Welcome to Podland Podland is sponsored by Buzzsprout. It's the easiest way to host, promote and track your podcasts [email protected]. It's Thursday, March the fourth, 2021. I'm James Cridland and the editor of podnews here in and I'm Sam
Sethi editor of Sam Talks Technology here in the
UK. And I'm Kal Amin from sounder.fm and later I'll be talking about our Podcast platform.
Hey, will. Portland is a weekly podcast where Sam and I delve deeper into the week's podcasting news, which I cover [email protected]. Please get involved
with this podcast, send us a voice message to questions at Podland news, or you can tweet us at the Podland news. This week's top stories. Uh, the , uh, the ambulance are the awards and we have the announcement of the nominee is James, who are they?
We do. Yes. Um, I'm not going to go through all of them. Sam because there are 164 nominees across 23 categories. But I think what's really cool about this. And literally they have just been unveiled. We've been holding back this episode of this podcast, especially. Well, one I think is really cool about it is that every member of the Podcast Academy will be able to vote.
So if you are a big fan of some of the nominations, uh, and then you can go in and vote, and if you're not a member of the Podcast Academy, you can still join and then go and vote, which is a good thing. Podcast. Of the year has about 10 nominations there, but it's a blockbuster, the story of James Cameron, bunga, bunga, chasing Cosby, detours, dirty, Diana dying for sex for life. The Podcast forgotten women of Juarez say their name and the happiness lab.
And I think just looking at those, that's a really good sort of precis of what's been going on in the Podcast industry over the last 12 months as a bunch of really good. Bits of journalism in there. There's some really good podcasts which have been sort of covering some of the things that, um, the world has been talking about. Have you had a chance to have a quick flick through? I have
until I will be now. Uh, because I think I'm sad to say. Um, I, I only listen to certain podcasts. I'm not. Um, I don't read books in the same way as I don't listen to podcasts about crime, thrillers, documentaries. I'm not that sort of person. My, my, my reading habits on audible, for example, they're all about business or all about technology. So, um, the list that you read out, I was listening going. Hmm. Do I want to listen to any of those? I probably don't.
I mean, I'm not a Joe Rogan fan either. I don't have the time for four hours. I just don't know when people find it, but yeah. Uh, clearly they are massive Podcast and lots of people do enjoy them. It's just not my genre.
Podcast yeah. I mean, I think one of the interesting things around the nominations are the amount of shows, which have got more than one nomination. So there are. Three podcasts, which have four nominations at dirty Diana, the left right game and wind of change. Uh, very familiar with a wind of change. It was that, uh, Podcast all about scorpions song, which apparently was, um, funded by the CIA or something and overthrew communism or something weird and wonderful such as that.
Listen to the podcast, I guess you'll find out. Yes. To be Frank, I don't necessarily recognize the left-right game or dirty Diana, but I'm sure I would, if I actually looked them up. And one of the things that you'll see tomorrow in pod news is a full list of the nominations, but also links to have a listen to all of them, which will be an important thing.
And you'll also find some stats in terms of some of the publishers behind them, because I think that's also an interesting thing to end up doing. I'd say, you know, looking at the list that I'm looking at so far, it looks very American. To me, it looks very focused on the U S and that. Is a good thing in some respects, in a bad thing in other respects, because I think it would be nice for this to have had a little bit more of a global feeling to it. Did you enter these awards?
I did. Yes I did. But I did say more on the case. Did you enter under business and Technology but I, it was embarrassingly because I'd paid my $50 to be a member I thought might as well, you know, Put an entry in or you entered didn't you
as well? I entered it. Well, the first thing. So I had a theory that nobody was entering. And so if you enter an award that nobody enters, then you'll do really well. Clearly my theory was entirely incorrect because there are loads of things in here, but I entered best news Podcast for pod news, as if that was ever going to work what's in there. You've got, do no harm, don't know post reports for the Washington post suspicious activity inside the fin send files.
The journal from the wall street journal today, explain from Vox vice news reports and what next it's not hardly likely the pod news is going to be in there. My two minutes rattled through the news. Um, but nevertheless, you know, w at least I've, at least I entered. And if you don't enter, then you're guaranteed. What was the
process of nomination who could get on this list? How was the list chosen? I was it whittled down? Do we know.
Um, well, we will talk next week to Donald Albright. Who's the chairman of the Podcast Academy. And we can ask him that question. My understanding is that, um, a lot of judges had a listen to all of these so that they could actually whittle down from the full list, the press release doesn't actually say, which is interesting, but I quite liked the idea that judges. Would have whittled down the list, but then the list is up to us, the members of the Podcast Academy to make the final choice.
That is a governor's award as well, by the way, I'm quite excited by that because I think that that does. Stop judges favorites from automatically being there at number one or people who, you know, and you want to be nice to them. That kind of stuff is taken away. What obviously it does sort of add is it adds a little bit of entertainment in terms of people trying to hack them. The results.
I think one of the things that I'm interested in doing is to see how much independent stuff there is in here. So part of the analysis I'll be doing is independent versus big. Publishers, but also us versus non us just to sort of have a look, um, not really meant as a criticism, but really more just to help us understand what sort of content is out there and what sort of content is being nominated for these types of awards. Yeah. And the
hour long ceremony will be streamed live on YouTube, Twitch and other platforms on Sunday, may the 16th, uh, From
00 PM Pacific time and 8:00 PM Eastern time. So what time that is for me and new James,
who knows late in the evening for you, and it'll be nice and bright in the morning. For me, there's a pre show starting at four 30 Pacific time, seven 30 New York time on may the 16th. And the award show is being run. I understand by Podcast movement and there are very good, uh, set of people to have, uh, involved in this. So the ambiance should be a good thing. I also notice that they've got a brand new logo on their press release as well, which is actually quite nice
now. Sounder a Podcast management and monetization platform has raised 2.15 millionaire seed round. They've raised 4 million in the past 14
years months. That's right. Yes. I caught up that seems a lot of, sort of an awful lot of money. I caught up with Cal Amman, the co-founder and the CEO of sounder. And the first question, obviously that I asked. It is, are you spending all of the money on speedboats and champagne?
That's right. No, no, no. We're very excited. Again, you know, it's obviously very hard to raise during the pandemic that we're going through. So we're very excited to have this funding in house. It really allows us to operate our plan for 2021. And really the focus is on our core mission. Really helping creators drive discovery and growth. And what that actually means for us is helping creators, gain more audience, engage that audience and ultimately monetize that audience as well.
So what we've built from a technology standpoint is really a strong speech to text technology and using those transcripts to really power new discoverable moments. To find new ways to engage through interactive moments and ultimately creating new ways to create monetizing well moments for that content as well. So a lot of the funding will go to really power research and development around those. You do
a lot more than a normal podcast host, don't you?
We do. Yeah. We'd like to think of ourselves as more of an audio management platform. And we talk about ourselves as an end to end technology platform. For audio and our goal there is to really help creators, not only onboarding their content and being that hosting provider, but ultimately helping them grow. Right. If you think about the industry, we talk about the 1% really driving a tremendous amount of the audio listenership today. What about everybody else?
And how do we think about creating tools and services that allow them to grow either using our technology or learning from some of the best practices that we've been able to capture through our community?
You offer sound bites. You do a curious, looking M RSS feed for synchronizing embedded multimedia feeds, which sounds interesting. And transcription, audio, search SEO, all of this stuff. Is this proprietary stuff to you guys, or are you working with other people to get this into additional platforms as well?
Yeah, that's a great question. So late was middle of last year. So about June of 2020, we launched what we call the sounder discovery suite and a lot of the features and tools that you've mentioned fit within that discovery toolkit, right? Everything from search, audio share, or soundbites as we call them audio SEO, the ability to really have your content optimized on search engines.
Such as Google and Google's own words, they're now taking audio much more seriously and making it a first-class citizen within their results. So the opportunity to really create an optimized approach. So all this is built on our proprietary technology. The foundation of this is our automated speech recognition technology, which is the speech to text that allows us to create a transcript for every single piece of content. Then using that to power search shareable moments.
Obviously a lot of that transcript power for SEO and the metadata that comes with that. But all that's built on our proprietary technology that we've built in
house. Podcast index, for example, has a thing in their new namespace around soundbites. And I think they even call them soundbites, which is, yeah. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Um, okay. And I also have, um, particular tags for transcriptions as well. Is that something that at some point in the future, you might be looking at working with them to, to, uh, add those features to your RSS feeds?
That's exactly right. You know, as we think about the overall industry, when we talk about our platform, when, when Dan and I started this company, we talked about the fact that, you know, we S we saw a need. First of all, we saw this need that the entire industry was really fragmented, right? There were multiple players really servicing one part of that creation journey. And our goal really was to create something that was much more end to end. And that's what we're focused on.
But the other big piece of this is, as we see some of the larger incumbents. Really becoming much more close in terms of the services that they offer. We do believe in an open ecosystem. We believe in the fact that we want to work with the community to create tools, services, and features that allow for every single creator and every single developer to be successful.
So, yeah, I think in that environment, with that kind of, that being part of our mission, We certainly would want to work with, with other companies to really accelerate audio and more quality content creation and quality
discovery. Yeah. It's great to hear you talking about open tech. You also do monetization options as well. Does that mean that anybody can earn money with their Podcast as well?
Yeah, that's the goal. So we've, we've done two things within the monetization space to start, uh, and this happened really late last year, so we're still early in the monetization game. We brought on a third party. Sales team to help us really drive more of the bigger brand conversations for the publishers on the platform who have a meaningful audience. Right?
So if you're looking at anyone has about 10,000 plus downloads per month, and we work with our third-party sales team to really bring those types of brands to, to those publishers. And then for the larger set of publishers on the platform, or Podcast on the platform, we've integrated with a Dai solution through Triton. And we offer that for the larger Podcast community, but that's just the beginning, right?
As we think about monetization and going back to this conversation around the, the speech to text technology, we believe there are really valuable ways to use that technology and those transcripts to really create new taxonomies, new categorization and keyword based ad models that can power the future of, of audio advertising for the podcast and oral audio. So that's something we're focused on as well. One
of the issues I have is I work for I'm on the board of a radio station here in Brisbane, in Australia, which is called reading radio, which is a radio station, which reads bits of the newspaper, um, out to people that can't read. And my co-host, uh, Sam, uh, lives very close to a place called Redding. In the UK. Uh, now reading is a very different place and indeed concepts to reading yet. Of course, they both look exactly the same in terms of a text.
So taxonomy has really helped with this sort of thing
I really do. And again, at the entire industry is, is going through this evolution. As we think about the technology, that's going to power the future of audio and the bet that we've made around. Speech to text and transcription is foundational, right?
So that is just the first step leveraging natural language processing technologies, building new data sets that live on top of that technology should allow us over time to do exactly what you're saying is really identify entities and sentiment a different ways to understand the audio content, to bring new ways to create discoverable moments. But also new monetizeable moments as well. So that's the whole concept and whole idea around the technology.
So when we talk about what we do for creators, we really do focus on helping them be discovered and then monetize. And what we've started with is that speech to text component that really is helping creators grow today. What's the word excited by.
So Cal, what do you see the future being for Podcast platforms? Will all of them have to evolve as you have and add all of these additional features?
Yeah, I think for us, the way we think about this is that there's, there's there's, this comes in waves, right? So if you think about kind of where the industry is today, many of the hosting platforms that, that are available, they provide you with hosting and they provide you with monetization. My belief is that what. Creators will be looking for as this entire industry becomes much more savvy in the space. I'm really turning this art form into a business.
We believe that having that end to end solution is very, very important, right? So everything from creation to editing, to guest management and scheduling all the way through growth and monetization tools. And we think that's going to be important for creators and the more people that are creating content, having those tools available, making it very. Simple and intuitive.
So they understand how to use those tools and leverage those tools to create growth we think is going to be very, very important. So it is that end to end approach. That's going to become much more front and center as we think about the next wave of tech platforms for audio. Well,
Carol, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. Thanks for having us Carola. I mean, from sounder just does look like a really interesting podcast host that, and you know, a podcast hosts, that's added all of the knobs and twiddles and everything else. I got the feeling, talking to him that, uh, he was really keen to work with the rest of the industry on this, but also obviously to keep some of the secret sauce for himself as you would.
The, but, uh, some really interesting stuff that they're working on. So, um, thank him for his time. Excellent.
Now, Tech meme, who I've been a fan of for many, many years. I know the CEO quite well, uh, have a podcast called tech meme ride home, and it seems James from the press release. They're the first Podcast to release an NFT Watson NFT
James well, and NFT is anybody knows, stands for non fungible token. There you go. That's easy
for you to say.
And now it's absolutely clear what it is. Isn't it? It's one of these weird internet fads, I think going round at the moment where you can buy. Digital artwork, which can be copied perfectly. So why would you want to buy it? But anyway, you can buy it and you can spend an awful lot of money on it. And tech meme ride home release. There Podcast as an NFT, which I think is the first. And when I went to have a look, it was for sale at $3 and 16 cents.
So I'm not sure that anybody's going to get rich out of this, but nevertheless, it was a nice. Story
Dave Jones, our friend over at Podcast index also wrote about the value tag and how it works using cryptocurrency. Have you had a read of that
report? Yeah, it's a great piece. Actually. He's written two articles. One of them is very dry and technical and explains how the specification works, which you can probably happily ignore the other one though. Actually goes into the point behind the value tag and the importance that having a different business model for podcasting that isn't just a 32nd out of somebody shouting at you about mattresses, but it's a different way of earning money from your creative.
He basically writes about how important that is very difficult, very complicated. At the moment, you can listen to pod news. You can't listen to this podcast yet, but you can listen to pod news on these Finks chat app and you can load that apart with Satoshi. And then as you listen, then I get a small amount of cryptocurrency, which I have no idea what to do with. It's all really interesting.
Yeah. And the last thing I thought that was really interesting in terms of, because of my technical background. Podcast index is databases now on IP. Yeah. This is
some weird and wonderful system that I don't fully understand around hosting data. I think it's got something to do again with the blockchain and stuff like that. The interesting thing from my point of view is that it is a downloadable directory of every single Podcast out there with all of these stories, with the NFT stuff, with the cryptocurrency, with the IPFS stuff, everything is all around. The new ways of the internet working in this blockchain fashion.
And, uh, yeah, I think it's interesting to keep an eye
on it. Yeah. IPFS has the interplanetary file system, which has a protocol and a peer to peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file systems, basically. Yes, you're right. It's part of the blockchain. And it's quite interesting that they're building on a distributed file system. So it means the index can be available to many people in many places, but
all at the same time, it sounds if you just look that up on Wikipedia there.
No, the first sentence I did, the second sentence was all mine. I have to tell you that now. So the second sensor is probably all wrong, but that's okay.
Now, then there's a race going on. Isn't
the Sam there is. First place and second place, we have a race going on with our good friends at Apple and Spotify. Certainly after Spotify as big announcements
last week, your good friends at Apple
Apple. I actually genuinely don't I believe, but, um, there was a report this week that you wrote about from email. Katea claiming that Spotify will overtake Apple podcasts in the U S in listeners. Let's. Quantify that all the way down this share, but not downloads. So it's basically yes, they will overtake, but it's in a very narrow field. What was that all
about James? Yeah, I don't understand. E-marketer I'll have to be honest with you. They publish an awful lot of research, university commerce, but there's absolutely no methodology in there. There's no source for the data. It's just, you know, it's just a source. E-marketer up. I mean, it may just be a bloke called Bob in a back room. I don't know. But anyway, his claim or you might, you marketer's claim is that Spotify will overtake Apple podcasts by us total listeners.
Now the last time I asked pod track for some numbers on this, Spotify had 25% of the market in terms of unique listeners. And Apple podcasts had 33% roughly. So it was a quarter for Spotify. A third for Apple downloads is very, very different. Looking at human beings. Spotify is actually doing pretty well. I do notice that there's an angry, uh, article in Podcast. Business journal saying no, no, no. They've got it all wrong. Look, uh, Spotify is far, far smaller than Apple and showing downloads.
Well, yes, they are far smaller in terms of downloads, but that's not what this is saying. And I wish people would just, you know, take a breath and read what the thing says, listeners. Not downloads. So that's a kind of, one thing will Spotify or Apple be number one. And then there's a race for third and fourth place. Isn't there as well.
If there's one report, why not have two Sharon Taylor, the CEO of Omni studios has released her predictions for Podcast in 2021. And the company owned by Triton digital puts Amazon music ahead of Google podcasts for downloads though this time, James in 2020. What do
you think? Quite an astonishing figure. Cause Amazon music really only launched towards the end of last year. And it says here that Amazon music is ahead of Google podcasts, not by much, but still, you know, ahead of Google podcasts, which has been going for quite some time. I'm kind of looking at this and thinking, well, that's interesting because I don't know whether Google podcasts really. Is going to be smaller than Amazon music, Amazon music, Sony in a few countries as well.
Interesting. Seeing that data, I'm sure it's absolutely correct. Because everything that Omni studio does is absolutely correct, but it came as surprise.
When I guess if Spotify can open up 83 countries pretty quickly, there's nothing to stop Amazon when they wanted to open up many, many countries. Uh, and jump ahead in their downloads and podcasting. I guess there's nothing. If they're just testing the market right now, before they're ready to roll, but when they want to roll, they've got the money. They've got the infrastructure. There there's nothing that will stop them. Now, Twitter on Friday announced.
At a earnings call with analysts that they're going to introduce things called communities, paywalls super follows James spaces. And of course they are acquisition. They talk to other review the newsletter. Now, James, you're going to be doing something on spaces this week. And what is spaces for those who are. Don't
know. Yeah. So spaces is what is going to kill clubhouse. And so clubhouse is going to die. Uh, I predict I give it six months. This is, this was my prediction from a couple of weeks ago, and I'm not, I'm not backing down on it. Excellent. Because I reckon that Twitter will be a much more. Interesting place for these sorts of things, but it is essentially it's clubhouse and very, very similar. I'm looking forward to taking part in a spaces
45 PM. New York time. Uh, you need to be either following pod news. Okay. Or following me, in fact, you need to be following both because I'm not quite sure which of those accounts I'm actually going to appear under. So you should follow pod news or me, I'm James Cridland on Twitter. And if you're using either Android or iPhone, then you can have a listen. Uh, which is great. So Theresa spaces is already on Android.
If you want to have a listen, you may need to download the beta version of the Twitter app. If you're an Android and you do that by. Going to Google play and an opting into the beta. So
just to be clear, are you saying that Twitter spaces available for everyone on the beater? If they download
the beater to be really clear, if you download the beta version of the app, On Android. Then you can take part in Twitter spaces. You can't initiate your own space yet cause they haven't built that bit in. But if you see one of your iOS running friends in a Twitter space of their own, then you can join. You can listen, you can take part, you can do all of that stuff. So, um, you know, it's still very much beater.
There'll probably be a fix that by this time next week they seem to be moving very, very fast. Indeed, but, uh, yeah. So if you have an Android phone and you've been cut out of clubhouse so far, then worry, not because Twitter is coming for you and you can already take part.
I have to say I was listening to five minutes of clubhouse this morning and love you my socks off. Cause it was a room called the room and I have no idea cause it was an American spats going on. But Jason Calacanis here, fame in the tech VC world was calling out one of the shark tank. People for spamming and hustling people. So it was hilarious. It was, I eventually ended up with them saying, I'll see you outside practice. Right.
You know, put down clubhouse and let's go outside and sort this out. It was great. It was for five minutes. It was hilarious. Wow. Now, So we talked a few weeks ago, James, to one of the organizers of Africa, pod Fest. And one of your observations was that wouldn't it be great if we could have a lower bit rate because in Africa they have to pay for their downloads in terms of.
Bandwidth. And I know the Podcast index has been working on alternative tag for that, but you spotted a story from Google who are doing something called Lyra.
What's like, yeah. So, um, Lyra is not like Lycra. That, that, that's the thing that you wear when you're on bicycles. No, that Lycra, this is Lyra. Yeah. Which is a new audio codec, which the company says is a high quality, very low bit rate speech Kodak. It's always good with these things to actually have a lesson. Uh, so, uh, this from their website is the piece of original one file that they put up.
When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say, he's looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. And then this is that clip again in the Lyra audio codec, just three kilobits, a second. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he was looking for the positive gold at the end of the rainbow. There's very little difference. Yes. It clearly sounds as if it's been compressed a little bit, but really very little difference. And that could.
You know, make quite a difference between, you know, a typical 128 K MP3, which if you are paying a lot for mobile data, as they do in many parts of Africa is actually quite expensive for you to download. If you could get away with using Lyra three kilobits per second file, and then you could really cut down the price. Of downloading a podcast. And I think that's very exciting. The company plans to make the audio Kodak open source.
And of course it was built using artificial intelligence and machine learning because nothing these days gets built without artificial intelligence and machine learning. From my point of view,
humans were involved in the making of this product now, um, The thing that I thought was interesting is that it's great that they've done that, but Google are greater producing technologies like this before they'd produced web a R P a done. If you've come across that as a image, uh, protocol, every time I come across it.
I'm like frustrated because yes, I know that the web designers looking at it for minimizing the download of an image and optimizing it, but invariably 99% of the world doesn't care. And most other websites I go to our JPEG or PNG. Um, and so web P I don't think has taken off. I wonder whether Lyra will be the same, you know, a great technology that could save downloads space and time. But nobody really cares. Yeah.
I mean, I think it's a very Western thing. I mean, pod news uses web pee everywhere. If you're on a browser that supports it, the standard browser on iOS or on the Apple Mac only started supporting it with the very latest version of the OAS. So, you know, Apple, I think deliberately dragging their heels there because it's something made by Google and similarly. They're using this Lyra audio codec along with a video code that Google also built called . And they're using that for video calls.
And so theoretically, you should be able to do a really good quality video call with, uh, justice standards, you know, GPRS phone. So, you know, very low bit rate, very low data rates. So that's, you know, that's interesting, but as you say, I think it takes such a long time for these things to be incorporated into. Particularly products from Apple because there's very clearly a not invented here thing
there. I think they're still angry about, uh, Google having Android. Uh, yes, they shouldn't have been sat on the board at the time, but anyway, that's another story now. Uh, it's women's history month this month clearly. Um, and for women's history month, you had a story about a lady bird Johnson.
Is this a story? So it's women's history month, this month in the U S the UK and Australia. Um, it is of course, international women's day on March the eighth as well. And I just love this. Uh, it turns out that the wife of Lyndon B Johnson, the president of the United States in the mid to late sixties, Claudia Alta lady, bird Johnson to give her full name was doing audio diaries. She recorded more than 123 hours of audio diaries during her time. In the white house.
And I just thought what a wonderful idea for a podcast is a podcast called in plain sight. It's from ABC news in the U S and it's basically all of the juicy bits from the audio diaries that she recorded put into context with a lot of other pieces of, um, of. Audio in there as well. What a great idea. And, you know, quite well done, you know, as well. So I thought, I thought that that works, you know, really, uh, very well.
The first two episodes dropped on Monday, the 1st of March and they're continuing all this month.
Well, you know what strikes me is that's amazing. But also I'm quite surprised that somebody actually was podcasting before Adam Carey. I thought he started at all, but clearly he didn't so well done. Lady bird Johnson.
Don't tell Todd Cochran. He'll only start shouting anyway, moving swiftly on, um, there's other stuff around women's history month, um, going on in the UK, isn't it? Yeah. There's
a great event that I think we wanted to highlight called women in audio. It starts on March the eighth, going through to March the 12th. It's free. It is a virtual event. So. You can visit their website and I'll put the shit that in the show notes, the webinar series and inspiring skills sharing conversation with five leading women, you've got Kirsty Walker. Who's the news presenter from Newsnight here in the UK. You've got Sangeeta. Polelle the creative massala Podcast Georgia cat.
Who's the award-winning producer and best known for the missing crypto queen. And I think there's a couple of other speakers in there. Stephanie Hirst and BT Clark. I. Certainly recommend listening to it.
00 PM UK time, check it out. It's women in history week. And I think this is a great event. We don't normally publicize other events as much, but I think this is one to two now.
Yeah, no, absolutely. And you find all of the times and all of the [email protected], of course, as well. So
James, what's going on for you this month in Podland. What
have you been up to been a busy old week? And if I'm sounding a bit tired it's because I was speaking at the rain Podcast business summit yesterday, and I was speaking at. Two o'clock in the morning, Australian time. And it's the second overnight Podcast conference that I've spoken at in the last week. So, um, yeah, so I don't know whether I'm coming or going at the moment. It's quite a thing, but that was good to speak at, I am also on the sound's profitable podcast this week.
I mean, I'm always on it, but I'm on it as the guest as well. This week, Brian Barletta talks to me about RSS user agents. If you are. A little bit more technical and you want to hear about that, then you'll find, sounds profitable in your podcast app of choice. It's available in all good podcast apps and some bad ones as well. And I also spoke last week at pod Fest as well, which was, um, you know, really enjoyable. They've been finishing their big mega week this week.
I clearly Austin important enough to get into the big mega week, but it's the week that they hope will. Set a new Guinness world record for the biggest, uh, number of people going to a virtual conference about podcasting called pod Fest or whatever the, the, whatever the record is for. Uh, I don't know, but anyway, but, uh, that, that was a great event too.
And it's a, you know, Chris Kermit SaaS does a fantastic job there and looking forward to radio days, Asia in a couple of weeks time, when, again, I will be speaking along with, uh, A bunch of other podcasters and doing a great big panel session, which I really must get around to organizing. And so all of that is coming up for me. It's been a big week for you as well. Sam hasn't it? Because you launched a new radio station. Yes.
Now next time anyone says I've got an idea to launch a radio station. Shoot me. Um, But no, it's great.
Now, how long did it take before you fell off the air? Because that's what always used to go on. When you lodged a new radio station, it would, it would go for about four hours and then something would go wrong. And the whole thing, that's how Virgin radio went on the air in 1993, the whole station fed off the air 15 minutes. Nobody talks about that bit. Yes, we,
we, we had,
uh, you had a
flawless start. Did you almost flawless? Yeah, that was great. They too well, I'll tell you about in a minute. But day one was, uh, day one was fine. It was great. And it was fantastic actually after six months of planning to actually get it out the door, um, we're doing a soft launch. We're not making a big splash, although it's called river radio. And, uh, the idea behind it really is we've. No, thank you very much. And we've got four shows that we're running.
We've got four new shows next week, and we've got four in the next week, et cetera. So by, by the end of March, we will have 20 shows running. That's the goal. Otherwise I would be dead if I tried to do 20 in one go, but yeah, we. It's all great. And it's a learning curve for me and I'm enjoying it actually.
I mean, I've got to get up very early in the morning and I go to bed very late at night because, uh, you're working at both ends, but you know, it's something I've never done and it was something I wanted to try and we'll see how it goes in a few weeks time
or very cool. So you can [email protected]. Is that right? You can
indeed. Thank you, James, for that plug
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