Welcome to Portland. We're sponsored by Buzzsprout is the easiest way to host, promote and track your podcast. And your first 90 days are free. It's may the 27th, 2021 on James Crick and the editor of news here in Australia. Okay.
And officially a Australian citizen, James.
and officially on Australian citizen as well, which is all very exciting. Yes. yes, that was a very exciting day that I had on Monday. And who are you?
I am Sam Sethi, the editor of Sam Talks Technology here in the UK. And finally, we've got some sun after the wettest April ever. So all I can say is start the hose pipe ban and the moaning Brits that it's too hot now
We'll page author of task and economics eight principles in pivoting through disruption. And I'll be on the show later on to talk about podcasts.
He will indeed, along with Dave Jones, the developer of podcast index. Portland's a weekly podcast where Sam and I delve deeper into the week's podcast news.
now the big story of the week that I wanted to cover eight podcast to piracy in licensing. James, you wrote about a wonderful podcast called finding the Tasha, which is from message heard. And you wrote that they had their podcast well stolen or copied and syndicated. What's it all about Jane?
so this was happening quite a lot. Last year, anchor was being used to essentially copy people's plans, casts, and then the pirate would add on there, support this podcast and have a button to give the podcast some money because it was such a good podcast, except all they'd done is they'd stolen the audio in the first place. and so that was happening a lot last year and cars seemed to have. Cut down on that they seem to be running some kind of automated bot that is at least checking the audio.
Is not the same as audio, which is already in the Spotify system. which kind of makes sense. The weird thing about finding Natasha is that what they've done is that the pirate has put the audio up on anchor, but they haven't used the audio artwork nor have they used the audio in its entirety, because any mention of message heard, which is the company that made it they've edited out, which is a bit weird.
I thought we would reach out and actually talk to Jake Warren. Who's the CEO of message heard and ask him what it's all about. Jake. Hello, how are you?
Hi Sam. I'm good. Thank you so much for having me on again.
welcome back now. Congratulations on the successful launch. What is finding Natasha all about?
it's an interesting one because it's something which is incredibly personal to me because it's actually, what about my mum? which is, I guess a bit bizarre and doesn't follow the usual pattern of the kind of shows that we make a mess of showed. But to be honest with you, It was never actually intended to be a podcast. And it's almost a bit by luck, chance, and I guess the sort of foresight of my colleagues that it actually ended up being one because.
I guess to give you the kind of background of the story without ruining the story. So if anyone's listening, hasn't heard it. I can go away and listen to it without divulging too much information. But essentially my mom was in the early 1970s, when she was a teenager, she was. I guess anointed as having the talent to potentially be one of the world's best ballet dancers. now obviously this is a period of time where, relations between the east and the west Soviet bloc Soviet union.
And that wasn't particularly good. and as was the case then, which is very much still the case now, which is, if he wants to be the greatest dancer in the world, that is the crown jewel of ballet, it's part and parcel of association with Russia. it's the great ballet companies, the Bolshoi and the Marine ski are still probably faded as the two best in the world. And my mum had the opportunity to be the first Western ballet dancer.
To be deemed good enough to get a scholarship, to go and dance in the Soviet union as a 17 year old, 1974. So that's a very long story short. I think she was probably naive to be polite as to the kind of the circumstances of what that would mean going, unfortunately for her, she went at a time as well after a few prominent defections that happened to the west. Mainly Mikayla and effectively she was shunned, not wanted fared as a westerner and left their home devices.
she ended up getting very sick for drinking, dirty water and contracting hepatitis, and was also suffering from malnutrition. She was effectively left the die in an isolation ward. and that probably would have been where she had died. If it wasn't for the intervention of one Russian teenager. A girl called Natasha, who was the only person that showed her any kindness that actually broke into the facility, managed to get her out and alert the British authorities and effectively, get her home.
Now, the last time my mum saw the Tasha or the last time she had any interaction with her was on a runway, almost 50 years ago in 1974. And my mum has Been searching for her ever since in fits and bursts, but had also repressed this for a very long time. So I actually only found out about this story in its extent, a couple of years ago, maybe two years ago. because it was all a bit too painful. I think my mum had blocked it out.
she eventually did reveal the story to me and it was hovering in the back of my mind. I need to try and find this woman or at least find out what happened to her. for the sake of my mom. and I had always intended to obviously running a business can be pretty time consuming, but when lockdown one happened, I went back to stay with my mum for a few months. she does on her own sort of fruit of the worst of it. And we were talking about it a lot.
And that was where I made the decision that actually, that was a lot of uncertainty with everything in the world. now that felt like the right opportunity and the right time to try and find this word. And I won't ruin what happens, but. The podcast affects. We documents that experience of trying to find the woman that saved my mum, half the world away, half a century ago.
I never intended for it to be a podcast, but talking to my colleagues as I did on a daily basis, I think it was probably Sandra Ferrari and they had a production and said, what? This is a pretty good story. We should start recording this, just in case. And thank goodness we did make that decision because. The response to the show has been overwhelming.
we're lucky enough to make some pretty great shows that have had some fantastic responses, but doing something which felt a bit of a personal pet project has really snowballed into something which, the emails and the messages of people saying how lovely they thought it was. and just the kind response to that, not so much even for me or message up, but actually for my mum, I think is. it restores your faith a little bit in the world.
I can see this being a film. it's got a film written all over it really
we're very lucky because obviously we are. Signed by Curtis brown, one of those great mystery and talent agents. and this has actually presented a really interesting opportunity where we've had expressed interest in books and TV and drama adaptations, and all that good stuff, which, was beyond my wildest dreams when I started this, so it's really exciting. it feels something. Mammoth could come out of this, which was never my intention, but there's a lovely bonus. we're not going to say no.
And your mother will be very proud of you. Now, the one challenge that's come about, I understand is that some buddy's taken your lovely podcast and loaded it up on tanker. Change the cover off book and plagiarized it in effect a bit of podcast. Piracy and I'll pushing it out to the end points of, apple, Spotify, Google, et cetera and pushing it off as their own How did you get alerted to that? First of all, and what's the consequences.
Okay. so it was actually worse than that, because that idea of Ripping audio and re-uploading, it is it's not particularly new or novel, that's happened all the time. Usually with, probably the biggest shows you don't think about the Joe Rogan's of this world, having that has, shows put onto YouTube and stuff, but actually they had actually manipulated the audio itself to actually add it and remove any mention of message.
Heard the company that made the show, which was particularly bizarre because obviously it's my voice in the show. And Massachusetts, is the business I run, but. it was one step further because it wasn't just plagiarized It was actually manipulation of it. I guess the way that we found it was really just through good luck because with my team and I think it was my colleague, Emily, who leads on more of the sort of marketing and PR side of things with us.
Typing it into the usual places that you would imagine. And suddenly there was another show called finding Natasha, which had the exact same description and slightly different artwork. And we're thinking, hang on a minute, here that's ours. And someone is gone to these extreme blanks to try and make it theirs. but that's part of the issue when it comes to music in particular. There is all this clever software, which is able to detect when copyrights is being infringed.
Now it may exist for the podcast. And I certainly don't know about it if it does. So really it's a manual job, isn't it to scour the internet to use that phrase wherever you get yours, to look at all these places to see if is anyone actually trying to steal or repurpose something which we own.
So what's the downside. are you charging a subscription for finding an attach or is it free on various sites? So that's my first question. Are you charging for it?
with this particular show funding, Natasha, we're not I think. part of the reason is that, we don't put everything that we do behind a paywall. In fact, we've not done anything by the payroll to date. of course we do monetize some programming. I think this goes back to the fact that, like I said, the reality is that, although this is. Been received as a very successful podcast. It didn't intend to be, and, exploiting my mom's trauma for content is an accusation you could make for doing this.
I don't think she feels that way. And I think she's very happy with it, but it felt a little on the nose to really start monetizing this. This was more of something that was just, a proud editorial piece that we're very happy to make a message out. And we wanted as many people to enjoy it for free as possible. it's not something that was, Katanning our ability to make money. But in theory, there was nothing to stop that person that I've loaded our anchor, then in turn, monetizing it themselves.
it will, of course affect your traffic because they're taking some of your traffic away now. this week apple announced and has made available iOS 14.6 with subscriptions. And so you can start to see more and more people putting subscriptions to this. I could imagine, actually, in a couple of weeks time had you. Gross out finding a Tashi.
You might've said, okay, we're going to charge one 99 a subscription, and I can see more piracy, therefore, a caring as people go, oh look, we just rip that off. Put it in there, throw it in with a subscription. If anyone buys it, we'll take some money. The problem I spoke to a will page who wrote a book called tiles and economics. He's the ex Spotify, chief economist. About funding, the Tasha about this very problem.
And he was saying that under safe Harbor rules, a bit like YouTube, that Spotify, an anchor can wash their hands off the piracy issue, but he did point out that soon as it becomes a payment. So if there was a subscription payment to it, Then they're taking a percentage of that payment and suddenly they are complicit with theft in effect. what is anchor and Spotify said to you, if anything, will they take down this other podcast or will they just going not our problem,
I'm glad to say that it has been taken down now after we got in touch, but only to the extent of whilst they in their words, Receive the complaint on, infringing, intellectual property rights and there's under investigation. They haven't determined that. Okay. This shouldn't have ever happened. But what they seem to do is that was you lodge a complaint. They will take it down to investigate what's going on. So you'd hope that common sense would prevail and they wouldn't allow it back up.
Anytime soon, we haven't got that confirmation yet, but at least they did act fairly quickly to take it down whilst they looked into that. it's an interesting one because. you've got the person, that's put it up who apparently is a wrestler. So I don't know what to make of that. maybe it's a podcast, isn't it finding the person that tried to still finding the Tasha, so they've acted quickly. obviously it's not affecting us from a monetization perspective, but you're right.
That kind of, I think the term you used was safe harboring that, that goes out the window when there's money involved and rightly
And I think again, one of the questions is who's at fault here should anchor Buzzsprout lip-sync any of the podcast hosts be policing podcasting in the first place to check, this is who it is, and this is who they say they are. Secondly, is Upland spot find Google, the end point distribution points libel to anything This won't ever come to a full light where anyone cares until a legal challenge is brought in place. I guess the law comes in.
But do you think there's anything podcasters can do themselves in between that? rather than going to court for final decisions made.
It's really tricky, isn't it? Because as the sort of content creator as the podcast it's really hard to, to scour all of the possible destinations as to where your content could sit to make sure that no one's stealing your content and actually. Should that burden of responsibility be on you? I think probably not.
To be honest, I also have some sympathy with the end points, the Google podcasts, Spotify as the apples of this world, because actually if you're uploading it into your hosting provider and then free that backend disseminating it everywhere where you would imagine it feels to me, there should be some more. Stringent verification process as to actually what you're uploading is yours. at the moment, it just seems to say, Click a box. I promise I'm not lying.
I actually do own this, but actually beyond that, what are they actually doing to police and make sure that you are not committing fraud and you are not stealing other people's content. So to me, I think the logical place of where they should set is with the hosting providers.
If they're willing to accept your content and potentially take a concert of any revenue that, that content generates and you're paying them fees for their services, they should be making sure that people are not stealing your content.
I tend to agree with you. I think it goes broader than just stealing your content. I spoke to James many months ago. there's a big thing about Facebook and Twitter having to watch what's being said, President Trump was famously taken down and certain posts. If you put the word Nazi or you put the word whatever into your tweet or your Facebook posts, the moderators on those using AI will flag it and take it down. There's also a way as me as a reader of those can flag it and alert.
actually we now know how to auto transcribe pretty quickly within a certain accuracy, a podcast, we do it all the time and AI does exist, which could go through and look for certain key words. And so I think. Putting aside, just the plagiarism or the piracy. There was also, I think, a role for the hosts to actually moderate the content.
we don't want mass here, green in Americas, putting out podcasts, realizing that actually, if I put it on Twitter and Facebook, I can't say what I want to say, but I can put it in a podcast. No one can actually stop me cause no one's policing it and I can get my message out equally as far as I want to, because it's not moderated.
you hear these stories about White supremacist content being hosted on apple or Spotify or whatever. And it's not a case of them accepting it with open arms. I believe it's just the exactly. As you said, there is no moderation in place. And so it's someone stumbles across it and says to them, Hey, do you realize you're hosting this? And then retrospectively, they go, oh, actually we don't want to be hosting this. Whereas actually, It feels like there should be subjective barriers in place.
Now I'm not saying that it should be disruptive let's not have a thousand hoops to jump through.
Now Dave Jones from the podcast index or who's on the show later as well, today is just launched a new licensed tank a bit like the creative commons that we had on flicker in the old days. Where you can put an attribution. Do you think that would be a good start for podcasts where you could save with finding the Tasha? Nope. This is totally mine. No, one's allowed to copy it and no one's allowed to use it. Or you could have on another podcast of yours.
You're allowed to take a little clip out of it because this week, Jason Calacanis is talking about how a service called pod clips started to take bits of his podcasts and then monetize against it, but not give him attribution or the third element of maybe this license could be well crack on take all my content. Do what you like with it. I don't care. Do you think that might be a good first step?
I think so I think like anything, it would be the scale of what she could be rolled out. And the awareness that it could bring in. So that actually, if it's something that 5% of the industry use, okay it's not going to be that useful. If it's something where there can be a sort of uniform understanding that this is the service that we use, and it's a sort of traffic like approach, as you said, that IBA, Reggie can't use any. but here's a few bits of green crack on. Fantastic.
Because then everyone understands the level playing field for everyone and it's clearly signposted what you can and can't do. I think just anecdotally from my own experience and, the example that you give there, I have noticed a more significant rise in people approaching me with opportunities. So they say for social podcasting and clips and stuff, and naturally, like you mentioned beyond the attribution, which, Seems to be pretty primitive, like it gets lost.
I don't really see the benefits of that to be honest. So I think if there can be a uniform system, if it's this podcasting index, as you mentioned that everyone knows and understands, that is fantastic, but it would just make everyone's life.
And I think, we touched on it briefly. Once money starts to get involved, this is going to become a much bigger issue. I don't think people are going to start saying hang on to me. I just lost several thousand pounds to that person copying my content and monetizing it. How do I get that back? Apple or Google or Spotify, And think yours is a prime example of just the tip of the iceberg. That's about to occur. I think.
I think you're probably right. I think That whenever money is involved, things start getting messier, right?
thankfully that wasn't our effect, but if there's small issue that seems to thankfully have been resolved now can help people realize that actually this is going to becoming what as monitorization becomes an even bigger parcel of costly with subscriptions and stuff, then, look, we need to get the proper processes, checks and balances in place, which is fraud and piracy should not be easy and it shouldn't be condoned.
I agree. Now, Jake, where can people go and get finding Natasha?
to use the overly used phrase, wherever you get yours, you can listen to finding the Tasha
Jack Warren, CEO of message. Home. Thank you so much. Speak
to soon, Jake. Thank you so much for having me have a lovely day.
Jake Warren from message heard. That's a really interesting thing of just seeing a little bit more piracy in this space.
so one of the things that I wanted to ask you about James, before we go on, is who do you think was at fault or do you think he was anchor? Do you think he is Spotify or do you think is apple bus sprout lip-sync allowing this to happen? is there a fault or is it just a simple case of. No one has a system to stop it. And therefore somebody just pushing the boundaries by saying, okay, I'm just going to keep taking stuff until somebody says I can't.
arguably, I think that the problem that we have here, the thing that is at fault is the podcast industry. Because we have said that podcasts are open there's no DRM, there's no license that you need to sign in order to. Have a podcast in your own app, the RSS feeds are all open, all of that stuff. So therefore that does mean that you get people coming along and using podcasts in a way that the creator doesn't want that podcast to be used.
In terms of the copy on anchor, arguably anchor makes it a little bit too easy, a little bit too simple and straightforward for podcasters to copy. Shows, but at the end of the day, that's the point of anchor. The point of anchor is to make it easy, straightforward, and make it easy to podcast. is it the fault of anybody? I don't think it's the fault of anybody really. I think it's just, whenever you build things, bad, people will work out how to use them for ill rather than for good.
And we just need to make sure that we watch out for that and try and get in their way as much as possible. there was a little bit more piracy. as well that happened Sam last week as well.
You wrote about Jason Calacanis famous from this weekend startups and a big VC investor in the valley. He was having his podcasts clipped. So not all of it being taken a service called pod clips. It was taking parts of it and then monetizing against his clips and he wasn't very happy. So he sent them a cease and desist letter. And it seems I've taken it down, but they don't feel they did anything wrong.
It's a strange old thing. I contacted pod clips. I don't know where pod clips are. They're one of these companies that hasn't even put their address on their website, which is always a bit of a concern. If you go into their privacy policy, then it says it talks a little bit about California law, which means one of two things, either the company is based in California or probably. More realistically, the company has copied a privacy statement from a California company.
but what they do is they take clips of podcast. It shows as a form of curation which is fine. And that's I guess. Okay. But they seem to be taking the audio as well and sticking the audio on their own servers, which is no good. So I did a. a technical review of how the website works and how the app works and all of the audio was being served from their own server.
It's probably a good reason for that in that's dynamic ad insertion of course means that it's a little, a bit difficult to get accurate clips, but it is also, copyright theft. And so they shouldn't be doing it. so I did ask the company for clarification of their licensing agreements knowing full well, they probably didn't have any given that there are companies like NPR and Vox media on there. and of course they haven't come back to me.
so I think it's just one of these, dodgy companies that's not quite understood how podcasts work and thinks that they can just take the audio and take the MP3 files and do whatever they like with it. And this is a great example, of, pod clips taking little clips of a podcast, taking something perhaps out of context and then sticking it on their own website. That's clearly not what any creator would actually want
we talked about apple subscriptions. We know Spotify is turning on subscription soon. Now there's money in them Hills. We'll probably see a lot more of this, as people start saying, oh, look, if I can make somebody else's content sticker, subscription against it and get paid. so the point I think is when it's free, it's immoral, but when it's paid and I'm losing revenue, then there's liability.
Yes, I think so. And my understanding of where apple is moving their approval process too, is that apple is now spending their time and energy on looking at channels. Are you looking at the paid stuff rather than necessarily looking so closely at the free stuff. and I've had quite a few people this week telling me that apple seems to be accepting new podcasts remarkably quickly, sometimes within minutes which has never happened in the past.
but the channels are still taking a number of hours if not days to get approved. So perhaps that sort of, apple changing that around a little bit. But as soon as you dangle money in front of people, then people find different ways of using and abusing that. The reason why anchor particularly, it's one of the tools that our typical podcast pirate uses is firstly it's free. And secondly, you can earn money out of it. You can earn money out of squeezing ads in there.
You can earn money out of the anchor support stuff. And we might think five or $10, that's all that they're learned five or $10 in some countries. There's a lot of money. and of course anchor is available everywhere, not just in the U S any of those services, Spreaker, similarly and other free podcast services as well. That issue in that it really does make it really easy for people to copy stuff and to, take other people's work and pass it off as their own.
And I still have a, an issue about what I call podcast policing. you and I have talked about this in the past. I still think that forgetting just plagiarizing content like they did with finding Natasha. I wonder if it's Marcy green putting up crazy, Wing views or somebody who not Marcy agreeing, but somebody who just says, the KKK is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Who is responsible.
Cause if I wrote that on Twitter, or I wrote that on Facebook the AI would pick that text up and immediately bring it down. And my point we now have auto transcription. So we now have the ability with AI should Buzzsprout lip sync, anchor, all the others, captivate shouldn't they be looking at the content, going into these and. Looking at the moderation on them before that posted or distributed.
so what the law says is that a company like Libsyn or captivate or whoever, or Buzzsprout is a common carrier. and therefore it's not its job to sit there and check that. Absolutely. Everything it does is.
legal and above board in terms of the content that it hosts, but that it should react very quickly if somebody reports that content is wrong and and shouldn't be there now, you and I have spoken in the past about a podcast that I. found on one podcast host, that was just the most unpleasant thing. I reported it to that particular podcast host and the person who I reported it to went over a well is a very nice man.
He pointed me to their terms and conditions and said it's in our terms and conditions that we're not responsible and, that's where we're going to end it. so from that point of view, I found that quite. Disappointing, obviously. so you've got from the podcast has host's point of view, legally, they're not responsible from the publisher's point of view and the publisher maybe the individual podcaster. It may also be of course, somebody like Spotify or apple that has a directory of shows.
it's up to apple. Or Spotify, what shows are in their directory. and if they want to get rid of some of the shows from their directory, then they certainly can. So things like Alex Jones, for example who's a dreadful conspiracy theorist. his show isn't in apple anymore. Although of course it's still available as an RSS feed because that was a decision that apple ended up making.
what podcast index has said is we're never going to pull anything out because we don't agree with that sort of behavior, but I think, you and I come from a different culture than some of the freedom loving Americans who are quite happy to hear anything on their radio and anything on their podcasts.
I caught up with will page the former chief economist at Spotify, and who's the author of Tarzan and economics to ask him about piracy and who should be responsible, for moderating all of this. will. Hello.
Great to be here. Thanks for having me back
now. Podcast piracy seems to be on the app. We have heard an interview earlier today from Jake Warren about the podcast, finding Natasha that was copied by somebody put on to anchor, given a new, fresh cover, and then redistributed to apple. And Spotify is podcast piracy going to become an issue.
Of course, it's going to become an issue. All these will be an issue. Piracy plays a part in just about everything, be it. that story We shall assume some level of shoplifting, I always remember Microsoft back in the early noughties, they had an optimal level of piracy that some geeky economist actually calculated because piracy helped spread their product too.
Emerging markets, but going back to podcasts I think piracy is going to be easier because people don't recognize borrowed words as quickly as you recognize board music. And in terms of solutions, it becomes harder. Yes, we can jump from a, to B to F and assume some sort of thing of printing tech solutions is going to come down the pipe and solve all this. That's to your example of finding a Tasha, what about plagiarism? Tech doesn't necessarily solve plagiarism.
That's as hard as trying to stop kids cheating on their school homework. So yes, the song remains the same. Piracy will always be a problem and the solutions for podcasts going to be different from music. But I got to remainder your listeners have a quote that Adam singer gave me and you see this at the start of my book, which is, what it means when you have no piracy. It means you've got no demand for your products, so there's costs, but there's also some benefits to piracy as well.
Clearly this finding attached show is a very successful podcast. Otherwise newbie would have pirated it.
So taking, finding Natasha, and we'll talk about some other examples in a minute. Who's the onus on to police this? Should there be a way of fingerprinting a podcast, or even if it's not piracy, there is an issue around, the ability for people to put up. I don't know, libelous content or a harmful content or racist content. It seems that podcasting is, a laissez Faire. Do what you like field for anybody to do anything or say anything.
Should anchor Spotify, apple Buzzsprout lip sync, all these people. Should they be predetermining? What you put up and checking it for its content, or where does the issue of content ownership and liability rest?
Oh, we are in deep water here, Sam deep water for the Lochness, which is deeper than the Atlantic ocean. And I think there's a couple of points we can unpack the early stage here at firstly, you just discuss content moderation. I think some last 40 minutes or podcasts last 40 there you have a problem and you've got much more content to moderate on. We also have no podcasts database. Very important.
We have no sort of global corporate database for music, but we're definitely are lacking our global podcast database. So tech solutions will be hindered by the fact there's no foundation to publication, but a moderation, just a quick point from the outset, which is, I would love to know how many tech companies right now, content tech companies have a content moderation team that is bigger than their legal department. Just a quick yes or no survey of the big media tech companies.
I know a couple of big guns out there and the answers are clear. Yes. Often two or three times. So twice the legal department and by the way, the gap is widening. So a moderation is going to be tougher because it's 40 minutes, not four and B the labor intensive nature of this content moderation. It's going to be expensive. And when you have a cost, it grows exponentially. If you like, you're going to get CFOs. And these companies saying few picks up the bill.
So that's one way to look at the economics of moderation back to the core part of your question, I think was the safe Harbor issues. So just very briefly. With user generated content platforms. The trick is it a question of whether or not the platform follows a safe Harbor law requirements? So what that stressing is no quotes, actual knowledge of the infringing content with podcast. I think it's easier to follow those rules because it's long, there's no database.
There's no other issues as there are with music is perhaps harder to see. I didn't actually know that song was. a problem. And then you swear, you get this off, take Damien's seat in effect, but with podcasts it's going to be an interesting one to follow and especially, and I know that you have a very global audience on this show, but if I can just make a very British specific point, just big Harbor itself was a us law adopted or imported by the European union to which Britain's no left.
So clearly there's a need to revisit all this for better or for worse. I'm not taking sides. And you're revisiting it in a world of podcasts as opposed to a world of music content. So the foundations of this debate can change, especially in this country.
So what you're saying is apple and Spotify could hide behind safe Harbor a bit like YouTube right now and wash their hands of it. So does that mean that in the ULA where the user is signing up, they'd have to put in. Terms and conditions that say anything that you generate that may be libelous, or if you steal something or if you plagiarize, you are going to be the person that goes to
court. Not us. I would see that as the likely scenario in the initial stages of nascent market plays out, but there's already twists the tail turning up right now. And James Kremlin's newsletter yesterday where reading that podcast subscriptions have arrived. Let's work this through you, Sam responsible for everything you say on your podcast, which is going to host my platform, but I'm going to monetize it for you. Okay. So now we have a financial transaction.
Is it really fair for me to wash my hands when I'm actually going to monetize that content directly for you? And then you can take it to the next stage, which is a they, and I'll take a cut of that money. I'll take a 30% fee. what Apple's done. This turn podcast, creators into app developers. So if I take a cut of that fee, I've got even more skin in the game because it makes it even harder to wash my hands. I'm spotting what I'm saying. I'm not taking a fee. Does that change the legal position?
I'm not a lawyer, but I want to slow these issues out there because we need to fastness as well. I think it's something else which is going on here too. It's picked up in a report that they did on Twitch, which is the understand that some of the terminology is already a little bit out of date. So we are used to UGC user generated content. What are you refer to in a Twitch report is a different acronym. A user created content, UCC, not UGC and amongst the gaming community.
And if we're on a Twitch, that's really caught a fuse that's burning now because we realize that it's not, I'm uploading my Favorite Katy Perry, video to YouTube and YouTube or wherever. And if the record label wants it to take down usual ticket there and using content ID, yes, I own my channel. And I'm going to go over the top. You remember that broadcast expression over the top. It's a very good one to use here over the top through Twitch to get to my consumers.
And I monetize that channel directly. YouTube picks its cut. I received my net share. And that's the essence of the business model. So user created content is the new chapter that we're opening up here and not user generated content and to reiterate safe Harbor worked well for you, UGC, I think it's going to work less well than CC, right?
So there's a problem brewing, let's say now. The technology that's available to podcast is we know how companies can auto transcribe a podcast. Within reason they'll get 90% or 95% accuracy. An AI could be used to then read that transcription. So I don't think podcasts companies have a leg to stand on these days. Maybe. 10 years ago when we weren't transcribing or auto transcribing podcasts, they could have hidden behind the, oh it's for 40 minutes or in Joe Rogan's case four hours.
How are we going to moderate that with humans will never scale it, but they should be able to scale that now very easily. When we upload this podcast to Buzzsprout, we set an auto transcribe option in deed script. So it's already then added to Buzzsprout.
So either Buzzsprout on the upload process can check for key words or key phrases or certain other fingerprints, maybe so that they might turn around and say, oh, sorry, Sam, you've got some naughty words in the air or I think you're actually saying things that are. anti VAX or the, you might be saying that there's Jewish lasers that kill, forest fires in California, so stupid things like that. And they might say, no, we're not going to host you on that basis.
So I'm just wondering, will they be able to hide behind it until there's a legal challenge? Is that what they're going to do?
So I think that the transcript point you make is really interesting and it highlights how tech can get us to a solution for piracy that is. But perhaps it was going to struggle with a solution for plagiarisms. We got to key to play around with IRC. I would imagine some sort of fingerprinting solutions can evolve from that AI reading, but plagiarism, I think is going to be harder. So the Kotlin moves on. So let's see in 18 months, time on, back on your podcast, discussing that.
And it's Hey, remember the days where we used steal each other's podcasts and stick pointing to TaShawn with a different branding. No, we just steal the content and refreeze it as our own. What did John Lennon see a brick art as borrowed and even better artists steal. So we have that kind of trade off there, going back to the AI being used with pen splits, It is possible now where you can take a paragraph of text speed, cute my podcast, and move it up to the front of the transcript.
And that moves the words up to the front. So that makes pattern recognition, which is already going to be harder and podcasts. And it is for music even harder with regards to piracy and neon impossible. With regards to plagiarism, it's going to be easier to copy your friend's school, homework and harder for the teacher to catch you out.
So one solution being proposed is by Adam Curry and Dave Jones on the podcast index. They've got a new tag called the license tag, which. From what I understand and Dave's on the show today. So we'll find out later, but it's very similar to the creative commons license that was put up for imagery that came around the time of flicker. And the idea is that the user created content owner could say, okay, will this podcast I've got, no, I don't want anyone to copy it.
It has a license that says it's, mine and mine only, no copying allowed. Or you're allowed to take some clips out of it, nothing more than that. And I'm happy with that, but you must name, check my podcast or you can have the, Do what you like with my podcast. Take it away, cut it up. Chop it up, replay it, sell it if you want to. Cause I couldn't. So maybe a license around podcasting is the way to go forward.
So it sounds to me like you're beginning to swim in the waters of creative carbons here. And in a prior life for six years, I was chief economist of the human rights society, which I know are trained to work at hotel license podcast, but we'll leave that for another day when we've got enough paracetamol and ibuprofen. But when we think about creative commons and certainly when you're at the PRS and you mentioned that word, I think you got fired, but.
I don't want to take a cynical view on this one, but I do want to flag something for your listeners, which is remember it's an irreversible decision. So we're all trying to figure, say you and James doing a great job, helping us try and figure this out. That, pod news newsletters is teaching us about something we just simply don't know enough about, but. With creative commons, it is irreversible. And do you really want to give it away?
So let's take a music analogy you do the song, can you kick it? And you release it in the nineties and you think that's fine, it's all done and dusted. And then Vodafone call you up in 2010. And we say, we want David beckoned to do a TV commercial for us with, can you kick it Thank God you held onto that copyright. All of a sudden you're putting your kids through college. Whereas, with creative commons, if you go down that path, it is irreversible.
So I questioned just, should we be discussing irreversible decisions at this early stage whilst we play and figure this out. I just want to throw that risk in there for the listeners. Another thing which I think is worth applying here, and it's an analogy that I'm actually using quite a lot, which is shopping malls, which sound like they have nothing to do with podcasts.
But I'm using it a lot to try and understand the apple techs to beat, which is going on between epic and apple in America and more next week, Spotify and apple in the European union. But it simply says, who built limo? It's not ringing system, apple built them all. And they populate that mall with lots of shops, including Spotify, Deezer, Google, Stitcher, and so on at their shops. So who sets the rules for that mall?
So when we have a situation where the owner of the shopping mall tells you what license you can and can't use, or is it the vault? I'm going to use that word devolved here. I think it's a very good legal word, not lawyer, but. Do you understand the Scottish independence debate, the evolves that don't serve retail establishments inside that mall to use their own license. And I think that's a really important one.
We have to wrestle with at an early stage, which is whose licenses anyway, the creator of the mall, my house, my rules, or is it for the users of the retail establishments in that role, your shop, your rules. And I think that's a really interesting way to think about how competition law will play out here.
To end it there really we're talking about apple, let's say the podcast app store taking a cut of the money now with subscriptions, but somebody like Buzzsprout or lip-sync or captivate uploading a podcast that I host to them directly. And where's the money slices happening. Who's taking the ownership of it and where's the liability within the, I think,
I just woke up on that one, which is just to stress. The knee jerk reaction is off. It's my money. It's my rules. I can see how listeners will jump to conclusion there, but. One of the incredible things for the apple app store is the way they've managed to handle fraud and payment systems and invest in systems that doesn't come for free. That's not free lunch. It doesn't hang off trees. You get the structure there.
Now, if apple, can you ignite a huge podcast subscription market where payment systems are frictionless and fraud has minimized, then you've got to give them a hat to say you built that mall. So you set the rules, but if you had rules for each individual podcast or licensee speaking to the podcast, or it might be harder to enforce that payment solution. And that's where the shopping mall analogy comes in, the customer wants to know they're going to the mall.
They're going to have a safe experience. There are rules that need to be done at the central base. And there are rules which can be devolved down to the individual and that's the trade. And I just want to really flag that Twitch report is not, bragging rights here, but. That, Twitch report tiles, no climates.com/twitch. You'll see it was just a really groundbreaking study of what happens when it's. User created content. That's setting the rules as opposed to you to generate it real quick.
You've got examples where people on Twitch are using Patrion and Kickstarter to monetize their content on Twitch. Now we've got. Two platforms with their own sets of rules on top of another platform, set rules and a creator that owned the panel and goes over the top of the consumer. This is how uncharted waters we are now is because there's no legal framework. Understand what the heck is going on.
I guess it's time for somebody to get sued at the legal framework to be to B you don't want it to give
it to the courts you want effective dispute resolution at the platform level. That's key for all of this. Having apple texts decided in the courts is not the best way before having it done between willing buyer. Willing seller always produces better outcomes. If anything, don't leave it to lawyers.
will Paige the author of towels and economics. Thank you so
much. Thank you, Sam. Love the show.
The Delta, it turns of will page there. Sam tell me a little bit about pod ping.
we talked about it last week, pod ping. And it's a way, obviously, of increasing the speed of being allowed to have your podcast when you upload it to your hosts. Then your host, a layer, allowing a directory like podcast index to then say, yep, it's available. And it appears on your client. Now I know a little bit about this, but I thought I'd go and find a man who loans a lot more. That's Dave Jones.
But I also wanted to ask him about the new podcast license type, because again, going back to the theme of this week's podcast about piracy, I thought maybe there's a way around all of this piracy issue. To create a creative commons type tank license. Hello, I'm joined today by Dave Jones, the chief developer at podcast index. Dave, how I
doing great, Sam. Thanks man.
Good. Now, Dave, I'm really curious. You've just launched recently the license tag. Can you tell us more about what the license tag is?
that'll be in the next phase would be phase three of the podcast namespace, and we, Laurie done believe 10 tags. If I'm not mistaken there will be probably three more in this phase, which will finish on June the first. And by finish, what I mean is there'll be a review period, a new. Changes and submissions and that kind of thing. We'll stop. we will review everything, make sure that everybody's comfortable with what the tags look like.
And then we will formalize them into the actual podcast namespace. the license tag is one of those. So there's going to be a, the trailer tag, the license tag and alternate enclosure. the license tag specifically came about because. Copyright doesn't always do enough. you can retain a copyright, which is fine, but you can't always go the next step in the RSS feed and express how you're going to license that content to other parties.
Now, clearly you want the listener to hear it, but who's in between. That's where the license tag comes in and, an app or a directory or a platform. May want to take your content and rehost it on their own servers or something like that. So this is giving the creator. The ability to specify in detail how they want their content to be handled down the chain as it gets to the listener.
So with the license tag, is it very similar to creative comments? Is that where you were aiming at? So it all, there'd be degrees of licensing. So will I have full license, Do not touch my content. or is there going to be a, you can have bits of my content, but attribute it to me or take away all my content and do what you will with it. is there going to be degrees of license levels?
It really can just be totally free and open. there's some guidance in there this says we. recommend that you use a pre-existing license just because the licensing is hard. I mean their whole companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop their own license and make it legally binding and as many countries as possible to make sure the wording is correct, so that there's no loopholes, blah, blah, blah, on and on.
And so it's really recommended that you use a pre-existing license, like creative commons. and so to that effect, we recommend in the document, in the namespace document that you choose from, the SPDX license list, which is a common open source list of vetted and popular licenses. And you've got creative commons on there, MIT GPL, all those, the ones that everybody's familiar with.
we recommend in the spec that you choose one of those just because it's easier, but there's also the ability in the spec to just freeform a name of a license, and then refer to a URL in the license tag that gives the full body content of the license wording. So you can really roll your own and just call it, whatever name you want to in the tag, and then reference the full detailed wording. right there in the tag as a URL so that people can link out to it and read it, hopefully.
I'm not sure they'll read it. That's the problem. But anyway, at least it's there. the reason I ask is because this week Jake Warren for message heard, had his podcast, which is doing really well in the apple charts at number five. it was totally stolen pirated and. Uploaded to anchor. they changed the cover off and they pushed it back out to apple, Spotify, and Google as if it was their own podcast.
Now, luckily for Jake, there was no monetary loss because he wasn't charging for it, but he had traffic loss and which is and also to make the matter worse, the story was about his mother. So he felt a little bit more personally aggrieved.
Do you think two questions, I guess one who should be responsible for policing that, is there a way to police that so that somebody can't pirate or plagiarize or steal someone's podcast and two will this license if adopted by others, but let's just use the podcast index. Will this license help detect and prevent that
that's a kind of a multifaceted. Issue there. And so I think there's a few different pieces to that. the simple answer is ultimately the hosting company that's hosting that content. If it's pirated, they're responsible for it. the sort of complicating factor is there is no expression of a license within RSS feeds currently that I know of. it's a little bit of a legal, gray area.
ultimately, but just from a pure ethical standpoint, the podcasting platform that allowed that thing to happen, they really should, be policing that better. And we really see this on the free hosts a lot out there. they are bad about allowing somebody to just create account and rip off content. That's why we created the lock tag in phase one. It was the very first tag that we created was to try to stop this from happening.
And I would be really interested and actually posted question to James on our message board last night, asking him wonder if all of these. Podcasts that are moving hosts from paid to free hosts every month. I wonder how many of those are violating the lock tag as it stands, because we know that a lot of them do have the log tag enabled. Now, of course that's not binding in any way, but it is a ethical thing in the industry. There's been an expression here. We do not want.
other hosts to be able to import our content without the owner of the feed going in and turning that lock off. And if these free hosts are doing that, if they're allowing that import in violation of the log tag, then they need to be publicly shamed for it. I think that the industry has spoken loudly and said, we don't want this. And if they're doing it that's something that they need to be held to account for.
And the other part of that is there a way to detect whether or not that's in violation and there probably is, but it's very messy. because a lot of times what we see with fraud feeds, especially pirated content. They change just enough, the ones that are good at it, that those guys will change just enough about the feed. In order to evade, just pure sort of brute force detection there. So they'll put a slightly different piece of a title of an episode or the feed itself.
They won't use the same author. They'll use a deviation of that. no, not name the enclosure file names the same. So they do a lot of stuff like that. Just slight changes to make that difficult. It really would come down to audio. Level analysis. And I'm not sure that would totally work either, but anyway that's where I'm seeing.
I forgot about the lock tank. I think that's a great way of at least indicating your intent that you don't want this copied. Then, hopefully the industry here's to your intent, if nothing else,
the log tag's been out there for what six months now. So I think at this point, it's time for us to step back and look at what's happening. it's been out there long enough and there are lots and lots of fades. I can tell you from looking at the podcast index, there are many fades. I'm not sure how many, but it's got to be well over. 200,000 feeds that have the lock tag enabled in it. So the likelihood that something is being violated is probably pretty high.
the only other thing on that would be that there's some big hosts that still have not put that in there. and I would say that there's no excuse not to really at this point, if you're a big hosting platform and you're worried about people parting your content. You really need to stick that in there. At least that way you can legitimately publicly shame them if they do.
So that's one part that I want to talk to you about with the plagiarism and the other part though, just to get your opinion, because I don't think it's something you're directly involved in should podcasting hosts though. Use auto transcription and AI to look at the. Physical policing of content within podcasts, or is that something that, Adam might roll around on the floor and kick his legs up in the end? No, you're not allowed to do that. It's okay.
It's a free speech platform and stop trying to prevent that because my worry is you're going to get somebody like a mascara green put out a podcast where she goes, I can say anything I like within this, and it could be hate speech. It could be anything again. Should we as podcasts as be ready for this before it becomes a legal issue. By addressing it in some way, or do we have to just wait for somebody to challenge a hosting company and Sue them?
ultimately that will be where it comes down to if you want to get a real answer to it. But I don't think that did it's really that much of a thorny issue with us. our standpoint is that as from a directory approach, We as the directory don't want to be policing, it's you don't want your your routers on the internet, your BGP routers policing content. those things just need to pass content and let the policing happen at a higher layer of the chain.
So I think that really at the, at the hosting company level, Each one has to make their own decisions. we see that with DNS too, there's this constant battle and in the cyber security realm of trying to police, DNS providers who host command and control server, DNS names and that kind of thing. Now, we don't, you don't want to necessarily come down. On DNS itself and try to programmatically, put something into DNS to make it where that can happen.
What you do is you don't take her with the protocol. You go to the host, that's violating it and say, Hey, you got some bad content on your system. And let them decide what they do with it. So I think, like programmatic analysis I'm not opposed to, it really is just that. What do you do with it when you find something? W I saw it yesterday on Twitter that somebody had been digging, they listed off of Apple's API and they think it was because they mentioned the Israeli Palestinian conflict.
don't. who knows there's been no communication about it or why, or if that was indeed the case. And you can imagine that somebody within Israel or within Palestine may have different sides of that issue and then versus somebody in a different country. So really, those decisions, I think have to be very local to the publishing or to the hosting company. And I'm not opposed to that happening on that level.
it just gets really like a really thorny mess once you get I guess lower down the chain there.
Okay. we'll see how that's handled by podcasting host when they get challenged. Now, having you on here is amazing because I know you're so busy, but could you just give us a little bit of a update on what's happening with pod ping? Because I know you've been working in that how's that going? And maybe you can explain very quickly what is popping again to those who are listening. Oh,
so pod ping is been dominating my time rather lately more and more so than I thought, but it's a replacement for web sub within the podcasting world. So it's specific to podcasting. the problem with web sub really is the amount of subscription level traffic, this required to maintain it. You have to resubscribe to every individual feed that you want to get a website paying for. And so for a directory like ours, we're running up on 4 million feeds. Now it's just unusable almost.
we have servers that are dedicated to just resubscribing to web subs all day long. That's all they do is just resubscribe. Cause your limit is about 15 days maximum on a web subscription. one of the other issues is it server only it uses web hooks. if you are going to subscribe to web sub to be notified you have to have a server somewhere apps can't do it directly themselves.
So pod paying is a wave is just a way for there to be one central location on the web where any host can send a paying as soon as a feed publishes a new episode. And that notification with the failure of it goes onto the hive blockchain, which is a global blockchain that updates it with a new block every three seconds.
So typically once a new episode is published, you see an episode show up on the block or URL show up on the blockchain within about 40 seconds total as it goes through the pipeline. And that's something that anybody's can subscribe to. Everybody can watch the chain apps can servers can. and as soon as that happens, as soon as you begin to publish your new episodes through pod paying, then everybody can start polling you.
So you don't have this incessant never ending energy consuming traffic going on all day long from everybody else trying to pull your feeds all the time. one thing that we noticed is that, currently we have 3.8 million feeds in the index, the top. Let's see, 3.4 million of those feeds are within 25 different hosting companies. So you have almost the entire batch on what is that, 88% almost the entire known podcast world is within that top 25 hosting companies.
So it's really not a big ask to just get those 25 hosts. To start, sending pings to to the system. And then you can spend your time. You can spend your, the majority of your time hitting those other smaller, disparate the, the diaspora of the rest of the podcast world is spread out, which is really where most of the polling should be. We shouldn't be. Polling these a host that has a hundred thousand feeds.
they should just be, they should be telling us that they have a new episode, not the other way around.
So who so far has started to support it?
so far we got a bus proudest sending rss.com is sending a captivate. dot FM is sending and just talk to John and Justin over at transistor yesterday. And they're going to start sending here shortly. So I'm we're still in a beta test phase. Everything's fully functional. It works well. but we're sorta, just onboarding host a little bit at a time. starting with the people we know, like to be early adopters with things, and so far running solid, not having any problems.
Excellent. Dave, you and I briefly spoke about if I'm listening to your podcast and I want to tell a friend, oh, it at minute 28, you should listen to this. and we didn't have a resolution. I know there's the new recommendation tag, but I don't know if you saw Spotify use the time extension to the URL that like you can do in YouTube. And I thought that was a great way, cause it's a standard as well.
So just simply saying at minute 28 equals T equals, the time and I can take that URL and share it with anybody I want. And suddenly that lands them straight into the middle of the podcast at the exact point I want, I don't know if you saw that and what you're thinking as well.
that's really cool. And it turns out that. Some of the apps, the podcasting 2.0 apps. They use the index as their API. They were already doing that. A pod friend, I think pod verse does it as well. And it seems to be a universal URL scheme, Martin, the developer of pod frames, recommended that I do that and I was like, oh, this is not going to work. And then I stuck it on there and he's Hey, it just works. I didn't even know that it was great. It's like this there's so much out there like that.
every time we propose a new tag or something like that on the on the namespace somebody will pop up and say, oh, there's already this thing over here, that's doing that. And the landscape of this stuff is so broad. there's so many things that. already happening that you don't even know about, even as a seasoned web developer, like Martin Nina now I think it's great stuff like that. It's awesome. It's like you get it for free.
Just got to expose it in the UIs now. Dave Jones. Thank you so much. Congratulations with everything you've been doing on the podcast index it's moved the needle so far, so thank you for all your hard work.
Thanks Sam. Appreciate it.
Dave Jones from podcast index, you can find out [email protected]
We've got a big announcement, apple subscriptions that it's finally arrived. James iOS, 14.6 arrived along with the Mac iOS 11.4 release. Have you signed up to any subscriptions?
So this is the paid subscriptions. I have not yet bought a paid subscription and I probably should do nor have I actually signed up and launched a channel yet. and maybe I should launch a channel first. Sam, have you done any of those things?
I signed up through to create all the podcasts. My radio shows, as I've talked about before, which is really good. And of course channels suddenly arrived. So I went into apple podcast connect, creates a channel and just simply added all the radio shows into there. I was quite impressed. The only problem is I can't find the radio channel. When I go look for it in apple podcasts, I'm not sure where to find
it. I'm not quite sure how channels work at all, to be honest. I haven't yet found one. I'm not somebody that uses apple podcasts. And so therefore from that point of view I don't know too much about that. certainly looking is it called river radio by any marvelous chance? yes, that might be
useful.
Yes. and in which case, all I can see is shows and an episodes, and I can't necessarily understand where a channel would be. So perhaps I need to sit down and actually have a play with this and see if I can understand it. apple have done some, very good and very clever thinking behind how this system works. And it seems to be a very flexible system. If you are a podcast publisher, and you want to. make podcasts available for a payment. and did you have any problems when you were signing up?
Cause you've ponied up the money, haven't you to be able to sell a subscription if you want to in the future? Was that sort of relatively easy?
they took the money very quick. They're very good at that. They they didn't have a problem taking my money. so the 1799 was very rapidly removed. But, I'm just looking on my iPhone. I can't find channels. I can't find my own, but I can't find out others either. maybe they'll just turn that on in saying 14 point six.one. but I also tried to turn on the new podcast subscriptions as an affiliate and that I'm afraid I abandoned ship on because it seemed to be too long.
They're asking for war and peace and I didn't have time. So I haven't signed up for the affiliate program. Any luck with you there, James.
I've been signed up to the affiliate program for some time. I did try signing up the other day and of course that didn't work I reported it and the good folks at apple came back and they said, oh, it was only a problem. If you said that you were a promoter and it's fixed now that's not quite how I understand it, but anyway, if they say it's fixed. Then they say it's fixed and that's all fine.
I can't see in those tools quite how you find channels either But I do notice that weirdly I have actually earned something recently on the apple podcasts affiliate thing. So I need to understand what it is that I have actually sold and how I can do more of that will be nice. I've used an affiliate link. For all of the apple links for the last couple of years on the pod news pod podcast pages purely. So I can measure how many clicks I'm actually getting there.
because of course, nothing has actually earned any money. so I need to understand a little bit more about that, but that's a, a crafty idea. If you're a podcaster. Who is promoting stuff on apple podcasts, paid subscriptions, you get 50% of the first month. So it could theoretically be quite a lot of cash for you. So that's interesting to end up seeing.
one of the other facts that you revealed in pod news was apple now owns more from the app store in the entire music industry and some music. So if there are any more from the app store, I'm assuming they will earn more eventually from the podcasts store as well.
yes. I don't know whether the app store would include podcasts, paid podcasts subscriptions or not, but just the 30% that apple earns from everybody's sending stuff on the app store means that apple are raking in the cash. There, there are currently a number of different court cases of course going on one with epic games. In the U S about the app store.
There's another court case, which is going on in Europe as well, where the European commission has accused apple of doing all kinds of naughty things. so I think that's certainly something to just bear in mind, but they're earning an awful lot of money out of the app store and out of, essentially taking that 30% commission,
that saves the Colts actually reduces that 30%, which is I think going to be the outcome. I think that's going to be the compromise. Okay. Enough apple
to Sam Twitter, a Twitter.
Yes. Gosh, it's now launched ticketed spaces. So now we can charge if we wanted to James for a Space.
I think we should try that. Yes. if we lived in the U S of course because in, in typical American fashion, it's only available to people like us, but not people like us. so yes they are making it possible to. charge for a Twitter space. Anybody who wants to charge has to have a thousand followers, we're all. Okay. There. we have to have hosted three spaces in the last 30 days and we need to be at least 18 years old.
they're using Stripe and that users will receive 80% of the revenue after apple and Google's in-app purchase fees are taken. So wait a minute. So apple and Google's in-app purchase fees are 30%. So you'll receive 80% of the 70% that you'll receive. So you'll receive not that much in comparison. what's that 60 something percent
and Stripe has handling fees
as well, by the way. Oh of course. And Stripe has handling fees of course as well. But anyway yes it's been interesting. I was on clubhouse the other day. And there was a man on there talking to me about podcasts and I was actually invited to be on this particular clubhouse space. So I thought, oh It's going to be interesting to have a quick look and see what this is but my goodness.
It was just the worst experience that I've ever had, but it was this guy who, for a start sniffed every second sentence that he would say anything, those, his big, loud sniff which already was a little bit annoying. I looked him up cause I didn't know who he was. he's a podcast expert. I didn't know who it was though. So I looked him up and his podcast had eight different RSS feeds, eight of them of which seven were dormant. And it literally tried every single free podcast host out there.
I listened to a little bit of his latest show and his show had, for example, a little segment in there that started about four minutes in which was a segment with a Reverend and that same segment he played again. In his show, 42 minutes in. So he'd actually repeated the same segment more than once, but he's the expert. And clearly, I don't know anything.
And these are the people who are telling other podcasters how everything works and I'm just there thinking, wow, if you're using clubhouse to get information from the experts like that, then just be really clear who the people are. Just do your due diligence on who these experts are and whether or not you would actually take some of their advice to heart, because literally everything he was saying was wrong.
Yeah. but that could have been a Twitter space as well. I don't think that's a clubhouse issue. I think that's just a.
It Kirti could also have been on a Facebook group as well, but I think again, it does show this it shows this one of the problems with the sorts of services. And if you then start charging for it as well, if you're charging for bad advice, then that again is going to be very interesting to come back to your earlier point. Sam, what do we do there?
Should somebody be sitting there and monitoring their advice and working out whether your advice is any good and whether or not they can have their money? Okay.
the point about clubhouse it you're right. James is moderation is an issue. and I think Twitter spaces is going to have the same problem. My wife used to run Microsoft MSN. and one of the things they had to do is close down the chat rooms because they were getting PD files. They were getting all sorts of imagery in there and they couldn't monitor it. And the UK police turned around and said if you're not going to monitor it, then you have to close it. And that's what they did.
They just couldn't find a way to. provide enough monetization. And I think clubhouse is going to find the same thing. it's that same issue. I think podcasting will have to address this at some point it, which is the moderation of podcasts. And especially if they're monetizing them, because someone is going to Sue someone at some point and they're going to Sue them for a lot of money for defamation or for something else. And I don't think safe Harbor, which will was talking about.
Or any of the other means where they can put their hands up and saying, Mia culpa, not me, gov, I didn't do it. I don't think it's going to sit. And I think clubhouse says in their terms and conditions, they're not listening into the rooms. And so if they're not listening in, and if Twitter spaces says they're not listening in, and if host companies aren't moderating podcast content, then there's a bit of a free for all until somebody sues somebody. And then everyone's going to clamp down.
Indeed. It's going to be interesting to watch. and I think particularly it changes things when you start charging money for it as well. it's certainly something to keep an eye on and see what happens there. I did
find it more than one interesting thing in that Twitter spaces announcement they're using Stripe and not square. Very
odd. Yes. You'd have thought that given that Jack, owns square, isn't it? why on earth? Would you not use that? Although quite a lot of the square stuff only works in the U S as well. So perhaps that's part of it. I don't mean Twitter space is only
available in the U S
you make, or at least paid stuff is yes. You make a good point. maybe you and I should have a Twitter space. maybe we should have a play on Twitter spaces one day. in fact, maybe we should do that too. Let's
do that tomorrow, James, and see if anyone even turns up.
So you need to be following either me. I'm James Cridland or Sam he's, Sam Sethi, all one word on Twitter. You will see us. if you're following one of us we can't do it under the pod land news handle because we don't have enough followers yet. but if you see one of us in the purple thing I think it's going to be roughly what should we say? if it's this sort of time, then it's a 6:00 PM Australian standard time and nine UK times.
should we go for that nine o'clock in the morning, six o'clock in the evening, Australian time. And and if you're in America, tough. Tough. We'll see if anybody joins us. That might be fun.
Now let's get away from this piracy stuff. Google. Someone seems to shook the tree again. they've added into Google Chrome, a follow button for, bringing back Google reader. what's this one? All about James.
So this is on Android and this is
currently.
Yes. And it's currently on the Canary feed or something. So you're not even going to see it, even if you're on a beater, but there is a follow button in your browser on Android. And apparently that is an RSS feeder. So you can follow an RSS link and you can then go to another view in Google reader and you can. see the updates from the RSS feeds. Now I found out who was running that at Google and I asked them on Twitter. Oh, this is really cool.
wouldn't it be cool if there was some form of integration between this feature and Google podcasts and they came back and they said, Ooh, that's a good idea. I'll look into that, which means that there isn't. so there's surprise, two sets of people at Google doing things and rebuilding wheels. But nevertheless, it's always interesting seeing Google taking a look into RSS.
Again, if you're using something like power press or you're using a site like that a captivate site or whatever, then actually that's pretty cool because that RSS feed will contain your Lotus posts of course, but will also contain your latest podcast audio in there as well. So who knows? That might be an interesting thing. And of course, a buzz sprouts sites ought to work on that as well. Can
I just say I'll never trust Google, so I wouldn't bother trying that feature.
Thank you grumpy Sam. Yes, you're absolutely right. They will kill it at about a week's
time. It's my problem. I used to, I love the Google reader. It was my favorite way of getting content and news and I subscribed to stuff. As I went around the web. And a beautiful curated list of Google RSS feeds. And then they said they killed reader and then I just gave up. And then if you look at the graveyard of Google products, I never invest into them because they never sustain anything for any length of time.
Yes, no, I think there's quite a lot of truth to be said there. And I think even when they do get behind a product, they don't promote it properly. They don't go out and shout about it. I run a pixel phone But Google pixel phones never sell particularly well because they never promote them particularly. they never do the deals with the carriers. and I don't know you see all of this stuff. they are a market leader for many things.
They're market leader for, smart speakers in most countries, they're market leaders for, mobile phone operating systems, of course, but most of that is left to other manufacturers to also help them. And Google is a bit of a frustrating, organization, and by the way, we don't know who's in charge of Google podcasts anymore. there used to be a guy called gay bender who was running Google podcasts, who left about a month or so ago.
Zack Reno with Dean who used to run Google podcasts has a long gone and he's now working on search for mobile. We don't know whether there is actually a product manager for Google podcasts. and certainly Google podcasts. The app appears to be, moving the odd button around here and there, but that's about as far as we go. So those of us wanting a good, strong competitor for the apple and Spotify oligopoly sadly, we're not really seeing that yet. And that's a bit of a shame.
Just going back to this Google RSS reader thing. I wonder if apple are listening. Could they put channels into safari?
there's a thing. safari, I find a fascinating in that safari is the only choice if you're running an iPad or you're running an iPhone yes, you can download something that says it's Chrome, but it's still using safari behind the hood because it uses the same. A web browser that apple users, because them's the rules. so the only one where it the only operating system where you can actually use a different browser is the Mac. safari is a whole other kettle of fish.
that's worthwhile having a look into.
It was just a thought, cause I can't, as we said, we can't find channels. I wonder if they're going to reveal them. As a way of finding them through safari. Nice.
Yes. Or maybe we're just not searching properly. Okay. maybe it's user error usually is. We'll
talk about it tomorrow
And I think that's it just before we go, Sam, have you found any new, exciting podcasts this week?
I'm going to have to listen to finding Natasha that's the lazy way out of me answering that question?
And what about you, James? I think that's a good plan. I have been listening to 20,000 Hertz, which is a wonderful podcast around audio and that sort of thing. They did a podcast and episode. Not so long back about the shore SM seven, which is the dynamic microphone that many podcasts has have. it's really interesting. It is actually a paid for show by shore. but it is still really interesting.
Go and have a listen to and understand a bit more about how that microphone came to be and why the microphone is so good and why it was so revolutionary. It is of course, the microphone that Michael Jackson used to sing into as well as so many different podcasters. also using as well. worth a listen it's 20,000 Hertz. and what's happened for you in Portland this week? Sam?
I've set up a channel in apple podcasts and I'm doing the final configuration of all those podcasts. 25 for them to be precise, James. So a little bit of work there. and then maybe I'll like finding Nemo or go and find my channel.
I'm currently working on podcast day 24, which is it's the planets podcasting conference. It's a 24 hour podcast conference. My bet is live and in-person in Sydney and new south Wales in Australia looking forward to seeing loads of really good people speaking there we've even got a speaker from New Zealand, although. that person will be on a video.
it's well worth going to you'll find all of the [email protected] and also tonight at about one o'clock in the morning, I'm talking at a BBC podcast festival. By the time you hear that year, it'll be too late. But it's really nice to see the BBC doing a little bit of work in terms of this area as well. And that's it for this week. Come back to Podland next time you can follow us in your podcast app, or we [email protected] on the web.
So if you have any comments or questions, please send a voice comment. Two questions at pod land or news, or tweet us at pod land
news. If you want daily news, you should get pod news. The newsletter is free at pod news, Dawn that's. The podcast is in your podcast app, and that's where you'll find the links for all the stories we've mentioned this week. Our music is from ignite jingles. We used clean feed and Riverside, and I think a bit of zoom and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout.
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