, the wonders of the world, et cetera, who's now I guess Amazon, those folks would more likely use our other marketplace think florida.com to go ahead and access. Music and specify the usage tier for commercial podcasting. That's different from what we've targeted songs for podcasters at songs for podcasters is really about that personal and small business Podcast here.
The independent podcasts are the key thing here is that we've set up the tiering in terms of usage on the agreements and terms that you get to use it for appropriately scaled to that type of usage. And therefore the pricing is appropriately scaled to that.
Usage. So how does the pricing work? What does it work internationally? First of all? Cause there's quite a few of these things that only work in the U S and also, how expensive is it as well? Sure.
You can get
a license to a music for a Podcast from as low as $55 for your license. The way we do pricing is that the pricing is dependent on. A couple of different factors, the popularity of the song, the popularity of the artists, the release date of the song, et cetera. So you can think of it as in, something that's old and not as well known will be cheaper than something that's well known and new.
Yeah. But ultimately what we want it to do is that even that range of pricing is something we feel is well suited to that personal small business. Podcast
and what's the feedback from the record company has been so far,
there's have been really excited. They've been excited for a few reasons. One, we built a platform that allows them to really build their businesses on and expose their content to people who even come directly to them. But take advantage of the infrastructure we have. For both discovery and workflow around licensing. So they're super excited about that.
The other thing that they're excited about is that they see our job as going out and looking at all of the trends and all of the activity that's happening in different verticals and finding ways to drive those opportunities, too. We do them as part of our aggregate marketplaces in particular for solves, for podcasters. There's so much that's happening there. That it's great for them to have us.
Trying to be at the forefront of connecting to those opportunities and bringing them into it based on what they do best, which is find great music to offer
as well. And so it's just as simple as going to songs for Podcast is.com. There's no sign up until you've actually found something that you want. It's even better
in
that. One of the things that we felt we could do with sauce for podcasters, given that particular usage tier is to say, come to the site, start searching, find the music you want. Go through the workflow for licensing the music. You don't have to sign up, you don't have to create an account. You don't have to. It's all on demand. We tried to bring it as close to retail as we can.
Okay. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, James. So that's fascinating. I'm really hoping that there may be some podcasts out there with some interesting music on them in the future. Yes.
I'm going to find that Agadoo track. I've always wanted.
I don't think that's going to be $55 there.
oh, well now. It looks like the job market's heating up. Not normally something we would talk about, but two rather interesting jobs are falling through on your lap. James one is from Apple Podcast, you're looking for a house international. So when are you applying? And the second one is Amazon music or looking for Podcast munchies in Spain, in Italy. Tell me more about both of
these Apple podcasts, their head of international. So firstly, it's based out of London. So you could go for this Sam if you really fancy pay enough, you need a high degree, but there were, you need a high degree of executive expertise. You will help define direction for the team within this exciting, medium, that exciting, medium being podcasts, of course, but it does look a very interesting role. Interesting to see.
Apple podcasts deliberately scaling outside of the U S which is the point of this particular role. So that one's good. The other one is two roles from Amazon. I'm really proud of the fact that you can hear my mouse clicking away. Oh, that one is a Podcast manager in Spain. And the other one is a Podcast manager in Italy as well. Two interesting things on this. Firstly, they actually posted it themselves to pod jobs.net, which is very exciting from a very geeky point of view.
But the second one is that if you're looking for a Podcast manager in Spain yeah. Then that probably means if you're Amazon, that you're going to be launching in Spain relatively soon one would assume so. I don't know anything, but a that's what one would actually assume. So that's really interesting and really exciting seeing that Amazon is going to be moving away from not just to UK and Germany, but also presumably moving into Spain and into Italy as
well. Well, again, I'd, wouldn't be applying for those two jobs. I think he's a lack of language that might help me back there. But anyway, now talking of the UK, as we were a few minutes ago, a Podcast one of the bigger hosting companies here in the UK has shared stats and data from their 2020 report. They have more than 60 million UK monthly listens. And so 184% growth in UK brands spending more than a hundred thousand pounds or $178,000.
CEO Ross Adams also reaffirm the company's commitment to an open podcasting system, which thankfully is a good news.
So firstly he's clearly bought a hat. So it was very nice to see Ross Adams wearing a very trendy hat with lots of skateboards in the background. Very cool on brand, very on brand. And he posted afterwards that he had just out of shot. He had a pod news pod coaster, which is a very exclusive thing. I think I've only given away about 10 of those and he has one so cool. It is that it was out of shot, but anyway he was talking very much around open podcasting.
Yeah. Being the bedrock of which the entire Podcast industry was built. And basically saying that there are some companies who are looking at exclusives and trying to lock people into a system, but a cast is very keen on open podcasting is of course they would say, wouldn't they, in terms of the things that they currently own. It's nice to hear someone actually coming out and saying, no, the future is.
Open Podcast, which, by the way, I, heart media has also done relatively recently, but open podcasting he says, is the thing. And that's quite refreshing to hear, I think. Good.
Well let's see if we can get him onto an interview. See if he'll talk about it more there now. And new pressure groups formed called Podcast is declare it's calling for a climate category in Apple podcasts and open letter argues that Apple's progressive corporate environment policies should be matched by place for climate change in Apple podcast. Do we agree, James?
I said, do you agree? Sam. Climate change. Is it vaguely important?
Uh if you miss the Trump, he doesn't exist. So yes, but I am not Mr. Trump and yes, I think he's vaguely important fact. Very important that there you go.
here's a hint and tip when you go onto Adam Curry's Podcast, which I gather you're doing it in the next couple of weeks. Don't mention climate change. There's a hint and tip. I did. I think I might've got away with it just anyway. I agree. I think it's a very good. Thing Apple is actually relatively progressive in terms of what it's doing in terms of waste, in terms of climate change, dealing with the climate emergency as the guardian calls it.
And I think it's strange that isn't a specific place in Apple podcasts for climate change and Noah where it really fits. So I've actually signed it. I've signed the campaign. Yeah. On the website and many other people have as well. It's at Podcast as declare.com. And I think it's a good idea. And it's interesting because obviously we have to go cap in hand to Apple to ask for a new category because of the way that podcasting works, because essentially Apple is in charge of the categories.
This brings into. For me sharp contrast. The fact that categories themselves have been locked in by Apple for so long. And why do we have to have a top down taxonomy? Why can't we have a bottom up tax on me, which I think when you look at the Podcast index with the category tag, it would be great. Yeah. If the industry and people who are Podcast is we're creating the tags now that's possible to do You should be able to allow people to say, this is a tag I want to use with my Podcast.
And then through aggregation. You could find that 50 people were using the same tag or a thousand people using the same tag and therefore make that tag available as a tag. That is an industry standard tag. So it could be a better way of doing it because otherwise some poor bloke in the Apple office, has to go and type out the word climate. And then. Hit push and then it will get done, which seems very odd that one person has the ability to determine
this. Yeah. I if it works in the same way as tags worked in a flicker and work today and things like medium, I think the whole category thing is a really obvious place where Apple's stewardship of the industry has been very helpful, but actually we probably need a little bit of change on.
Now we saw this week that Buzzsprout a company who sponsored this podcast. Now let you import your podcast stats. So if you're moving from another podcast platform to bus sprout, you can bring your podcast starts with you, which I, again, for those people with larger podcasts would probably be very useful
losing them. Yes, indeed. So you caught up with Tom Rossi and you asked him more,
Tom, what do you do in Buzzsprout? What's your role?
My primary role is in the technical side of things. So writing the code and helping with the team that does all the development of the product
and for those who don't know. And how long has bus Brown been going? When did you start bus route?
I think we actually launched it in 2008, 2009. So quite a while ago that the space has changed a lot since we started that's for sure.
Now. What was the embryo of the idea for Buzzsprout? How did you create Buzzsprout you
and Kevin? Yeah. Yeah, it was at the time it was mostly Kevin and I, and we had another product that we had built and we had people that had audio content that they wanted to get out to the world. And the best way to do that was a Podcast most people didn't even know it was a Podcast, but. We helped them build an RSS feed and get their content out. We were constantly updating it and providing instructions and it was just complicated.
And we said, man, we need to build a product that just makes this really simple. That takes out all of the complexity. And so all they have to do is send us the audio file and we take it from there. And that's
pretty much what people do today still don't that they send you the audio file, you hide the complexity and just make life simple for them. That's
one of the things that we try to do really well is to hide that complexity in everything that we do. So there's a lot of really cool features that we have, and they're powerful features, but we deliver them in such a way that it's easy
to use. Yeah. Cause I get approached as a Podcast by many people saying I want to start a podcast. How do I do it? And they get worried that there's going to be this massive technical hurdle that they have to overcome. And actually I say to them, grab your iPhone, grab a pair of headphones, use the built-in recorder just to start with, Yeah. Before you invest in a Mike and you invest in all sorts of other things, just do that and upload it and then press a couple of buttons. And guess what?
You're on Apple. You're on Spotify suddenly. Maybe not the world's best. Quality, but you're there and that's the
Podcast, but it also, it highlights that it's the content that matters. If even if you record it, I had a Podcast who was really successful and he was embarrassed to tell me his setup because it was such a simple setup and he thought. That he would be shamed. Like he didn't have a crazy awesome Mike. He didn't have all the things that you would think somebody of his caliber would do, but he had phenomenal content and that's what got people to listen. And that's how he built his base.
Now, one of the things that you've been working on is a new Podcast namespace without encouraging day Jones. How did you get involved with them?
I think as soon as we saw, I saw what they were doing, we jumped right on because we love the idea of somebody that's not, Buzzsprout somebody who's independent of the hosting of the player defining, Hey, how can we collaborate? How can we innovate together as an industry? Because in a lot of ways it's been stuck RSS in podcasting, hasn't changed in years and we all. Talk about these. Oh, wouldn't it be great. Wouldn't it be great. We had actually just implemented transcripts in our RSS feeds.
We had put them in there. We said, look, nobody knows how to do this, but we're going to do it just to demonstrate that it can be done. And I think it was maybe a month after that we came across the podcasting. 2.0 namespace stuff. And we were like, this is perfect. And so we jumped right in and have really enjoyed being able to have those conversations about what could podcasting look like?
How could we make it more powerful, more innovative as we go into whatever the next generation of podcasting 2.0, what does that look
like? I liken it to cause I used to work for Netscape and we came along with the browser and we started being innovative and nimble. And then you had this big behemoth called Microsoft and who did nothing and change nothing for years until the little nimble Netscape came in and started adding new features and function. Then it became a little bit of a browser war, but eventually the industry moved forward.
And I will wonder whether we're seeing the same now in podcasting, we're seeing the likes of buss Brown lip sync and all the other guys getting involved in. Working with Adam and Dave to come up with crazy new ideas to extend the RSS feed with new enclosure tags and new namespace tags. And maybe, do you think Apple and Spotify might wake up and start to implement any of this stuff?
I don't know. I don't know. I think it's going to take a player that gets closed. To the market share that you have with Apple and Spotify, somebody that can really challenge them. But I think going back to the Netscape and internet Explorer, I think that's a great example of when internet Explorer came out, it wasn't that much different than the Netscape navigator at the time you could use one or the other, but Microsoft destroyed Netscape.
And when they did that, you ended up with this bloated internet Explorer, which people to this day hate, they have this visceral hatred of internet Explorer. Why? Because it killed all innovation in the web browser and anybody who was a web developer just absolutely hated it. And so I think it's in all of our best interests to make sure that there is a market out there of independent. Sources to be able to do your podcasting. And so that's why it's great to have good competition.
It's great that there's a third party, like the podcasting 2.0 guys that are helping us as an industry move. I
liken it to the open web versus the closed web. We are looking at you guys to keep the RSS feed and podcasting open and innovative and moving forward compared to Spotify and Apple who are very much into closing it down and making it proprietary to their platforms. A lot of the Spotify functionality is very specific to Spotify. We've seen things that Apple have produced, which we'll talk about in a minute that people tag, but they've had.
They're equivalent of the people tag, but they've not made it an industry standard or made it available to everybody. So it's good that this is happening. Now, you started with some of the new features that you've implemented already. Can you name a couple of the things you've been working on?
Sure Buzzsprout started with the transcript tag. So we shared what we had already learned in our process of how we thought it would be best to share transcripts and there's some different ways to do it. And so we worked with Dave Jones on how we could build that tag together, and it was great. The next one that we tackled was the locked tag. The lock tag, we think is really important for people to be able to protect their podcasts.
From just being imported at the time, there was a lot of podcasts that were getting, somebody was just taking their RSS copy, pasting, submitting it as their own. And we needed a way to be able to lock a Podcast similar to the domain name model. So you can lock your domain name. So we did the locks tag and we also have the funding tag. We've always had the ability for podcasters to give us a link for people to be able to support the show.
So this was a natural fit to be able to put that in there, we did the chapters. We just recently did the image. We support images within the chapters tag. So now they can upload individual images and we put that right into their RSS feed. The soundbite was really fun. That is a tag that allows people to highlight a section of their show.
So if somebody is considering listening to the show, they can go listen to the sound bite and that we were able to integrate just with something that we did within Buzzsprout, which is we have something called a V. Usual soundbite, which is an excerpt from the show that you can share on Facebook and other places to give people a flavor of what the episode is about. And so we just built that right into the RSS feed with the Podcast soundbite tag.
And then most recently we did the location tag, which allows you to put in a location. If your podcast is about a specific location, you can drop it in there. And we put it right into the feed.
And the next one, I think you're working on is the. Yeah. So
we'll be launching that shortly, where you'll be able to put the hosts of your show and we'll put those into your RSS feed. And so the hope, I think that you brought it up, it's a great example of where Apple did it. It looks great. And so we have podcasts that reach out and say, Hey, I was at this podcast and it had these pictures. And how did that happen? Apple did that, but. Nobody else can do it. There's no way for us to implement that.
And so this levels, the playing field that allows us to say everybody, I don't care how big your show is. I don't care what Apple thinks you can now put your podcast, hosts, images, and a link to your profile and things like that.
Yeah, and it's great. And we talked about you supporting all these new tags, but the challenge is chicken and egg. You put these in, but where will they be exposed? So I might put in for Podland the picture of me and James as the authors of this show is that the challenge, the industry now faces you support it and then someone will expose it. It's the chicken
or the egg. And no one wanted to be the first. Mover. Nobody wanted to, and let's face it. I understand it. It costs real money to develop a feature. It also costs usability, which for us is really important. Buzzsprout we want to make things very simple and easy to understand. We don't want to ask people for information that they don't understand. Why are you asking for the location? What does that have to do with my Podcast? Or where is that going to show up? Why am I going to give this.
Information to you. And so it's definitely a chicken or the egg, and we wanted to put our full weight behind it. We've got a lot of podcasts. We have probably over 90, 90, some thousand active podcasts on Buzzsprout and we wanted to put our full weight behind all of these different tags and what we've decided. we'll do it first, even if there's not a player that supports it, we're going to go ahead and put it into the tags. And hopefully that gets a player out there to say, okay, Man.
I want to be different. I want to be able to do the same kind of things that somebody, as big as Apple is doing with their player, I want to do it. And so I can make use of these tags just like them. I think
Paul Chase is going to be one of the first that does support the people tag I've spoken to Bradley and he's looking to support it. So I think it's going to happen. I think it's the old India model around Costa is going to be surrounding conquer. That'd be great if
every player. Out there supports a feature except for Spotify and Apple. They're hopefully going to give in and say, okay, we'll support that now, too.
Now you've been busy as well. You recently implemented dynamic content insertion, and you've made that free for everybody. What's the uptake been? How's it looked. And what are some of the crazy things you've seen people using it for?
Yeah, dynamic content is something that we got really excited about. The more that we talked about, I'm more on the technical side and Kevin and his creative team came up with a really simple way to be able to implement dynamic content so people can upload. A little piece of audio that would play at the beginning of their episodes or at the end of their episodes, they upload it and then they can just go in and swap it out for episodes.
And what it does is it opens up possibilities for all kinds of things. It could be a host read ad, but it could also be an announcement. Hey, I'm going to be speaking at a conference. We had somebody that wrote in, they used it for name change. They were changing the name of their podcast. So there's all different. Ways that people can use dynamic content.
What we want to do is provide a powerful tool like that and make it as simple as possible that people, when we actually, when we initially launched it, people were like, did I do it right? Because it seemed too easy. And we were like, okay, we did it in such a way that it was so easy that they didn't even believe that it happened. So we actually put in some more visual cues to show them, yes, I know it's working. What you've done has changed it.
We had to do that because yeah, it was just so simple and so intuitive, but yeah, dynamic content is a great feature. We've got a great response from it. We include it in all of our plans. we've always. Charged for the things that we had to charge for. We don't want to be the nickel and dime company. We want to be able to provide those kinds of tools and only charged for them when we have to charge for it.
Now there's a big conversation in the industry going on about downloads versus streaming and how you measure the value of your Podcast. So I call it legacy because of bandwidth that download has been the way that we do things botified. Bedding their shirt on streaming.
And a lot of people are talking about using dynamic content, insertion, Brian Barletta used it brilliantly recently to show that they can inject ads at different points using time of day weather, other externalities, to determine what's being put into your Podcast. Where do you stand? Do you think eventually about sprout moved to a more of a streaming or will you always remain with this download side of the fence? Where do you see the industry going? We will always
err, on the side of. Respecting privacy. And so without mechanisms for how we protect people's information and how we do that's only, I can say with 100% that we don't want to do anything. That's going to put us in a position where it's creepy, where people say, how did they do that? How do they know where I was? How did this thing happen? I didn't realize they were tracking that information about me.
And so dynamic content is a great example of how we did it in such a way that you still have the powerful feature of being able to provide some dynamic content that you can swap out and your editing. Without having to do anything creepy.
And I've never really thought about it that way at home. A number of people had talked about how they measure the value of their Podcast by the number of downloads. But if you've got host read ads, hard coded into the Podcast you only had some listener listen in their downloads, the first two ads and the third one was never heard, but that poor advertisers being charged and Spotify as arguments, be more we'll inject at the time.
So we will know when you're listening and we'll know where the ad is, but I'd never actually, till now I actually thought about. That is the other side. It's a privacy coin, which is where I am. You know what I'm doing? You know what I'm where my
location, there's an element of that too. Which if you just think about the way that you frame the question it's under this guys that we have bought into, I think as an industry, that success is measured based on downloads. And I think that can be really misleading and discouraging for people when they get into podcasting, because it's not always about the number of downloads. That's not the only way to. Provide value in your Podcast is based on the number of downloads.
And unfortunately, a lot of people think that is the only strategy for success is for me to get a bunch of downloads where there's tons of other models for how you can use a podcast to provide value and have an impact on people. And those are the kinds of messages that when we originally got into it, that's what really excited us was people that had a message that they wanted to get out to the world and they didn't know how, and we made it really simple.
You can get that message out to the world and whether it impacted a hundred people, a thousand people, 500 people, whatever the number is, it was more about, I have a method. There's a way for me to get this thing that's inside of me out to the world. And that still excites me to this day. I love going and seeing all the different podcasts that are out there about any topic you can possibly imagine as tight of niche, as you can think of. There's a podcast about it. And it's great. Those people.
Love talking about that topic and they're passionate about it. And their success is not measured based on downloads. No matter how much this whole industry tries to move in that direction of defining success for them. It's just not.
So if we don't measure it in downloads, are we going to measure in. Maybe subscriptions. So the room is around the industry or that Apple are going to turn on subscriptions. Is that a nother way of measuring success in math? You get paid.
It's definitely success for Apple and it's definitely successful for the Podcast that gets bought. I just think there's a huge middle ground or not even a middle ground. It is. The majority of podcasts that are out there are never going to get acquired by any kind of walled garden of Spotify. They're chasing a pipe dream that will only monetize based on downloads versus building. I'm an author, and I'm going to use my podcast to promote my book.
I'm a consultant, and this is a way for me to connect or I'm just a person. I was talking to someone from a hospital. And they'd come across a Podcast. It was a woman whose husband had come down with a disease. She started a podcast to just talk about from the moment of diagnosis through the first year, changing the diet, all of the different things that she ran into, everything related to this one specific disease. And what happened was it changed the trajectory of people's treatment.
They responded so much better if they listen to this podcast. And so the hospital was talking to me about how do we get more of this? How do we didn't we don't even understand what happened. And how do you measure success? How do you, how does that translate into a world where the only Podcast content is in a walled garden and we're monetizing it through Geico ads. That's just not. Yeah, the future, I think by
hopefully not. Now, one of the other things that you've recently written about is the way that you handle audio. So James and I broadcast this podcast out at 192 kilobits per second in stereo, but it was initially when we first did our first uploads, it was it. Brought down to 96 kilobits per second, but you've now decided to make a clarity on that. Can you talk a bit more about that? When
we first started, there were all types of blocks that people were putting in front of people when they were starting podcasting, all kinds of decisions that they had to make about what should, how should I record? What kind of equipment should I use? And they were being pushed to become audio engineers. And we said, don't worry about any of that. Let's just. Look at the industry standards, what is the best way to optimize the audio? And that's what we did.
And we automatically optimize the audio. And then after some years we recognize that one size didn't fit for everybody because you did have music podcasts, and you do have people that do want to record in stereo, or they understand. Bit rates and things like that. And so for those people, we did, we launched a stereo option, but we've had that for a long time. The only thing that we've recently done was just write up all of the details.
Cause we're finding more professional podcasters that are coming to Buzzsprout and they're saying, wait a minute, I didn't know there was anything happening. And so now we've got a nice write-up so they can understand what we do automatically and what they can do if they don't want their files to be touched at all.
Okay. So I'll put that into the show notes. So our link to that, into the show notes today is this one of the features around magic mastering is can you tell people what magic mastering is as well?
Magic mastering is it's a bit more, we have some audio enhancements is what we call them magic mastering being like the umbrella over all of it, but. The magic mastering is where we'll send it to be leveled and all of the things that we can automatically do to an episode. So it's more than just optimization and it is costly because we're integrating with a third party to be able to do that. And so we do charge extra for that, but that's what the magic mastering is.
It's basically going through a process and I'm not an audio. Guy, but it's based on a lot of experience. Kevin on our team spent a lot of time figuring out what are the optimal settings that will work for the majority of our Podcast or some people when they put their episode through might not like the results they might be on the fringe, but for the large share of people, that's what we want it to be able to do. And ultimately we didn't want to harm.
That was what Kevin would say a lot is do no harm. He would want to, I don't want to make it sound worse. It might not. Maybe they put it through and it doesn't sound better. But we don't want it to sound worse when it gets to the other side of it. So ideally people can put it through there and it saves them a step in their audio processing. Or maybe they've never done it before and they just run it through mastering and they go, I don't know why it sounds better, but wow. That
sounds a lot. Yeah. On last week's podcast, we were talking about a potential new tag that's coming to the Podcast index namespace called the alternative enclosure tag and. This may be something that Buzzsprout supports early. I know you support a lot of the features early. So I think is in phase three currently. And it would be a way of allowing some people like James and I to have 192 kilobits seconds is our preferred level of all audio, but equally we.
We were interviewing the African Podcast festival people and they were saying it costs to download. And so they would want a low bit rate. is that something you think you would eventually support multiple track levels that people who then choose before you answer Tom? I don't get why we haven't done this before. Cause you go to many videos sites and you've got three 64, 87, 20 4k as an option. So why don't we just do that in podcasting?
Yeah, I think that's definitely something that we would look at. I would be more excited about it from the perspective of another format besides MP3. So being able to provide an alternate format that's maybe more efficient or effective at delivering audio content than an MP3 and using an alternative enclosure to be able to deliver that you could also do it for a smaller sized file. I just think more and more.
Even in Africa, there's just more and more bandwidth and it will get less and less expensive. And so I think in the long-term, if we're looking for innovating for the future, I think that's probably a more realistic use of the alternative enclosure tag would be to have a, another format besides MP3 as new formats emerge,
Tom Rossey, founder partner at sprout. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks. Sam.
Tom Rossi from Buzzsprout and we thank Buzzsprout for their sponsorship of this podcast, along with our friends at squad cast, which is how we're both talking to each other today.
Now we had a question this week from a friend of Podland from Harry Morton. Hi,
Sam. Hi James. This is Harry I'm the founder of lower street. We're a branded podcasting company out of the UK, a big fan of the show. Keep up the good work. I've got a question about AI. You recently had the founder of lately on the show, which is doing all kinds of clever stuff. Repurposing our Podcast content for socials. Descript is obviously doing incredible stuff with their transcriptions, removing filler words. And then their overdub feature is obviously.
Potentially replacing hosts at some point. And then there's all kinds of clever AI kind of writing content, sales copy writing your blog posts for you. It seems not too far to go until we're seeing AI. Is that right? Podcast script. So I've got two questions. The first one is where do you think the new tech is going to take us in podcasting? What are the next tools going to be and where are there opportunities there and things for us to look forward to. But also, should we be worried?
Are we going to be put out of a job here in podcasting? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Cheers guys. thank you, Harry. Gosh, where'd you go with that? Sam you first?
I think AI is going to certainly help us more. My, my one area that I think it would could help us is in the area of transcription and moderation. I know I keep banging this drum about moderation, but I think it is going to become an issue in the industry. And unless we, as the industry address it before it becomes a legal issue, then we will find people falling foul. Now, moderation. Because transcription is now fairly standard through a lot of places.
I think we could have hosts who could then simply apply a bit of AI to certain key words that would then alert them to certain podcasts that are carrying possibly right-wing offensive material, sexist material, things that society has agreed are not acceptable. And I just don't think. The current stance that the industry takes, which is we'll just let anything go out there. And if someone happens to report it, then we will consider taking it down. That seems a little bit laissez Faire to me.
And I think AI. Could help them because I think the problem they're saying is it's too big a challenge for us to actually police all these Podcast with a manual process. So while we can't do it with any intelligence, we're just going to leave it alone and let it just exist. But I think that issue will come and bite
us in the box. Yeah. I think that's certainly one side, I would also suggest that AI could be used for spotting music, things like that. The illegal use of music and arguably it already is, there are a couple of services out there which are sniffing podcasts for use of music. So that's one thing I think also AI, just from a basic technical point of view could be used for things like a better audio compression, particularly seeing if you can take a Podcast.
And make it a smaller audio download, but still make it sound as good as you possibly can. And that isn't always just a case of punching in some numbers into something it's a case of actually listening to it and working out whether or not this still sounds okay. And actually AI could play a part in that too. So yeah, I think there's some really interesting tools coming up and Harry, thanks so much for asking
about them. Anything that Harry mentioned was descripts overdub and that's getting better and better as the ability to take your voice and how it then trained and synthesized so that you can then type out text and it will generate your Podcast voice from it. a few years back, a company called real talk used AI to take Joe Rogan's voice. but they used it and. They actually synthesize it and then got him to talk about how he was going to sponsor an ice hockey team using monkeys.
As the player, I've decided to sponsor a hockey
team, made up entirely of chimps and tired of people telling me that
chimps are not capable of kicking human ass and
sports. Chimps are just superior athletes. See you on
the ice folks. Now that was a deep fake and I need to add that the script will not allow you to take someone else's voice and create an overdub from it, but obviously real talk managed to take the 13,000 podcasts or million podcasts that Joe Rogan's done.
yes. The script for editing is he's a really good and clever tool. And, being able, just to say , right, get rid of all of the arms, get rid of all of the years. It's very clever. And I think, there's a bunch of people that would really benefit from it
So James, what's coming up in Podland for you this month, launching a
very good thing tomorrow which is very cool. You have a link in your show notes actually for it. But we won't put them in the show notes of the podcast because I'm not launching it today and watching it tomorrow, but it's a very smart thing. It looks at where podcasts are moving from one hosting company to another I've discovered a thing called a Sankey diagram. Oh, Sankey diagrams. They're the future.
I'll tell you anyway, there's some really surprising information there in terms of just where Podcast has, are moving from what Podcast hosts and what Podcast hosts Podcast is, are moving to. There are some big winners and some big losers as well. Some really interesting information, which I'm looking forward to launching tomorrow. Assuming of course, that there isn't another. Big massive story of somebody buying somebody else tomorrow.
because otherwise that'll ruin it all for everybody, but anyway, that's what I'm doing or what are you doing, Mr. Sam? Sethi,
I'm actually moving my Podcast from simple cars to Buzzsprout, but that's one thing. That's another story, but I doubt I've made your Sankey list or your article of big changes. I doubt that made anyone's. Change list actually, apart from my own now, what am I doing? I'm still putting together the final parts of our river radio station river.radio, which goes live on the 1st of March. Yes, it's very exciting. We've taken on even more presenters. This week, I must be
mad. Oh, very good. I've been enjoying a new radio station out of the UK called boom radio, which is for old people, but what's quite clever about this radio station brand new radio station, but it's coming from people's houses. And some of the people who are presenting are, very old I've worked in radio all of their life. But now working at home, doing great sounding shows and it's sounding fantastic. So a boom radio is a very good thing.
It's worthwhile the seeking out on dab in some parts of the UK and also online at boom radio, uk.com.
And in fact, we will be having several of our presenters working from home, which opens up the palette for allowing more presenters who are further afield
in the studio. And of course we are both at home as well as we currently speak. So who knows radio might be learning from podcasting and that's it for this week. If you've enjoyed your trip to Podland come back again. Next time you can subscribe on all the major Podcast players or visit our website at www dot still haven't fixed this. Pod lands. Don't use
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And if you want daily news, you should subscribe to the daily Podcast newsletter. It's free. Pod news.net. And that's where you'll find the links for all of the stories that we've mentioned this week. Music is from ignite jingles. We used squad cast for our interviews this week, and a little bit of zoom. I think it was edited by me on Hindenburg journalist pro, and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout. We'll
see you in potluck next week. And James, I'll see you on Monday two in the morning and looking forward to it.