Welcome to Podland. Podland sponsored by Buzzsprout is the easiest way to host, promote and track your Podcast [email protected]. It's Thursday, may the sixth, 2021. I'm James crude and the editor of pod news here in Australia.
And on in Sam Sethi, the editor of Sam Talks Technology here in the UK.
And I'm will page the author of tars and economics, eight principles in pivoting through disruption. And later I'll be talking about the economics of podcasting.
He will Podland is a weekly podcast where Sam and I delve deeper into the week's Podcast news. And also coming up today, we have Charles van Winkle, who is a senior software engineer for de script looking forward to hearing from him. Sam, what are the big stories this week? the big stories are Twitter. It's launched spaces for everyone or at least everyone who's got more than 600 followers.
So that means you and I, the company has also allowed plans for people to challenge for spaces, to shed your spaces in the future and to co-host as well. So that means you and I might even want to do a space together in the future, Yes, that might be fun. spaces of course, is the clubhouse like thing that Twitter is doing. I have to say whenever I've had a Twitter spaces, it's always been much more friendly and much more of a feel of friends getting together.
Rather than the equivalent from clubhouse, but maybe that's just me. I think this is big news. Twitter has 187 million daily users. That's actually what they call monetizeable daily users. I'm not quite sure what a monetized daily user is. but that's quite a lot of users that Twitter has, and everybody will now begin to see all of these exciting blue glows at the top of their Twitter screen.
so clubhouse has also announced things haven't they've announced that they are, thinking about an Android.
the thinking about you, James specifically, clearly there finally got to pleasing you, does that mean you can finally get rid of your iPod and buy something useful? Or are you going to keep that in
the cupboard still, the iPod is very useful. It allows me to see whether Apple podcasts is working today. We'll find out later it's a very useful thing. So clubhouse is, busy continuing to say that they're doing something with Android just the difference between. Twitter's 187 million users per day. And clubhouse is 10 million users per week kind of says where this is going. really interesting to see who's going to win out of this.
so my question do you think clubhouse has got any chance at all,
as I've said previously, I don't give clubhouse very much time to be honest, but still there we are.
So is it an acquisition then? Is clubhouse just going to be acquired
is it going to be a quiet or is it going to fade away? I suspect it'll probably be acquired. they've sent me a very exciting press release today, which I don't fully understand, but it's all about content partners and it looks as if there's an awful lot of podcasts who they're getting into bed with in terms of something to do with clubhouse and content which I don't fully understand because I'm not really sure how that all fits together, but I should probably read that. Press release properly.
there's always a first time. but I think, Twitter is such a larger company with so many more users. it's just bought scroll, which is a subscription service. that is a way of you getting ad free. news websites. so they'll probably merge that with bits of review, which is the newsletter service that they've also bought and everything else.
I think Twitter is almost doing a bit of a pivot to turn from being a company, which is all about short form time text content, to being all kinds of different forms of content in all kinds of different platforms. And perhaps that might be an interesting future for where Twitter's going.
I think 20, 21 is here. If the creator, it feels like we're beginning as creators to be given the tools to allow us to monetize against our fan base or audience. And I think. Twitter as well, clearly Jack Dorsey, isn't the one running it because he's probably off at square or in Africa somewhere still. But whoever is running Twitter these days clearly has decided that they can't make more than three. I think it's around 300 million.
if they use a base and they don't seem to be going up much higher. So if the stock market wants the share price to move anywhere, then I'm sure they're under pressure from shareholders saying, do something different. And I guess this is what they're doing. I do like, scroll, cause I've been using nozzle for a while. Which is,
I'm glad to hear it. What's nozzle.
Oh I've
been using nozzle for a while. This is the sort of conversation that you hear down the pub every day.
Yes. Drop that in and just leave. no. As long as the mail that comes out of scroll and you can sign up to it and what it does is it looks at your social graph and then it picks out the best ones and sent it to you. And it just gives you a highlights basically. And I've just been using that because I can't sometimes bothered to go through my feed And that's been good. And then I've been reading the scroll and Twitter press release. I did read it.
And they say they're going to build nozzles straight in. So look, I think it's great. If you're a creator, you've got multiple ways now to use review scroll, hopefully scroll in my opinion. We'll get rid of the trolls.
Ah, okay. And that may or may well be it. Nozzle sounds really good. So I'm busy looking at the nozzle website. the first thing that I learned is that Twitter is about to shut it down. So there you go. So it's always the way isn't it. When you see something and you go, Oh, this looks really cool. This looks really helpful. Oh, they're just about shut it down. Great.
but I believe it's a shutdown to, to integrate rather than the shut down to just do it. Acquire of developers, which is normally what you see
I hope so. clearly Twitter have their eyes on a subscription model for all kinds of things. which is good. Of course. We've just heard about Apple and Spotify doing paid subscribers for podcasts as well. but there's another one. Isn't the Sam.
It looks like a at, is that how you say it?
The
Spanish fellow now. Yes. Now I won't do the Manuel.
If two British people are in a room at the same time, then it very quickly goes into faulty towers, impersonations. Yes. Badly
nations as well. so tell me more you wrote about it.
So they've, they have been running paid subscriptions for the last three years. who knew not me. it has more than 2000 Podcast creators taking part on that. and they've given, lots and lots of money to Podcast creators. So it's interesting seeing that I've votes has been already part of this. And of course there are others there's supporting cast and member full and all kinds of other services in there as well. I Vox is planning a webinar on may the 19th.
My guess is that webinar will be only good to you if you speak Spanish. But nevertheless it's always good to remind ourselves that it's not just Apple and Spotify. There are a bunch of other companies doing this as well. And in fact shim Aleigha, which is the big Chinese Podcast platform, but also audio platform. They are filing for an IPO in the U S at the moment, and they have published their prospectus online. And that includes what Shema layer feel is the Chinese audio market.
And again, there's an awful lot of user generated content in there. There's an awful lot of Podcast creators. They've got millions of Podcast creators using that service too. So there's a bunch of these new interesting companies, which are doing interesting things outside of the U S which is always interesting to me So I learned about the whole Shema layer IPO thing. And in fact, I asked somebody how to pronounce it.
I learned that from just pod, which is a new issue newsletter, which is in English. There's another version for Chinese speakers as well. And I know that Chinese, isn't a language don't ask me. and that's all about the Chinese Podcast industry. So if you're interested in that part of the world, it's well worth going to find it, it's called just pod, and you'll find it in your favorite search engine
Now you had one of your friends, who's an economist. Also give us a little insight to what his thoughts were on all of this subscription model.
Cause there are so many subscription services now. So I wondered what that meant for the economics of the Podcast industry and who better to ask than an economist. So I caught up with the author of a new book, which is Tarzan economics. He's also a man who's been writing for the Ft and other places. his name is will page. So you were the first chief economist for Spotify. You are the first chief economist of PRS for music, which is the U S music collection agency.
A few years ago, we got excited about hitting, I think three-quarters of a million podcasts. Now there are 3 million podcasts. Are there any parallels between where we going in terms of podcasting and me?
Yes. I think quite simply when the barriers to entry fall. Supply exceeds demand. That's where the rubber, but hits the road in terms of the economics of both music and podcasting. And I'll come back to those metrics with some, from my own, which is, I published a piece in the financial times saying that there was 55,000 songs being shipped onto streaming platforms every day, 24 hours later, Daniel EK, my former Boston, hopefully.
Future boss of arsenal football club and those at 60,000 and by some rough mass of my own, as we come to the end of April, it's now up to 75,000 new songs a day. Let's just be historically clear here. I think in 1984, the British music industry released 6,000 albums in one calendar year. Okay. That means that streaming platforms are ingesting every day. What we used to provide every year, that's been the explosion and supply that we're dealing with here.
And you're seeing it happen in different ways. I just go into the detail a little bit more. Last year, major record labels released 1.2 million songs. So streaming platforms, that's a lot of music. the artists using the DIY platforms. I know this is another parallel of podcasting is just doing it yourself. Empowering using tools like anchor, for example artists using DIY platforms released 9.5 million.
So that's a ratio of eight to one of artists doing it themselves, as opposed to having labels do it for them. So just to reiterate where the rubber hits the road is when those barriers to entry fall supply is exceeding demand, which is a positive problem solve
that. Is that all a good
thing? It is. I think if TPS had ran with the title of the music industry is making more money. That's good. That's what we all want it to happen. You know, when we're staring Paris in the face, but we have way more mouths to feed the population of British artists and songwriters, it's more than doubled in the past 10 years, more than doubled, find me another area of the labor market, where the population has more than doubled in under a decade.
And. I think the same thing is happening with podcasting. There's more money going into podcasting, but there's more mouths to feed. So you just have to do that simple division in your head to see that it's a positive problem to solve. And you're, that's going to dominate the narrative for the next couple of years, I believe.
Where do you see the Podcast business at the moment? I've heard people say that Spotify has spent more than the entire industry is worth. Do you think that's a fair thing to say?
it's spinning the money on assets compared to what the ministry is worth in terms of revenues. So you have to differentiate between the two, but yeah, they've put a lot of, if not all of their chips on red at the casino and hope that's going to work. You've also seen huge investments from Amazon, Apple, Pandora, and perhaps more interestingly and credit to Eugene's for covering this, which is, our Podcast, a threat to radio.
Or does radio just by podcasting and, seeing the radio industry invest in podcasting as well. which brings us back to that perennial debate, which why on earth do we call them a Podcast? Yo, an iPod can only be purchased in cash converters in Kentish town, high street, charity shops, the only place you can buy them and broadcasters the exact model that's trying to disrupt. So know, can you imagine trying to explain to somebody in Brazil or Indonesia where Podcast are taken off?
This is the origin of the word. They wouldn't even know what the iPod was there. So yeah, there's definitely some definition issues that we have to tackle
here too. we can blame Ben Hammersley for that. He was the person that came up with that particular words, that particular portmanteau, what would you call it then?
Oh, you're putting me on the spot there. I'm not sure I can give you a quick fire answer to that one, but it's. Is the way I approach getting to name, to think of it as a means to an end. What am I actually achieving here? I let me reel back for a second. James has got some great ideas. I want to get them into my head. I could read a book by James Cridland. I can listen to a podcast by genes Cridland, but it's a transfer of ideas in an intimate setting.
Now what makes Podcast really beautiful for me is they crack intimacy. I've always said this, the internet can scale just about everything, but it can't scale intimacy and of podcasting as an industry plays it's cars, right? It might even correct for that. We could have a huge business, which preserves intimacy. That's the balancing act. We're dealing with
other cinemas out of the UK, which I think say that 50% of radio listeners listen to the radio alone. Whereas 92% of podcast listeners listen to a podcast alone, which is a tremendous thing. I think I do like numbers know talking about books. You wrote a book during the lockdown. It's called Tarzan economics. It's available now in the UK from may the 18th in the U [email protected] and all good bookstores. tell me what actually is Tarzan economics? Has it got anything to do with monkeys?
So it's a, it's an expression coined by a technologist called Jim Griffin quite a famous technologist and music circles. He was responsible for the first ever digital file sold on the internet, which was Aerosmith in 1995, a long time ago. So he's been there, seen it and done it long before Napster came along.
And he used tires and economics quite a few times to explain how in life be ourselves as individuals, businesses, political organizations, we cling onto the old vine of doing things through inertia. it's paying the bills or get us to the next quarter. We know that old vine is dying, but it holds us above the jungle floor. And what we're reluctant to do is to let go of the old vine or reach out to the news through a fear of the unknown.
And if you look at the music industry, we have a 20 year head started playing Tarzan economics for the first 10 years, we held onto the old vine believing people were going to go back to buying CDs and downloads, that was never going to happen. we spent millions of litigations suing customers, websites, ISP. We lost billions in revenue. That's a bad ratio. And then it came to the kind of the crunch point, which is we're going to have to let it go.
And in the second, 10 years, we embraced streaming, which by the way is replicating what was happening in piracy. Yo, I remember speaking with Daniel X, when he had hair that's aging, my Spotify years, which was to say that consumption of music was not the problem. Monetization was you can bring a horse to water.
And expect those customers to come back to buying CDs and downloads, or you can bring water to the horse and build something that's better than stealing more convenient than stealing, beat them on convenience. And now we've got our recovery. That's the envy of every other media sector. So Tarzan economics is to get that. First to suffer first to recover story, but transfer it to everyone else. And post pandemic. We're all pretty much staring at our Napster moment now.
And there's a ton of great stories in the book. I was curious if you made a podcast about your book, what would be the first episode?
You know what the first episode is? Chapter two, not chapter one. So we'll lose the chronological order, which you can do with podcasting, but it's on attention. And I just really hammer home this point about attention economics. I call it the first fork in the road. You've got to deal with it before you do anything else. And I don't care what you're doing. If you're drafting local politics legislation, deal with attention.
If you're drafting a new Podcast, deal with attention, and it's just fascinating. Start thinking about attention as binary. You do you have it? You don't or stackable many forms of attention competing at once. And what I do in that chapter is I give a brief history of attention, which is fascinating stories of Mark Twain. For example, Mark Twain invented a scrapbook, which is a modern day newsfeed on Facebook know Facebook is giving 1.6 billion use fees to their customers every day.
Not one of them the same. I think about that for a minute. No broadcast. We all consume the same content and discuss it over the water cooler. Not anymore. We have this narrowcast model. So I give you the history of attention, but then it gives you a framework for dealing with it. And I'll just put that framework to work really quickly for you, which is to think about where is their gin and tonic. I'm going to refer to alcohol here. That's way too early in the morning for me.
whereas our gin and tonic, which has. Complimentary forms of attention. I buy more gin. I buy more tonic. I buy more lemons in line. And when is it monopolistic brands of attention that is different brands of gin. Either I buy Beefeater gin or Gordon's gin one or the other, if one gains it's another one's pain now. If I look at Netflix, I'm in a weird situation just now in that Vince Gilligan loves my book. And when I was told this, I was like, first thing I said was a bit of a full power.
Who's been skilled again, you have watched breaking bad I've you know, I haven't woopsy so I'm going to meet Vince Gilligan to discuss the book and this crazy cause the reason why he loves the book is the purpose of looking at attention. How. Songs are getting shorter and the course has been moved to the front and how he wrote breaking bed. He put the conclusion of the first episode at the very beginning.
So there's this connection here between music and film, earlier we discussed music and Podcast. So I am now dedicating two hours every night to get him through breaking bed. Before I meet Vince Gilligan, it would do me proud of, I actually. Watch this masterpiece before I meet him, says two hours at Netflix gets off my media time, which everyone else loosies. So Podcast Lou's music, Lucy's social media. Lucy's Netflix wins.
Everyone else leaves, which means everyone else has increasingly less time to compete for. So you have this kind of tragedy of the commons playing out there. That's what I want to get across in the attention is, Optimized for attention based one, then moved to base too.
And it's interesting, you talk about attention because that's clearly one of the things around clubhouse and those live audio services Spotify, your former employer bought locker room. They announced today. It's going to be called the Spotify green room, which is all very exciting. art services like clubhouse and Twitter spaces and the Spotify green room again, competition for podcasts. They clearly are in terms of attention. Aren't they.
Yeah, let's just step back and refer to that means to an end, I Podcast in competition for books. Absolutely. Our boots in competition with music. potentially it could be complimentary. So we start them to use this clubhouse phenomenon. I call it a social network for the AirPod generation. you think about air pods as a device possibly made clubhouse. Possible. So you start with a device and you build out the success story from there.
yes, because, could it become passe to listen to a one-way communication? Oh, I only want to engage in Podcast when it becomes two way. So you can see the scramble in this wild West podcasting world happening right there, which is. in six months time, we'll be on the listing to James Cridland Podcast thing. Do you remember the days where I used to talk to you and you couldn't talk back? That was so out of date. Now we have a two-way conversation very quickly on that.
I think discord is worth, I mentioned there too in that discord, although I think the UX could be a lot better is making it possible for everyone to become a talk show, radio host. I'm not saying that everybody wants to become a talk show, radio host, but having the option of two-way interaction, as opposed to one way does make the Podcast gambled a little bit antiquated. how do I get feedback live on the show as opposed to, how do I just talk to somebody?
How do I talk to ghosts and how to become, make those skills? My friends. Think of it that way.
So in the last few weeks, a final question, Spotify and Apple have both announced, paid subscriptions for podcasts. You're the economist. is that gonna work? Is that the new vine to grasp? Hold off.
I think the important thing here is to look at the business, sees from a couple of steps back of Podcast. So it's not to have the blinkers on and think, is this the right Podcast strategy, but is this the right corporate strategy? So what is the business that Spotify is in? It's in a business of conversion.
Back in 2008, when it rolled out in Sweden, Norway, and in 2009, when he launched in the UK, the idea was you had a funnel, a free funnel, which allowed frictionless engagement with this new thing called streaming and the conversion mechanism. They got you to go and pay. Now in economics, we refer to standard class and first-class carriage is, it's easy to travel standard class. What can I put in that first class of courage that makes you want to upgrade? And my gamble. Back then.
And my gamble to this day is these businesses are in conversion business seats. They want you to pay, this idea of ad from the media is a bit of a quirk in history. If you look at Pepys notes, paid for everything back then, paying for stuff was the norm. Then advertising came in. I think we could be seeing a return to history of paying for stuff, becoming a norm again. Yeah, I think it's going to be a big one, but I would just ask your listeners to remember what is the business you're in.
And if it's the business of conversion of making people pay, then what we've seen in the Podcast evolution to date is a means to that end. So I think it's going to be the big one, but I'll reiterate the words, a great friend of mine at Spotify. Lauren Jarvis said, which is, if you don't go somewhere, you end up getting nowhere. it's not for the observer to wonder it's for the businesses. Execute
will. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.
Thank you so much. And thank you for the pardon news. It's an essential fix every morning. Like crack cocaine.
I will write that down somewhere.
Just for the record. I've never taken crack cocaine.
I'm all for being compared to crack cocaine. I think that's a fantastic thing.
I actually do use the term crack cocaine marketing
fascinating interview that with a wheel page and something that if only I could put that onto the pod news.net about page, I'd be very happy now. Sam, do you have any exciting showbiz neighbors?
I do actually, strangely I live in a very odd place where we have, he may know him personally, actually. I've got Ricky surveys, which we'll talk about in a minute, but you might know Chris Evans as well from your days
at Virgin, I've heard of Chris Evans. I opened the door for him once. I worked at Virgin at the very end of his second stint at Virgin when he was doing the breakfast show. and I started work there about two months before he left. I never even spoke to the guy, and for the Americans listening, that's not Chris Evans, who is the actor. That's Chris Evans, who is a ginger had radio DJ.
By his white head now really? The ginger. Yes,
exactly. frankly, it had gone back then, but he was dying. It don't say
don't tell anybody.
so Ricky do surveys is your close neighbor as well? Yes.
where I live in Marlow in bucking machine. We've got a very eclectic mix. We've got Ricky, we've got Russell brand. we've got Tom carriage. and Chris Evans and many others actually, it's becoming a little bit boring now seeing them all around the town, but Ricky is a close neighbor. he lives at the bottom of my road and he's launching new Podcast called absolutely mental with the famous neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris, which I think will be really good.
But I will say it's on may the 10th that they're launching it. and it's going to be $14 99, but here's the big question, James. Will it be on Apple or Spotify?
and we don't know, that's the interesting thing. So the story says listeners will be able to, to add them. That's I think a deadline wordage for play them air them on their Podcast players. which leads is it open to? Are they going to use something like supporting cast or member fall or super cast or any of those services or are they going to use Apple and Apple's brand new Podcast subscription service, or are they going to use Spotify guys or are they going to use all of them?
w don't really know. but it's quite interesting. Ricky has got previous in this. He charged for his podcast back in 2006 on a product called iTunes. Remember that. he charged $6 95 for quote, at least four installments all the way back then. I think he released a few more. and he was also Guinness book of world records holder for the world's most downloaded podcast, which got 261,000 downloads per month, 261,000 doesn't seem like an awful lot. but he was certainly a winner back then in 2006.
So he clearly knows what he's doing in terms of selling podcasts. The question is how is he going to sell them? I guess we've not got very much longer to wait and then we'll find out,
I'll just pop down and let you know. I'll give you a ring
later. When you're going down for, a mug of Micah of milk or whatever it is that you showbiz people do there.
Oh I often knock on his door and just see if I could borrow some sugar.
exactly. Why not? when he's not in LA or wherever it is that you, you presume it'd be spends most of his time.
he was trying to stay close to his roots in slouch, which is down the road, which is where the office was filmed. Clearly he's moved up market a little bit.
Indeed. I knew there was a reason why you're running a radio station for that area. And then now all of a sudden it makes perfect sense.
I'll offer them when their careers are on the way, just a little jobs. If they want
to do something now your radio station works, which is more than we can say about quite a lot of things from Apple at the moment.
Yes. Now the new Apple Podcast iOS fourteen.five.one actually drops this week. but it's not dropped with a lot of fanfare or favor. Kevin Finn was not too happy. For example, what have they done, James? What have they done to upset everyone now?
Oh, well, it's you know, a never ending hamster wheel of Apple podcasts, negativity. It really is. so firstly, let's talk about Apple's Podcast connect. that is the backend that. if you're a podcast producer you log into that and you get your analytics from it and you tell Apple when you have new shows and for quite a lot of people for quite a lot of Podcast consultants, they've been waiting now two weeks for access to this thing.
it won't let quite a lot of people log in when it does let people log in. It won't give you any analytics. I had my cutoff again last week. it's now come back, but I have no analytics. So I don't know whether anybody's actually using Apple podcasts anymore. I'm presuming they are. so it's doing all of that. It's also not allowing quite a lot of people to add new shows and it's coming back with errors about, copyright or images or something. when there are no actual errors there at all.
so you've got that on one side. Then you've got the Apple podcasts app, which has changed quite a lot of the way that it works. So this time, last week we were talking about the Apple podcast app, no longer talks directly to RSS feeds, and instead talks to the Apple podcasts crawler. Now the Apple podcasts crawler is the thing that goes around and checks people's RSS feeds, except it does that very slowly.
So this show, for example, took a day and a half to actually get into Apple podcasts last week because Apple podcasts, crawler is rubbish. So you've got that As another thing. And then what they've done is they've changed the way the episode notes works. it used to be, and in fact, their specifications on their website still says that you can use proper HTML links and bolds and Tallix and, bullet points and all that kind of stuff. Nope. you can't use any of that stuff anymore.
so I wrote up a whole thing about that on pod news a couple of days ago. so all of the stuff about episode notes and then today in pod news, talking about episode numbers, because you may remember a couple of years ago, Apple got very upset that people were putting episode numbers in titles. So they came up with a new tag called iTunes title which allows you to produce a special title for iTunes. You could then also give.
your episode number in a different tag, but what all of this has led to is that the new Apple podcasts app doesn't work that way. So again, there are specifications that are on the Apple podcast website and good podcast hosts like captivate and Libsyn. And presumably Buzzsprout are producing proper episode numbers correctly, but because the app is ignoring the title tag, then that bit's not working, it's just a mess.
and I said, this last week, I said that The Podcast subscriptions have been really well thought out and a really good piece of work by the Apple team, but all of that Goodwill has completely evaporated now where we've had no working with Podcast hosts on any of this new stuff, no working with the Podcast as themselves. clearly launching a very buggy product where the crawler isn't crawling fast enough that the app isn't working properly, And I get the feeling that Apple thinks that this is just.
a bit of fun and it's just a hobby for people to do podcasts. It's a one and a half billion dollar industry. And Apple seems to be taking us all as just idiots. And it's just incredible. And they're still saying nothing publicly. They're saying nothing about all of this. What are you saying? you're a bit more of an Apple fan boy than I am. You have the Apple phones and the Apple pods and the Apple, whatever. am I just being a bit harsh being an Android fan boy?
No, I don't think you're being harsh. I think they've really screwed up. Walter Isaacson in his autobiography on Steve jobs had a brilliant chapter where Steve jobs called the whole of the iCloud team into the foyer. As I stood on the balcony, got the director of the iCloud and literally then said, you're the idiot who developed this and have failed and cost us the business online, if you remember the first version I think everyone got an icloud.com or icloud.net. Email.
he basically sat him in front of the whole thing and then he sacked every one of the developers. and then the HR people ran around very rapidly after Steve left and went there now
he didn't really mean it. He
didn't mean it, honestly. I know he's the boss, but he didn't. but it's a brilliant chapter in the Walter Isaacson book about Steve jobs and Steve jobs mentality. And I suspect had he been alive there would be heads rolling now at Apple for this diabolical effort given I think how much he was probably involved in the initial iPod and podcasting itself. I think that in summary, I would say Apple can't do software. I think they're awful at it. I don't use any of their apps on my Mac.
I just think they just all stink personally. I haven't got a good Apple. Piece of software. whether it's numbers or whether it's, any of them. In fact, I can't even read them off because they don't use them. That's the first thing I often do is just delete everything of Apple off in terms of software wise and just reinstall stuff I want to use. I don't know what they're trying to do. I reckon this is what it is. I reckon they're trying to avoid a DOJ issue.
So they're making it really crap and saying, look, the competition's really out there. We're not very good. Don't go and break up at the app store. That's it? I think I've finally worked it out. They're going through Congress right now. Aren't they? And as Epic and everyone else,
one of our listeners who is a big fan is convinced that I think that this is all a deliberate PLI by Apple. and I absolutely don't think that, but also on the other side, it's interesting to hear that you do
well. I've got to think of some reason why Tim cook has gone and allowed this diabolical effort to go on. So maybe that's it look, Mia culpa. We are so bad. We can't be competitive. Leave us alone.
the frustrating thing is that Apple aren't saying anything about this publicly. and if Apple were to put their hands up and say, we're really working on this guys, we've screwed up. We're really working on this. or yes, this is a bargain. The way that the new episode notes are supposed to work and we'll fix that or no, this isn't a bug. This is how we want our episode notes to look like in the new act, deal with it.
either one of those will be fine, but the fact that we don't know is just embarrassing. and to me, I'm just there thinking, either Apple should take this seriously or, it's just very clear that, the stories that I was hearing a couple of years ago are the Apple podcast is the place where you go, if you're not very good and you don't want your career to move forward. and I laugh that off at the time.
Cause I thought that was a dreadful thing to end up saying, but now when you have a look at what Apple have foisted on us you can see that there might be a bit of truth there.
You would think that somebody actually tested this somewhere, There was a beater of it out, but it's very
limited. There was a, it was a beater, but it wasn't using half of this tech, there was a loss of service side stuff. So you didn't see half of it. that's the problem that quite a lot of it, wasn't tested and there was no beta of the new podcasts connect service at all. So nobody got the chance to give Apple any feedback on that. And that's an appalling piece of software.
Anyway, I can't work out whether I should be just annoyed and angry about it or whether or not it's just hastening, Apple's demise and whether or not that's a good thing. I just don't
well, quick question that we raised a few weeks backwards is the Apple Podcast index because of the change in the color, actually now a permanent change, or is that a bug rather than a feature.
and again, we don't know because Apple don't bother talking to us because clearly the Podcast industries and important enough to them. I spent much of the last couple of weeks rewriting all of the Podcast pages on pod news because I can't rely on iTunes IDs anymore. and I know that a lot of other people have done that too.
I know that Marco from overcast has ended up, hooking into the Podcast index as have another four or five other companies because they can't rely on the Apple iTunes IDs to actually exist anymore. And that's a dreadful position for us all to be in. but the point is, we don't know, we don't know if it's a bug or not I used to work with a very blunt Yorkshireman. and is there any other, there are plenty of not blunt, but I used to work with, I used to work with a very blunt one.
who every so often would talk about mushroom syndrome or it's all about mushroom syndrome. This kept in the dark and fed horseman year and you're there thinking that's basically where we are. We're kept in the dark, we're being fed, nothing particularly interesting in terms of Apple's plans for where that future is, were being taken by Gideons. And there are some people who still go, Oh I'm sure it's a bargain. I'm sure they'll fix it soon.
I'm sure it's a bug, but at the end of the day, what do you do? Oh
let me hold your hand and step you off that soapbox. Now
it's a long way down.
It's a long way down now. let's leave Apple alone or see what next week. I was thinking actually next week's headline has got to be that Zuckerberg announces some subscription service. It's got to be to compete with scrolling. He can't leave it alone for a week until he finds he's got to copy someone else. So I'm expecting that's the headline next week
maybe. Yes. And talking about copying somebody else or other acquiring somebody else. I think Spotify is trying to get in on the clubhouse action. Aren't they.
So Spotify recently acquired a clubhouse, like service called locker room, and it's going to be called a Spotify green room. so I think I can see where they could use it. So if you've got Beyonce or I don't know, ed Sheeran in a locker room or a green room and you as a fan could then go and participate in that. I think that would be quite exciting.
I think so. I love the name, the green room, because that's where you go and you talk to celebrities when they're nice and relaxed So I can see that. That could well be what they're planning. And maybe it's a little bit mean to talk about this as being a clubhouse, like service. It is a clubhouse like service, but it's a clubhouse. like service where only the stars get to go on the stage. So you don't hear that annoying guy from LinkedIn who posts 30 motivational posts a day.
And you do just hear from people like Beyonce. Yes. But also, Ilan and, Jason Calacanis and all of those types of people, but you wouldn't hear from, a random SEO university commerce specialist who thinks he can run a clubhouse from Danny aleck Talks in the most recent for the record Podcast, which is a podcast that Spotify makes, it's not a podcast, it's a show cause it's only available on Spotify.
but he says that there's real opportunity for live audio from a. consumer standpoint to allow creators to express themselves and connect with their audience. And I think, there's probably something there. and that's a very focused plan. I think Twitter spaces is open to everybody and do whatever you like with it. Spotify greenroom seems to be the same sort of thing, but very focused in terms of what they might do I'm quite excited by seeing what Spotify is planning.
for where they see audio work. It
just made me wonder, would Apple buy clubhouse, They're going to have to trust you and Pete, if they want. they had Apple one, which was basically getting a radio station to try and promote artists. they've got to get into exclusive content. They're doing that on Apple TV. and that's not been going great guns, but they're doing it. And they're spending a lot of money.
If Spotify start to get stars in the green room to talk and you get fans milling around that green room and listening to tracks it's a very sticky way of getting people to subscribe and to play music.
you can well, see that. there are lots of things that I think a well run Apple company would do. and let's just wait for that to happen, but you can see that this is a subscribers extra that, in the same way that you get certain pieces of exclusive content through Apple TV, plus you can get exclusive pieces of content. Presumably if you're on Spotify if you're a premium Spotify user, you certainly don't have to hit hear the ads all the time.
One would assume that more value ads like this would be a good plan.
it also made me want to ask you the question. So Amazon's got prime, right? And Amazon seems to have gone to sleep at the wheel around podcasting. they had a little flurry and then dropped off a cliff, but will they react to any of this stuff? Will they do anything as the first question? I guess James, but even if they do, they can just, up the ante by just saying Oh, it's free with prime or it's free with prime plus.
I think a lot of this can be driven by, the Amazon prime, the Apple plus subscription that they have Google one, which is a subscription service that Google also has. I think a lot of this can be driven by that. and those services, yes, they need things for you to buy, but they also need additional unique selling propositions that you simply can't get from anywhere else. And so the difficulty that Spotify has is that they're selling.
Stuff that everybody else has, you can get the new Elton John compilation from
good to see you're listening to me.
I was literally going to say Taylor Swift and then I thought, no, that's a really bad example because she has deliberately taken her music off things. but you can get the new Billie Eilish album ECAP, Billie Eilish album from Apple music, from YouTube music from Spotify. It doesn't matter. It sounds the same. it's available on all of these services and that's fine. so it's up to all of these services to give me something extra that I can't get with anything else.
And so from Spotify is point of view could be the Spotify green room. It could be their discovery weekly playlist, which is A great tool that they have that kind of nobody else has for YouTube music. It could be the fact that there's bootlegs and there's weird videos mixed up in there. or it could be the fact that they've actually got some rather better algorithms now than Spotify does in terms of algorithmic playlists.
there's a really clever one that they've got, which is the focus playlist that they've got, which has all of your favorite music, but only the instrumentals. that people have produced. that weird Indian instrumental from the Sergeant peppers album, for example, that will get on there or, music from air will get on there or, that strange, et cetera, et cetera, all that kind of stuff. So there's a lot, an awful lot of these unique things that individual. services can do.
And that's the thing that actually will keep people with a service or will make people jump from one commodity to another. because that's all that these music services are.
Spotify in the U S launched their piece of hardware for the car, which was their first, attempt. I guess if you're in your car and you've got car play well, you haven't got car play, but if you had car play, you've got Android auto.
I don't, in fact, I don't even have Android auto because Toyota, for a long time, didn't believe in it. so we weren't allowed any of that stuff, but exactly. I think what Spotify trying to do is that they have realized that all of the data that comes out of audio listening in cars shows that it's all radio listening still even now, and Spotify is they're going okay. We want to be in the car. clearly people aren't just hooking their phones up and doing all of this weird bluetoothy nonsense.
Clearly we need something to remind them. So we're going to spend $40 on this little piece of of electronics that can sit on the dashboard and remind you every time you get into the car that you have a Spotify account and you should be using it. And that's a very clever plan. I think.
Spotify is the play everywhere app for me, it's the universal app you find on nearly everything. and I know Daniel has said in the past that was a clear strategy to be available everywhere for everyone as opposed to Apple only on one platform or Google it on another platform. So that was quite a smart thing. The other thing that Spotify though, I wonder whether they'll do this as an open the market place. This is one of the areas that I think Spotify could really do well.
And I'm sure you've heard of things like song kick and bands in town, which are like third party apps. again, I'm just trying to think how Scott He calls it a Rundle, a revenue recurring bundle. And that's really what subs. It's catchy and runs off the tongue, but that's his thing. and, but I think what he's saying is if you can bond or more subscription services what is the price elasticity of music. So let me just explain that for a second. It's 1499 for a family account right now.
And Spotify could they go to 20 pounds? Could they go to 25 pounds? would I still pay it? Would you still pay it? what is the breaking point of that subscription payment level?
and that's a fascinating question. I understand that even the basic cheapest Spotify or YouTube or Apple music subscription is still much more than people normally spend on music. Anyway. if you were to have a look at households and how much they spend on music, it's somewhere in the region of $40 a year. and once you obviously pay for Spotify over a year, even just the basic model you're looking at considerably more than that.
and th there's a lot of this that goes on and it goes back to that interview with Wilpena earlier where if there's one person that understands the economics of music, it's him and the book that he has written ties out and economics goes into a lot of the ways that music is charged, music makes money. and you can absolutely see that there's some interesting changes on the horizon, given that how much are people going to pay for music? They get podcasts included in that, right?
But how much are they going to pay extra for the extra Podcast, the Ricky surveys ones that they want to have a listen to as well. And in which point does that get too expensive? if you're paying for all of these individual rentals and then you're paying for, the Netflix and the Amazon prime and the Apple TV plus, and if you're in Australia, the Stan and they binge and all of these weird and wonderful streaming services, You know what's the cutoff point.
and I find all of that fascinating and comparing the cutoff points of these, which are, 15 or $20 a month with what you might pay for your cable connection for TV which in the U S somewhere like $120 or more and it's this similar here for satellite TV, $120 or more per month to get all of these services. it's fascinating times, I think.
I think there's a syndrome is called the forgotten subscription syndrome. Or if there isn't, I'm making it up. but I think people, I don't know, I'm sure there is a syndrome for everything. but I do know, people now, and that's why people or companies prefer it where you set it up as a subscription and then they don't have to knock on your door every month and say, please pay us. It's just recurring. And happens all the time.
Now, the reason I mentioned Songkick in bands intro, just to finish that last point in case people were wondering why the hell I mentioned it earlier was would Spotify start their own app store competing with Apple? Because again, it could be a music related thing. If they've got hardware and they're beginning to produce hardware, if they opened up an API and allowed the parties to integrate with them, I think that would be an interesting competing space as well.
and Spotify does have quite a good API and does integrate with quite a few things. But I think Spotify has been quite careful in how they do that. I used to have a really good DJ mixing app on my tablet, which was a fantastic little thing. And you could basically connect it with your Spotify account and basically mix with music from your Spotify account, including speeding songs up, sewing them down, all of that kind of, beat, matching all that kind of stuff.
and it was just quite fun to play with. and they had that for a good number of years and they finally had to. Stop, including Spotify because of some change it to Spotify. But I think that again, I think a lot of this is the integration into other things that we use.
Hence why you all of a sudden see that smart speakers, you can begin to use Apple podcasts on Amazon Alexa, smart speakers as one example because somebody's bright, it Apple, there must be one or two of them still have realized that it's a good idea for Apple podcasts to be integrated into other platforms as well.
the last part on that, which is very similar to someone, an Apple, must've worked it out, how to stop the DOJ actually coming after them because in fourteen.five.one, you can now use Spotify as your default player. So you don't have to use Apple
anymore. and that's existed for a while on Android devices as well and on Google speakers. again, it's it's Apple catching up, but great. well done Apple.
Excellent. I think we've done that to death now. Let's move on. headliner, which is an app I love to use the headline that you wrote that they've integrated with megaphone by Spotify again. Oh my gosh. We back to Spotify.
so firstly, it's no longer just called megaphone. It's called megaphone by Spotify. that says Spotify is enterprise podcast host and headliner of course, is the company that does all of these fancy little sharable videos of your podcasts that you can stick on all kinds of social media platforms. they've done some integration into megaphone, which is. interesting. I've not seen headliner do very much integration into enterprise grade stuff.
and so it's nice to see that megaphone also claimed a number of new clients. Who've joined them over the last couple of months. one of them is called girl boss, which apparently is very big. one of them is called major league baseball which is some form of American sport. so I reported that and then somebody else that also has major league baseball as a client said, Oh, that's weird. There's still a client on our service as well.
So I wonder whether it's just, a major league baseball affiliate has decided that they'll use megaphone. Whereas another one is using. This particular client who knows, but anyway megaphone are clearly making a little bit of exciting changes there. rolling out some streaming ad in session on that as well. But you've got you've got a headliner about headliner for next week. Haven't you
indeed. Neil Modi the CEO of headliner. We're going to have him on the show next week, and he says, he's got a big announcement to give us. So I'm looking forward to that. I have no idea what it is.
Excellent.
we'll read the press release together, James I'm. Sure. Or will we who knows? And it's good to see that Spotify is using the same agency for naming of their products as Facebook, megaphone by Spotify, Instagram by Facebook. it must be a trend in Silicon Valley,
dude.
Now, uh, um, uh, um, uh, uh, that's what I'm going to say, because one of the products that has come out is called clean voice.
Yes. Clean voice is a new service, which promises to automatically remove all of those, um, and ER, words from your recordings, which a sounds amazing. and B it's priced really competitively. you basically, pay $3 a show. and that will essentially edit out all of those arms and ERs and sort of SUVs and everything else, which is very cool. I'm looking forward to testing it.
I do have a code to allow me to test it, but the way that I'm going to test it is I'm going to interview Adrian spatter from the company who is running it. and I'm going to put our interview in a couple of weeks through clean voice to find out whether or not it actually does what it says it's going to do. But that's a pretty cool thing. You use D scripts, don't you for M and a removal.
Yes, I do. I've been using it for a while and it's, it was one of those Oh my God. Moments when I first used it and I think podcasters should all be when they edit. I learned about the editing from sonar chotsky, who's the Andreessen Horowitz internal editor for podcasting. And she, turned me on to the whole idea of de script, the script being one of the Andreessen Horowitz investments.
And. Oh, my God. I was using audacity before and suddenly I just went into de script, click the button and they were all gone and you've gotta be very careful. I think I was a little heavy handed. I think people have told me in the past, like Brian by later that he thought some of my editing was a little bit too harsh and he was probably right. so you have gotta be careful what you do cause you can remove the natural flow of a conversation.
If you hit over edit and maybe, with clean voice, they can do that. de script have worked very hard to make that much smoother in the current versions and actually what was quite nice. I caught up with their senior software engineer, Charles van Winkle this week to talk about his role in script and his move from Adobe audition over to D script. Charles. Let's start off with, what are you doing at de script? What's your role and what you're planning
to do? I'm just a week into my tenure at de script and my role as a software engineer. And so what I hope to do is fix bugs and add new functionality. Keep customers happy, just like I've been doing for a number of years before, but at a different
company. Okay. And what attracted you to deed script? What did you know about the script before you joined them? I
had a friend that works there, but also. They're innovating and I'm trying not to use like corporate terminology, but executing well. So I've seen a number of things come out in D script that I said, why aren't we doing that? Or why can't we do that? They actually have two former research interns, or they've been working with them. One longer than the other from my previous company.
So stuff that I saw in the incubation lab early on, but we could never really get that out to the customer or put it into a product at my previous company. And de script is shipping new stuff, I think every three weeks and it's mind blowing. So also intimidating for me to try to ramp up to
there. You talked about a previous company. What was that previous
company? So I just hit 16 years at Adobe. And all, except for about two years, I worked on Adobe audition, start as a tester and ended up being one of the co lead engineers of the audition team and also audio for broader part of creative cloud
now. So in D script, and you're focusing on the next generation of product, what is some of the things you might want to bring across and maybe not bring across from Adobe, but what are some of the things you think you want to bring to the product? What's the focus.
I was playing with my local build just yesterday. So one of my small achievements in the first week is AI can build the application. So from source code and run it. And so I was playing around with it and I noticed a number of things that the basic building blocks are there. And there's some really cool Marquis features.
Like overdub is a great selling point and there's pretty good interchange, but there's some small finesse things in the user experience, which is not necessarily my area of expertise. I like to be in the lower level in the engine and work on really geeky stuff like file formats and metadata and routing and channelization, things like that. Something that you can point to a standard too. And I say, give me the standard and I will make sure it is accurate, like loudness, for example.
But one of the things I learned from my teammates over the years at Adobe is to really sweat the small things. And that can simply be like the difference between click and drag or region versus clicking and dragging while the mouse is already moving. And it's hard to actually explain to someone until you actually show it that you need to handle those things differently. If someone is quickly editing on the fly.
You probably imagined a number of radio broadcasters in the UK live and die by the mouse and keyboard in cool edit or audition. There's some small things there that you can do that make that experience better. So I'm keeping notes of the things that I find, and maybe there'll be prioritized and maybe not, but small things to just make the experience a little bit more smooth. Where you don't even notice. It's an ergonomic function
I've been using. I the script for nearly two years now, and our mutual friend is Jayla berth. Who's there. And he knows very well. And most people who know me know very well that I loved the script as a product, but it does have those minor nuances, those minor. Why are they doing that moment? Or why doesn't that work like this? Cause it doesn't make sense. And one of those I'll say it because I'm sure I've put it up on too many notice boards in D script is a mixing audio.
Music with the vocal track. Just that way that it works, it just doesn't feel quite natural. And so sometimes I have to jump back into our dusty just to do that because it just is simpler and quicker and easier. And I look, I'm not picking apart the script cause it's a great product
position view. I felt that too, you have your speech track. On the bottom and I'm not up on all the correct terminology. And then you can have various clips or regions above it. And I've been playing around and dragging, put in an image, put in a video, put in an audio. And I think there's some design revisions that could be done there that could help onboard new customers. But the things that I will probably personally start working on are the hear audio stuff.
And I tried to make a statement when I joined the company saying I want to focus on audio and really own that part of it. So I noticed that while you're playing. Bang audio, you could go up and start twiddling the volume knob really fast, and you hear some cracks and pops and chunks and stuff. That should be smooth as if you were moving an actual physical, potentially potential or on an analog border on your stereo. And so it's some of those.
Audio specialists things that I will probably end up working on, but like herself and other users, I'll give a bunch of feedback on the interface, but they're doing a lot of stuff. It's quite staggering. What they've been able to accomplish.
I run a radio station. I've got 35 presenters using de script and we couldn't live without D script. Now just the removal of ums and ERs was one click. Just the ability to close down audio gaps and the remove certain paragraphs or key sentences or words like a visual word document. You just can't do that before in our dusty, it was like, Ooh, somewhere in here, there's going to be a word. Let me see if I can find it easily. Me money. I'd go there. Oh, that's a bit of luck.
And so it was I total transformation. In terms of Podcast, audio editing, given your background, you've got two degrees in audio engineering, I
think. So I have two miscellaneous associate degrees, a bachelor of science in audio recording from Indiana university, school of music, and then a master of science, electrical engineering from the university of Washington and my fault in electrical engineering. People think at all that you're working on circuits, but it's actually the domain of digital signal processing is often within a doubly as they call it.
So I try to focus on digital signal processing to do the actual math, To create a reverb or take away noise or something like that. That was the goal. At least I didn't actually end up doing a lot of that in my career, but it helped shore up my background. As I switched from a role of a tester to a programmer, also studied a number of other sort of current topics. See how machine learning and codex and networking and.
things like that, but try to angle everything, but any of my class projects would have been something related to audio. So
looking to the future, now, what can users or people do to get involved with descript? How can we best feed back in? As I said, I've got some things I want to feed back into. What's the best way that people can do that. There's
a public feedback page. Find the URL. I think it's just feedback to the script.com. And what I noticed is that. Whenever someone votes on something or enters a new feature request or adds feedback there that's immediately public as like a push notification to the company. And so there's a Slack channel that aggregates it, or I can go there. Actually, when I was interviewing, I was going there to, to decide this is something that I want to work on.
And I looked at all the feature requests that people had. And the nice thing is from coming within the same. Product domain as going from a competitor to another competitor. A lot of the feature requests made sense, and I already have opinions on, Oh, it could be done this way, still learning the code base, the new code base, but it all, it felt very comfortable for me. And so that's probably the best way it has a under review section, a plan section and in progress section.
So the script tries to be fairly transparent on some of these things. Typically there's a three-week cadence. And I think the best way to do to influence her, to advocate for something is just to go there and vote things up.
Okay. last few questions Given your background in audit, where can Podcast is see eventually computers and software like descript helping us with podcasting. Is there things in your mind that this is where the next generation of this will go? I
think the real benefit to podcasters. Is to identify the things that cost you a lot of time. So some podcasters are running it as a business and they're making money. A lot of podcasters are doing it just because they have a passion for a topic, sometimes a really niche topic, but they're passionate for it. And not every podcaster is doing their own editing. And if they are doing their own editing, not every podcaster is comfortable with audio workstation terminology. So the things that.
Cost you a lot of time, like you're editing out every single breath. Like you're perseverating around trying to find the right cue for someone. And you're not really sure what to do you read? Oh, boost this frequency up somewhere on a forum. I would imagine a lot of those things will become more and more automatic trying to remove background noise.
Those things will just become more and more automatic if it's costing you time and money, because that's Where you see value in a product where you can justify going from a free product, like audacity to a paid subscription. Like the script is that you can prove to yourself, this is going to save me time and that's worth something. It will also be balanced with the business needs of enterprise customers. We'll have these weird requests.
Okay. We needed to work with our media asset management system or this sort of billing system. And there'll be those sort of features that happened too, that we'll have to be balanced with the needs of Podcast, but I'd say you have the wow features the real for those where you'd say you look at it and immediately say, Holy smokes, that's going to save me three hours every single day. And it's three hours. I could be. Sipping coffee or playing with my kids or riding a bike or whatever. Cool.
Charles van Winkle, congratulations. We'll come on board to de script. I look forward to your light touch hands, making the product even better. And where can people, if they want to find out more about these scripts, where can they go? Do you script.com. Nice and simple. Charles. Thanks so much PTC.
Thank you.
Charles van Winkle from Dee scripts. I was going to say, you're listening to Podland it's a quarter past six, but I decided to, I did that. I better not because this isn't the radio and you don't need to do that. one last story Sam.
we were just talking about or Udacity and, or dusty being a free product for editing. And most people start off with using that when they're Podcast, they go, how do I edit my podcast and clip it out and add some music and do various things. And that's what I did. I started learning or dusty, which is great and long may rain, but it's been bought or not bought. It says acquired by a new company called muse group. Now who are muse group James. And why would they buy a free open source platform?
or indeed, have they bought a free open source platform? That's the weird thing. so they announced it in a video from a chap called Martin Kiri. Now Martin is actually a very well-known and well-regarded person who has worked on UX research and design. He used to work at Microsoft. He's done a bunch of that kind of stuff. He announced that he has been asked to step up and manage or Udacity in partnership with its open source community, whatever that's supposed to mean.
And if you go to a website from a company called muse group, then you'll discover that audacity appears on their website as one of their products. Now muse group produces a couple of other products. One of them is called I think it's called muse coal, which is a, another piece of music software and and all of that. So I was curious because. partially for two reasons, firstly Audacity's website doesn't mention anything about this. It's not mentioned in the development mailing list for audacity.
It's not mentioned on the audacity forum. So I don't really understand quite what's going on here. Secondly or Udacity is a free piece of software anyway. so you can download the code that makes audacity more than a hundred people work on it. Anyone can download it. So I was there thinking, I don't really understand how muse can buy something, which is open source software.
and I'm not quite sure how they can end up saying that, but I think having looked a little bit more into it, there is a trademark for Udacity. And that trademark is was originally registered by the original developer, Dominic Mazzoni, who is a Google software engineer these days. Now that trademark now appears to be owned by muse group amuse group they're based in Cyprus and And so that trademark is now owned by them. So that's interesting.
so what I think is going on here is that audacity as the registered trademark is now being looked after, by this company called muse group, they will probably Falk. a version of audacity, which does additional things, which you can do, and that's fine. and it keep it under the audacity name. And almost definitely revamped the user experience. It's a really ugly piece of software.
And in fact, the way that Martin Curie first announces it is he says, audacity, everybody knows or Udacity, it's the music editor with six magnifying glasses it's interface. It does. When you have a look at it, it's got these weird six magnifying glasses. You've no idea what any of them do. so I think that he's, my hope is that he makes audacity a much better editor and and actually puts a little bit of money into it in terms of improving. The look and feel of how the thing works.
and maybe that's the plan for, where, or Udacity is going. And hopefully Martin can do it in such a way that he doesn't really annoy all of the developers. who've been working on it for for the last 10 years or so.
it is a great tool and it's the one that a lot of radio stations use as their starting point for when you want to edit stuff so long, may it rain in DC? What happens now, James, what's happening for you in Podland
this week? I have been putting some of the finishing touches or some of the mid touches to the Australian part of Podcast day 24, which it turns out I'm organizing the program for. and the exciting thing that we just announced today is that it's going to be an in-person event in Sydney. it's actually going to be a conference that people can go to which is going to be cool and very exciting. It's on June the seventh.
I've spent most of the day emailing people who I want to appear as well as emailing those people who we even already announced who are appearing just to double check that they are doing what I think they're doing. so all of that is really cool, really looking forward to having a Podcast conference in a venue. In Sydney, I'm a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Sydney Harbor bridge is going to be a wonderful thing. You can find out more at Podcast day 20 four.com/australia.
If you're wanting to come to the Australian thing, or if you want to be part of the whole day, which is also happening in London and in North America then it's just Podcast a 20 four.com. what have you been doing?
today later on, I will be hosting an event called the cookie apocalypse. Let me try and even say it today. The cookie apocalypse. I'm not going to do very well. I might this afternoon, some hosting ex
psychiatrists say good luck.
Yes. The cookie thing that's dying. I'm hosting it for sweaty, Betty boo, who I know several other fashion houses. so yes, that'll be an interesting afternoon for me. And I'm also doing a live in person event, or I've announced a live in person event called older bangers and mash up. I doing it with two friends who we've done an event called mashup for many years, and we just decided that actually it'd be nice in September to get everyone together. no, no speakers. Just a chance to meet up.
So it's called old bangers and mash
up. Wow. Sounds like a lovely thing. I'm also actually working for a large company that I can't mention, but one of the things that I'm as usual, but one of the things that I'm doing for them is I'm sitting them down in a room and explaining how podcasting works. And I'm really looking forward to doing that actually. there's a lot of people who are trying to enter the podcasting space at the moment and they enter the podcasting space without really understanding the history of podcasting.
And it's something that I do think is useful to know, and to understand even if you then make the choice that you're going to ignore all of that.
I think it's very important to at least understand how podcasting currently works, how people earn money from it And I think, we're used to look at luminary and Luminor is launch. That was a clear example of a company that didn't understand the space that it was getting into. And I think that they've now understood that, but I'm very much looking forward to doing that. So that will be in the middle of the night for me, but I don't care. It's fun.
so I'd like to do it a little bit more of that in the future. I think
indeed. that's it for this week, James? should
we wrap it up, man? Go on, then go on there. I thought you were going to do my ending screen. No,
I think I'll leave that to you. Okay.
Okay. And that's it for this week. If you've enjoyed your trip to Podland come back again. Next time you can follow this podcast in your app or visit the website at Podland dot news.
And thank you for listening. If you have any comments about anything on the show today, send a voice comment to questions at Podland dot news, or just tweet us at Podland news.
if you want daily news, you should get the daily pod news newsletter. It's [email protected]. That's where you'll find all of the links for all of the stories we've mentioned this week. The music is from ignite jingles this week. Yes, we've got the music back again this week. So that's good. We recorded with clean feed this week. We edited with something or other Oh, D scripts. Yes. And hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout.
We'll see you in Podland next week. Please tell your friends about us and in the words of Apple, if it ever works, please keep following