The Feed The Podcasters take on an iPhone 16 Apple Watch Series 10 and Apple Intelligence Spotify removed over 500 episodes. Find out why? Big updates for Pocketcasts and Castro. Episodes.fm is getting better using your old feed for new content? We have thoughts. Why is public radio cutting more staff and as always stats, geographic and user agent download numbers? Hello, I am Elsie Escobar, Director of Community and Content for Libsyn and this is episode 277
of The Feed The Official Libsyn Podcast. The podcast that takes it beyond how to podcast into keeping you podcasting with podcasting tips and information for the everyday podcaster and taking you inside lips and now if you would like to get featured on the show, oh my gosh, send in your 30 second promo, 30 to 60-ish second promo. How do you do it? You just attach it to an email and
you send it over to thefeedatlipsyn.com. If you don't have a promo but you want your voice on the show, ask us a question or add to the conversation that you're here on an episode, send us your voice feedback and you can always talk about your show briefly, your name, everybody will know that it's you. You can call us also at 4125731934 or you can use SpeakPipe at SpeakPipe.com slash The Feed. Your promo, your voice feedback, it is first come first served so
the sooner you get your info to me, the sooner I'll get you in the queue. All right, and now onto our main conversation with Rob Waltch, VP of podcaster relations at lipsyn as well as my co-host right after the first promo of the episode, DealCraft. From trade agreements with China to Blackstones, pivotal deals and to John Brankas purchase of the Beatles catalog for Michael Jackson,
landmark deals are often spearheaded by savvy negotiators. Enter DealCraft, insights from great negotiators, the brand new weekly podcast that features my interviews with the world's greatest deal makers like Blackstone Steve Schwarzman and music super lawyer John Branka, diplomats like former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger, James Baker and Condoleezza Rice and many others discussing their most challenging negotiations. It's hosted by me, Jim Sabenius, professor at Harvard
Business School and director of the Harvard Negotiation Project. Drawing from my decades of direct experience with complex negotiations, I share fascinating deal stories and distill useful insights for listeners to apply in their own deals and disputes. Follow DealCraft, insights from great negotiators on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello Rob. Good generic time of the day, I'll see how you doing.
Oh, just Peter, you know one thing that is absolutely consistent about podcasting, all of these years Rob, all of these years, you're always going to have to troubleshoot. It's too consistent. Yeah. You always have to troubleshoot, like you have to be so good at it and be like, okay, this isn't working, let's do this. And how do you do that? Which is fine when your guest is another podcaster, but when your guest is not another podcast
here, you're feeling like, oh, whoa, you feel like you have to be everything. The host, the tech support, the whole nine yards. Yeah, my husband had to do a rerecording of a podcast episode that he did that was a really long, it was almost two hours of some kind of expert that he had on and all the stuff. And the other person that he was having the conversation with is also starting a podcast, they were going to launch and they were futsing around with their stuff. Right? So in the middle
of the recording, they were like, you know what, I'm going to reset XYZ, whatever. And so they did it in the middle of the recording and everything was fine and they kept going and come to find out after he did that, the whole recording was lost. So that was like another, you know, it's one of those lessons that you only have to learn once. And then once you learn that, you're like, okay, nobody touched their stuff. Once you start recording, we have to restart recording.
If anybody needs to do their things and blah, blah, blah. So it's a lot of there's always trouble shooting. But all of that to say, be prepared for trouble shooting. Yes. Yeah. And schedule extra time for your recording. Just in case you have to spend the first 15 minutes troubleshooting. Yes. It may have been the case today. It might have, it might have just been that. Okay. So, we just had the iPhone event that iPhone fall Apple events that we all, all of us Mac users
look forward to. And your notes were more copious than mine on this year. Oh, were they? Well, the thing is I actually, yeah, I sat there and I was very excited. I was very into it. And I did take a lot of notes, believe me. And then I distilled them. Let me just give a real, a run down of this. And I got a little flack, Doc Rock. If you're listening to me, this is why I said what I said. So I was watching the event. I'm writing all the notes down, right? And I'm excited and trying
to get as many details as possible. But there came a point once, like I think it was the iPhone 16 Pro Max. Once they hit that part, I was out of it. It all felt the same. There was something in there where all I started to hear was blah, blah, blah, blah, bigger, bigger, blah, blah, more, blah, blah, the biggest. And then so Doc Rock to said to me, well, of course, because everything is going to be the biggest from moving forward. And he said, I don't understand why people
sometimes complain about that. And I'm usually not a complainer about that. And then later on, I realized that it wasn't necessarily about what they were saying is that the pacing of the entire event was a little off. And it became less about their announcements and more about the pacing of the announcements. And so they lost me. They lost my attention at that time. Here's what I noticed too about that. They cut to a lot more people. It used to be like three or four people in an event.
Now you have three or four people in each product segment. And to this person, to that person. And now they had like 12 people or 13 people or something like that that were in the events before maybe had four. And so you have all these other people and they're cutting, they got these transitions that waste time from one person to the next. So yeah, there's a lot more fluff in the in the presentation center used to be. I agree. I mean, you know what Rob? I'm not sure even if it
was fluff. I think that it was a matter of it was one of those things where when you're in a in the cutting room floor, if you will, well, I guess maybe it is fluff. Maybe it is just maybe just don't say this one sentence again. You know, maybe let's just cut to this chase because I think what would have really held me on would have been after and the announcement of the iPhone
16, which they did go through all the most the biggest and all of that stuff. Once they got to the iPhone 16 Pro Max and all of that stuff, they needed to go straight into the differentiators between the iPhone 16 and the 16 Pro Max, like just zero in on that. Like what's the difference? And then going on the the best and the greatest, but it felt like they sort of reiterated the same thing from the other one. And I like, I already wrote this down. It's the normal thing better
processor, better screen, better camera. That's the difference between the Pro Max. Those are the key ones and maybe a couple of other little things, but every year, those seems to be the difference. But I did take a lot of a lot of notes, people. And your notes, your start with apple intelligence. Yeah. Also to note this, that in the presentation, which was the craziest thing I felt is that they never announced when iOS 18 was going to be released. They did not. You are correct. And I'm like,
wait, hold, you didn't even get to that part. So I had to go look that up afterwards. Anyway, so apple intelligence won't be available with iOS 18. It's already been released, folks, if you have not updated, just it's out by the time you hear this iOS 18. Yeah. And not even with the new phone. So a lot of the things that they showed, we are not even able to put our hands on it. We
can't see it as of yet to be able to see how all of the apple intelligence stuff works. And it really is only supported with an iPhone with a 17 tip or later with an iPad with an M1 chip or later and the Apple Silicon Max with M1 or later. So there's a lot of stuff. Most of us won't get access to the one thing that makes me look to want to upgrade is the ability to record phone calls.
Because I can't do that with the 13 pro max. Correct. Just what I have currently. Yeah. So I probably going to be at an Apple store on Saturday morning, seeing if they have any iPhones available, the pro max, the one I want. Because when I went to order it online, it was like out to the middle end of October. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I think it was that way from the beginning. Because I mean, I went online to order and the 16s were right away. So I was like, okay,
well, I was like, I'm also just trying to go to the store and get it. They usually have some at the stores. We'll see. We'll see. Maybe I can go get it. It might be one of those things that I should order it and got it in the middle of October. And I might not wind up getting one now until November. But if it is that way, it is that way. But I do want to test it out. Well, we'll talk about some of the other features in there that I liked on the iPhone 16 pro max
in a bit. But you've had an article here from Mac rumors. Yeah. What their thoughts were. And there, well, actually, this Mac rumors thing is really about the fact that I wanted to test that recording feature for sure. And it didn't realize that my phone wasn't going to be supported. I tried to test it out today. And I didn't see the little thingy that you can, I guess, on the top left or something like that. I forgot what it is for top right, something like that. There's a little
button, a little, you can tap on it. And it pops it up and that mine did not have it. So I don't have the functionality of recording those phone calls. But again, this is part of the Apple Intelligence of it all, which so I'm assuming that you can't even test this even if you had your phone until Apple Intelligence is out because that's how it's being run. To be able to record the phone calls and then have the transcription go directly to your Notes app, which I think is
incredibly helpful. And it's. And that's the differentiator on which phones on the feature that's not available on older phones is the transcription because you have to have the AI features for that. Any of the phones that support iOS 18 will be able to record the calls, but you won't be able to get the transcription right is my understanding. I'm not sure. So I'm going to have to figure that out too because it seems like it could go back, but you're right. There are some some parts of it that
may not work. And there's some like I didn't see anything pop up on my phone, but my end is probably because Apple Intelligence has not been released as of yet. But still it's not going to be supported on my phone, which I have the 13 mini. The other thing that I really love about the iOS 18 and the computer Sequoia is that what it is? Yeah, I forgot the name of it. I literally just saw it.
Is the fact that now you can capture you can have iPhone mirroring, but not in the way that we are all used to because you have been able to mirror your phone to the computer for a long time already, for many different apps. And even natively you can do that. But this one actually allows you to interact with the phone, which I think is like, oh my god, thank god. Because for content creation, the kind of stuff that I have to do sometimes when I have to do a lot of work on things like Instagram
or there's certain apps that just are really stronger on mobile or are only mobile. Oh my god, this is going to be so great. I hope that it works as promised, which is drag and drop. And I can just grab a video and drop it into the phone or grab a video from the phone and just pull it into my computer for in terms of workflows of publishing things that I have to do on the daily. This is going to be genius. So I'm very excited about that. We also have the audio mix. What did you think about that?
The pro audio mix features. It looks good. It's one of those. Let's test it. Let's see how it works. But for those that aren't don't know what we're talking about, it's apples going to give you ability to do some extra recording and breaking out of the different elements of the sound. So voices and background elements become different items, different tracks that you can basically remove. We'll see. Apple G is a pretty good job on this. It did seem like it was a little more music
focused, but I think it could work well for podcasting. This is why I got excited about that. Because a lot of people are moving into the whole video of it all. And if you have the phone and you're recording a video podcast, right? So you're capturing the video and the audio at the same time, just to put your show out. I'm thinking that maybe that initial raw footage, if you're going to be ripping the audio out of the video, that it could be a little better than if not, right? So that's
all I was thinking about. I'm like, well, if it can make the voices be cleaner, clearer, and does a little bit of magic in the back end there that it's going to level up the most basic audio output that you can get. Because there's a lot of folks out there who aren't quite well, they're using things like just the raw footage from a Zoom call or raw footage from anything else. And they're not doing anything to the audio. They're just publishing that out anyway. It's not
the best. So with maybe something like this, it might level up the audio a little bit. So it sounds not so bad. And that all comes back to the iPhone 16 pros, which quote unquote have four studio quality mics. So we'll see how good said studio is because everybody's definition of studio is different. Again, I'm hoping to have one soon. I hope maybe this weekend, but hopefully some point soon, or maybe one of the future episodes will record my side just from the studio quality
mics from the iPhone 16 Pro. So everyone can hear how good or not so good it is. You know what's going to be good too is the if we do the phone call, that would be great too. If you do get the phone, you can call me and we can talk on the phone and see what happens with that little bit of recording. We'll do a test. And let's go ahead and move over to the Apple Watch 10, which in terms of audio, because I was just looking at the audio and what would matter to our
broadcasters, the Apple Watch 10 now has speakers. So I guess my question is why, but alas, you have some thoughts about that, but I have to read this though. This is from the website called soundguys.com. And I thought that this was brilliant. By the way, guys, all the information that we have and we're talking about is going to be in the show notes so you can click through any of these articles and read a little bit more, but this is from the article from the sound guys quote
in a move that no one asked for. Apple has bestowed upon us a mere mortals the ability to blast our favorite podcast from our wrists. The new Apple Watch series 10 now features a speaker with all your audio needs. To be fair, this is a future that Android smartwatches have had for a long time. Still, I don't know why anyone would want to listen to anything from their watch instead of their phone laptop or AirPods. Apple assures us that despite shrinking the speaker's size to
improve battery life, sound quality remains unaffected. You can now enjoy your favorite true crime podcast while jogging much to the delight or horror of everyone within a three foot radius. Who needs AirPods when you can have your watch competing with traffic noise? End quote. I mean, come on, that was some good writing. Well, you know, even after all that, I still like this feature. There were multiple times in the past where I wish I had a speaker for podcasts so I could
listen to them from my Apple Watch. Have you really? Yeah, in a car with just my Apple Watch where I didn't have my phone. So I was like, oh, you know, I'm going to drive to grocery store and I didn't have my phone. I'm like, I can't listen to a podcast, but I can't because I don't have my phone enough. I forgot it. So there have been times where it would have been nice that I could have it. There's other times where I in a small room that may have some sort of porcelain sitting device
that would also have the Apple Watch. Oh, good Lord. Oh, yes. Okay. You could have played. And I'm like, you hear for a few minutes, it would have been nice to get to a podcast. But okay, we did not say that on this episode. No, no, no, no, all right. Okay, but you've got some news about Spotify, Rob. This is Craig. Craig. What's going on? In the last week, Spotify removed over, over well over 500 episodes. I stopped counting at 505 a few days ago. Almost all of these
episodes as near as I could tell were removed because of music. Does not matter if the music was pod safe. It just matters that the podcast episode was mostly music. Spotify does not want music podcast episodes. So background music, that seems to be okay. For ground music, not so good. So the majority of your episode was foreground music. It may have been removed in the last week. Again, over 500 episodes from our servers that Spotify contacted us. And it's just Spotify.
Episodes are fine in Apple podcast. Don't worry about that. And everywhere else, this is just in Spotify. For example, one of those taken down was for episodes to help ADHD students study and focus. And the music is all pod safe. So it's still fine up on Apple podcast. But Spotify doesn't like music podcasts. I think we've mentioned that in the past. Yeah. They want spoken word podcast, not music podcast. But you know, in some of these were like the eight hour sound music sound machines
to help you sleep and things like that. So if you have a music podcast or some episodes that were music oriented mostly music. And it's no longer in Spotify. That's why nothing we can do about it. They had the bot going out and clean in house than the last week. And what's up with reinstating them. Is that nothing you just you can't do to go on unlike the Lord did not come in back. Yeah. Yeah. Then I go back to Spotify. Yeah. No. If they if your episode got taken down because they had
music in it, there's no getting it back in Spotify. Yeah. Music only podcasts are Apple podcasts. And all the other apps other than Spotify. Good Lord. All right. Well, that's great. Wow. Okay. I have some podcast apps updates that I have been seeing online. The first one is from Pocketcasts. And Pocketcasts is actually out now. This article that was published that I have in the show notes is talking about the beta. But the version of Pocketcasts 7.72 is out. I have it. I downloaded it.
I haven't really played with a lot of these features. But I want to let you guys know. It seems like the clip feature has been released. So they have a little clip thing in the same way that overcast and Castro previously had for a long time. So overcast has had this feature. Castro also had this feature as well. And we've talked about it on the show. In fact, what that is. So Pocketcasts now has the ability to clip portions of a podcast. And you can share them.
I have not gone through this process yet. And remember Rob, when we talked about the key component, the overcast effect. In fact, where Marco shared a clip of our episode to his feed on Twitter at the time. And our downloads went through the room. Yes. It was crazy. Marco, do that again. Marco, do that again. Yeah. And so, but I don't know what the end user experience is. And so the reason that the that happened with Marcos is because what it does is it gives you an option to either
listen in overcasts and or listen in Apple podcasts, which was very interesting. And it actually led you to the direct episode. It wasn't just the clip. It was an easy way of listening to the clip. And then clicking through to directly to the episode. So you could continue to listen to the episode. I don't know if that's the behavior of Pocketcast. Again, I have not tested it. There is that there for so you to be able to see that says that there are three options for the design of the video clip
as well as the ability to download an audio file. And once done, you can select whether you want to share the file directly to a social app or save it locally while copy link gives you an online option. So it seems to me, given that that there might be a possibility to click through and continue listening to the podcast episode, which is kind of neat. Then this article also continues with this pocket casts is also getting a transcript option that is not yet live or available for all podcast
episodes. You can expect pocket cast 7.72 with the clip share and transcripts to hit stable in two weeks or join the beta here to test it now. And similarly pocketcast last month added the ability to rate podcast out of five stars by going to feed while the Mac and Windows clients recently got a big update. So it looks like pocket cast is really moving. It's really expanding and doing some really wonderful things. It looks to me that the transcripts option is that they're right.
It is not yet out in the wild. The clips portion absolutely is. So I'll be looking forward to looking at that. Also Castro got also got a big update. It's less about fancy things coming to it, but a little bit more of an overhaul. So Castro 2024.9 is currently in the app store. And in addition to new icons. So it they changed their entire icon overall. It's a little bit more it's like more one tone versus the black and sort of like a greenish that was before. And in addition to the new icons
and full iOS 18 support. They've added a full featured explore tab that really brings Castro into the 21st century. They say that it's their biggest release of the year and they're very excited for everybody to try it. I actually just want to do this. Yeah, go ahead. I hear people say this about apps bringing this app now into the 21st century. There were no apps in the 20th century. It just want to point that out. Okay. There were no smartphone apps in the 20th century.
No matter how bad their last app was. Even if they made it look steam punk, it was still from at least 2009 or later. Okay, sorry. It's all right. Maybe it's like into the future into the, I don't know whatever, but yes, I understand I completely understand using. I downloaded the latest update to I have not also had a chance to be messing around with all this stuff. All of this happened like literally like sort of at once. I have another update also and this is two episodes.fm,
which we've talked about before. In episodes.fm, I have found to be incredibly helpful for sharing our episodes, Rob, because you can send people directly to an episode that you're sharing for the reason of consumption, because we always have to think I think as podcasters, what is the end user experience? That's a huge question that I ask all the time and I ask podcasters all the time. If you're sharing a link on social, what is the people's experience when they click that link?
Right. What do you want them to do? And I find that episode.fm is a wonderful way to get folks to listen to an episode at least, right? There's a player on episodes.fm websites and they've done this like amazing updates. So they now have, this is really cool. So this is from their article at the blog post quote by default, we save a first time visitors preferred podcasters based on their selection and returning visitors are automatically redirected to their preferred
podcast app. We do our best to honor that promise. Even if we can't confidently identify a match, we'll still redirect to a platform's own search results as a fallback for shows that measure downloads with OP3 will sort the apps based on their popularity with your existing audience. And so what's really cool about this too is that if you click an episodes.fm link and you are a you know die hard cast or user or overcast user, it will default to that for you. So you can
immediately just put it in the way that you consume your podcast, which I love. They also have now dynamic page colors that really make it pretty. And it pulls the dominant color from your show an episode artwork and that recolors the pages for social preview images, which is also very fantastic. And it makes it seem like it's yours versus theirs. There's been trailers and
serialized optimizations for people who have that kind of stuff. They're now offered at the beginning of the landing pages there so people can either consume the trailer or if you are listening to a show that needs to be listened to with from episode one to 10, let's say, and it has to be in order. It's prioritized there. So you're able to kind of see what that looks like.
And they're also now supporting feeds beyond Apple podcasts. So if anybody, if it shows are no longer required to be listed in Apple podcast directory, you can really just drop a feed URL into the search field to generate a page for the show, which is also really cool for people who want to use episodes.fm and don't want to have their show inside of Apple podcasts. Those are some neat little features for I really like that functionality. Nathan does a really good job.
And the URL again is just episodes dot fm. So yeah, there you go. Super super easy. So Rob, what do you think about this Elgato's latest stream deck? You're trying to make me spend 900. I know what you're doing here. No, I'm not actually it's so funny because Elgato, you know, they offer very reasonably priced top notch hardware to optimize like your production as a solo podcaster person in your room basement, whatever. And it's fairly well
priced, right? And they're accessible and easy to use and small. This is none of that. This is it. This is like, it's like a nine, it's 19 inches rack mount with 32 LCD keys. And it's $900. I'm just letting you all know because I'm sure there's some podcaster with that. That's probably like, oh my god, I need to have that. That's like super pro. Not something. It's yeah, I don't want this. You know how there's, there's stuff that I know
that is very expensive. Sometimes when I go like, oh, I wish I could have that. This is not. We'll have a link to it for anyone that was there. I have to take that $900. Sorry, it has to go towards the iPhone, which is going to be yes. $1300 or $1400. The version. Look at oh my god. Yeah, that would be a better choice. 100%. I get $400. My 13 pro max. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's not too bad. That's a good return. Anyway. Yeah. Okay, Rob. Here's our first email.
Hi, Rob. Quick question. We have linked our podcast from Lipson to YouTube and are trying to utilize the wide screen artwork for each episode. However, the only thing that is getting pulled through is this standard square graphic. Is there a reason this may not be pulling through regards and art? In short, your show is not set up for YouTube in our system. The wide screen artwork only works for shows using the YouTube destination. It looks like that they were and they
confirmed it that they were submitting the RSS feed directly to YouTube music. So that won't work. It is again, the wide screen artwork that we have in our UI at the episode level is just meant for those that are using our YouTube destination, which is our recommended way to go. It then gets you stats back from YouTube, not something that happens when you submit your RSS feed to YouTube.
And also as you're learning allows for the wide screen image for each episode. So that's another key reason to use our destination plus you can also set up the playlist page and you can change the artwork at the playlist page from inside our UI now. So multiple reasons to use the YouTube destination. But I had totally forgot that we advertised this wide screen artwork image. But it's only available for those that submit via our YouTube destination. We didn't list that
as a reason in the past for using our destination. Yeah, and I believe, I mean, not to discount our destination because I do for everything that Rob said, I think it's easier just to do it all in one place, of course, right? And you can definitely have different types of workflow depending upon what you want to do because you sometimes can't have everything in one place, which is fine. But I do believe that if you do that, I think you still can do that with the YouTube of it all, but you have
to do the extra, you have to do the extra stuff. I think there's an extra step you would have to do within YouTube to be able to do that. You would have to manually go over to YouTube and upload wide screen artwork for each episode. Correct. Whereas here, you just upload it when you're publishing the episode with us and you're done. So oh, and by the way, guys, this is something that I did myself and I'm calling myself out on it. And I believe that this is also the case, even if you use the
YouTube destination and all of that stuff, which is kind of lame for me. In the last episode, I had the Kelsey brothers as part of the title. And I made a typo spelling Kelsey with an S on the artwork. And everywhere else, it was spelled correctly. But in the artwork, I misspelled their last name with an S. And I didn't catch that. I know. I didn't catch that. And I did, I was able to replace the artwork and fix it in all the places. But with the YouTube stuff, I was able to replace the
thumbnail. So if you're looking at episode 276 and you're just looking at it, you're able to see that Kelsey is spelled correctly. But once you start to play the episode because the image is embedded into the file, it kind of switches to the misspelled part. And the only way to really fix that is a little too much. You know, in the Bangles game, Kelsey was off. It was his first game where he had less than three catches in the last seven years. He only had one catch. And it was just something
off. And now I know what was bugging him. He saw the artwork. Oh, he spelled his name. That explains everything. That explains everything. God darn it. God darn it. All right. Anyway, that was just a little bit of tidbit just to let you guys know. And yeah, there's a way for you to kind of fix the entire thing. But it's way too many steps for me to it depends on how much you care. And I'm not saying I don't care. I'm just saying that it's more steps than it has to be worth your goals. And
that's a whole other conversation. But alas, next question. Hi, Rob, longtime listener of the feed and lips and members since 2016. I recently ended production of my long running audio and video interview podcast, which was initially a music industry show. But over time, became a Joe Rogan style show with various guests, some various industries. I will soon be starting a much shorter, fast paced movie based podcast with two co hosts. I'd like to launch the new show in the same
feed from which I closed my old show. Do you have any advice on the best way to do this? Any help would be greatly appreciate it regards and are. Hi, a couple of things. One, don't make your new show short thinking that will make it more popular. That's just bad advice that I've heard out there from some recently again, attached below. And I said, I'm the shows the average and median length for the top 200 episodes and Apple podcasts. This goes back like I picked select dates all
the way back to 2018. And it's clear having a longer show does not hurt your show for popularity. The phrase we like to use is there is no such thing as too long only to boring. So make the show the length you feel is best for you, not based on what someone else said. All right, now to your question. That is simple. In your lips and account, just change the title description and artwork for the new show. That's it. You keep the RSS feed and the Apple podcast URL,
which is important. Now, if you have actually shut the show down, which I don't believe you have, but just for someone who has shut a show down with us before and you want to reopen that old show to get that RSS feed and try to recapture that Apple ID, you do need to go to support from the original email address you logged in from. And then you can always reopen your account. But again, in this case, I don't believe you had actually shut it down. You just stop producing.
The feed is it was still active. So again, just go in, change your title description and artwork. You want to keep all that so that you keep that built up Apple podcast search juice. So you're doing it the right way. You're thinking the right way, keeping that Apple ID and that Apple podcast search juice comes from the all time number of people that have ever used to be called subscribe. It's now called the follow your podcast. So let me show those back to 2016. Back then, it was
called follow up, subscribe. Sorry. And now it's called follow when you do replace the artwork. It is really important that you meet all the specs. So the show updates correctly. That means making sure the artwork is 1400 by 1400 square to 3000 by 3000 square. Again, 1400 by 1400 and one is not square enough. It needs to be square exactly square. Keep the file size below 500 kilobytes and make sure it's RGB for the color and either JPEG or PNG file. Oh, and the other
thing is change the file name of your artwork when you upload new artwork. It was logo.jpeg make it logo 2.jpeg and that way Apple knows to update. Apple will not update your artwork. If you change your artwork and the file name remains the same. All right, that's a question that I think is going to continue to be coming up with people understanding, you know, it's really interesting. It's the RSS feed as an asset that a lot of people don't realize for as a release
feature. You know what I mean? Like having a new show with a new account transition from one to the other. Keep your search jails especially if you know someone who's had it for eight years especially. Oh totally. A lot of people that have clicked follow and subscribe over the years. For sure. All right, so we have another a message, not an email. This is a message and my mouth is has fallen down to my chest because of this. But anyway, here we go, Rob.
LC is now reading this. This is not LC saying this. This is LC reading this. I am going to read this. Yes, because wow. Okay, here we go. Quote. Rob, excellent connecting on LinkedIn. Love your story and mission and look forward to presenting that to my audience. Thanks for your support and future participation in our podcasts and look forward to your positive commitment to season six. Please see below for the package. Investment for an episode $800. Investment for an annual
sponsorship $19,000. Deliverable. Oh, dollars, by the way. $19,000. Deliverables, annual sponsorship of the insanely overpriced podcast. I may have changed the title. That's right. That is the N.A. The insanely. Of this message. Okay, what you'll receive 28 to 60 second commercials in each
podcast for a total of 56 to 60 second commercials in the mid role position. Inclusion in all social media, a thousand newsletter email blast 1500 CEOs text campaign per episode, a traditional media posts and coverage, including over 44,000 impressions on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. We are on all podcast platforms in total for $19,000. You will receive a minimum of 56 podcast spots
and 56 posts on all social media. Let me know what we need from you. Bullet points for the commercial win available. Your company name and address and your title and we will send you the invoice once received payment. We use Zelly, Venmo or check. Let me know and look forward to your support. Cheers. FI. Dance for fracking and sane. All right. So this is someone that reached out to me and linked to and said, Hey, we love to have you as a guest on the show. I'm like, okay, yeah, email me. So my
reply back was 19,000. I go, is this is a joke, right? I see this is your show and I send them a link. I go and it's hosted on anchor. No one that is serious ever posts on anchor. I go and you have 19 reviews and maybe you get about 200 listeners per episode if that anyone that knows anything about podcasting will instantly laugh when they see where you're hosted and the lack of any listener
interaction. Have a great week. Oh, so that was my tourist reply to the person. What is scary is that some people might be dumb or wait, better to say desperate enough to pay someone like this. I'm very open to coming on almost anyone's podcast, but I have two key rules. One, they don't charge for guests. Even if they're willing to wave the fee for me, those that charge tend to get guests that are pitchfests and not great quality guests and that leads to lack of a real audience. So it's
not usually worth my time to go on a show that charge for guests. That's one, two, they're not hosted on anchor. If they're on anchor, I do not see it worth my time. They're likely not serious about the podcast and will not likely be around for long. So those are the two things and this guy broke both rules. As someone that had one of the earliest interview podcasts, I kind of had my three rules overall for the show. One, respect the listeners. Two, respect the guests. Three, if you
can't do both, then delete the recording or bettied, don't do the recording. It is almost impossible to do item one if your guests are paying to be on your show. Just in my opinion, and that is where I see the issue per charging your guest. I know there are some shows that have a decent size audience with paid guests, but they are accountable on one hand. But point is this, respect your guests, your listeners and respect the guests, but you got to do both and if you can't do both, don't
don't have the podcast. I just have never been a fan of paid guests because they have to try to get something out of it. They have to get an ROI on it. They're just going to be pitching, pitching, pitching. So there you go. But if anyone is not on anchor and not paying for guests and wants a guest on their show to talk about podcasting or iPhones or Star Wars or college basketball, I'm happy to be a guest on your show or engineering, electrical engineering,
quartz crystal oscillators. Yeah, if anyone has a quartz crystal bottle, it's a later podcast. Let me know. Love to be on your show. Good Lord. You know what? I mean, I absolutely agree with you. The only thing I push back a little bit on there is just that anchor is now Spotify for podcasters. And there are some pretty solid brands that are on there. It just depends on the podcast. You know, most of the podcasts on anchor are dead 75% over 75% like he's maybe even close to 90%
haven't released a new episode in the last 90 days. That's just the numbers. That's just what the facts are. So I'm like, sorry, it's not just for like, because someone reaches out and they have two, three episodes. Then I'm probably never getting to. Yeah, no, if it's like a beginning one like that, sometimes I'm been disheartened. There's been some really amazing podcasts that have come out that I've that I've actually have followed. And then I go back and they really just made it to
the third episode. And it makes me sad because the possibilities were the possibilities man. Anyway, okay. We got a press release. Lipson had one. We did. You want me to take this one? Let me go ahead and read it and we can see what's going on there. So Lipson announced that the 2024 annual meeting of stockholders will be held on Wednesday, September 25th, starting at 10AM,
Eastern time and the it's available via webcast for the following purposes. One, to elect five directors to serve a one year term from the date of the annual meeting of stockholders or until their prior resignation or termination of the election and qualification of their successors. And two, to transact such other business as may properly come before the annual meeting in any and all
adjournments or postponements, post post ponements thereup. Stockholders of record on August 30th, 2024 will be able to participate in the meeting vote and submit questions during the the meeting via webcast by visiting this URL at the time of the annual meeting and entering a secure control number included with the notice of annual meeting. The notice of annual meeting of stockholders and proxy statement has been mailed to all stockholders of record on August 30th, 2024
and is included on the company's website at investor dotlipson.com. After the stockholder meeting concludes the board of directors and management will provide an update on company developments key initiatives and financial performance. And we'll have a link to that in the show notes and you can also always go to investors page defined press releases. So wait, all right. And now we have here's an article from podcast news daily. Right. And this one comes with the title WNYC
Studios parent New York public radio again cuts staff. So now in like the last year, they've cut about 20%. Looks like a few more podcasts and jobs are being cut so they've cut some podcasts and they've got some podcasting jobs. Overall, 32 jobs are being eliminated both on the radio and the podcast side. One of the podcasts being cut is notes from America with Kai Wright plus more
from the WQXR podcast stable. They get right a few podcasts there. Cost cutting is the reason given saying they will save six million dollars a year, which works out to a little over 230,000 dollars per employee cut, which when you look at it from that light seems overly excessive in salaries. Just saying anyone from the latest cuts that can get their RSS feed, we have a home for you at Lipson. You just need to be able to do all of the show, you know, editing, recording,
content creation, publishing, the whole thing. And if you're making 230K here, you should have that talent to do all of that. There you go. But we're not going to be paying you. You'll be owning the show and doing it on your own, but we'll be here to help you for hosting and monetization. So they just want to throw that out. Anybody who's there that just got cut and wants to even start a new podcast, love to have you over here, where we're not going to cut you. Cause we're not going to pay
you. Lincoln is showing a full article. Thoughts on that. I know I'm being a little cold. I don't mean to be cold, but it's just when you see all these ones that are being cut from public radio, you start to wonder what's going on with public radio. And I would say public radio has become out of touch with the American people. People know I back now, know my political leaning, it's more left, but public radio is all left. It's it used to be a little bit more middle of the road.
And maybe they should try reaching out with some programs for the other side. Just saying. Because when it's all one way, you're isolating yourself down to about 35% of the population. 30% in the middle and 30% on each of the ends. This way, it's kind of gone. So not surprising that there are these laughs. You need to have content that appeals to all of the population. Some content for left, some for the middle, some for the right. You know, I don't know enough about
public radio to comment on what you just commented on. I think that this for me and is just a reflection of what is happening across the board in terms of content and audience building overall. Building an audience, building people to consume consistently something that you're putting out. People's way of doing that has substantially changed. It is in no way like it was even, you know, starting from like 2020 on. Release schedules, content production, and again, how the end user,
how they consume content has changed. And one of the biggest things that I've seen even now, when I'm starting to work with some clients and whatnot, the key thing that they say to me is that their audience has drastically shrunk. And I think it's now they're just going back to the reality of what an audience actually looks like versus overestimation of growth and what it's going to look like moving forward. So I think that this is a recalibration to reflect the reality of audience building
without me mentioning specifically. Again, public radio should be for the whole public. It shouldn't be for one political party or one political ideology. And you have to have both sides. And that and that was what one of the key NPR editors had said previously. And remember, I think we've talked about this in the past on a previous episode that about this. And you know, if you could take in public funds or might have talked about it on another podcast, it was a guest on it. But if
you're taking public funds, you should really skew on both sides. Because if you don't, what happens is then one of the other political parties who is in there is going to realize that you are taking money from the government, but you're not providing anything to their constituents and they're going to take your money away. And that's kind of what's happened to. So it's just pointing out that public radio should be more balanced. And it has definitely not gone that way. From someone
on that side, it's clear. I mean, you can see it because there's not much that you hear on the left side, the folks I talk with, I don't hear them disagreeing with what they hear on there. They should be saying, oh, this person sinks on NPR and this show is horrible and they're so skewed, right? When's the last time everyone's that anyone you ever heard of, and it was a, that NPR show is so skewed right? Probably that's the first time anyone's ever said that right now. When you hear
about these public radio cuts, I think that has a lot to do with it. I think they're getting out of touch with all of the population and then those things happen, which is beauty of podcasting is it appeals for the full spectrum. There's a show wherever you are in the spectrum. There's a show for you. Conservatives on fiscal but liberal on social issues. Sure. There's plenty of shows that call libertarian podcasts. You can find those. Super liberal on everything. Democracy now,
baby. It's a great show. Super conservative on everything. Then you got Bangeino. Right? There's stuff for you, depending on what the other side of the aisle you are. And that's the beauty of podcasting. And that causes these folks in public radio to lose audience and funding. Public radio wants to survive. They need to change. That's my personal opinion. Robert podcast 4011.com if you want to disagree with me on any of that.
Rob at podcast 401.com. All right. So we have more industry news though. It is not done. Rob. Quote. Spotify head of podcast business. Sahar El Habashi. Abashi. I'm so sorry. Sahar. El Habashi. El Habashi. I think. El Habashi. We'll depart the company at the end of 2024. El Habashi. Who helped grow Spotify's podcast audience from less than 10 million to more than 150 million will be replaced in the interim by Roman. Was in your. Yeah. Was in probably.
It's probably Vosin. Mjola. But yes, unquote. And we'll have a link to the radio. Inc.com article. El Habashi took over for her old boss Dawn Ostroff in January 2023 and oversaw the big layoffs at Spotify podcasting back in June of 2023. She previously worked for Ostroff at Condi Nass. Ostroff left Condi Nass went to Spotify a few months later when she left Condi Nass. El Habashi took over at Condi Nass for Ostroff. Then a couple months later, Ostroff stole
Alabashi over to Spotify. And then when Ostroff left Spotify, Alabashi filled in for her there. And now it's reported that she's she's not leaving for another company just seems that six years in podcasting was enough for her. All right. Yeah. But just interesting her path when you look at her and Dawn Ostroff how they worked together and moved together one to the other. Additional news and industry talent management firm underscore talent has announced the appointment
of Elsie helped me out here. Maria Mongeli I think I think that this that's their name. Okay. That's kind of close to where I was going. Maria as that new head of podcasting. Mongeli spent the past year as president of the Unwell Audio Network that is Alex Cooper's network. And prior to that, Mongeli spent four years at Studio 71. Congrats to Maria on the new position. And then last but definitely not least per industry news and hiring and what's going on. Lipson is hired Matthew
Passe. Matthew will be working with me on the Lipson Pro side and beyond working with our enterprise and Lipson Pro customers. Matthew also be our lead to work with the podcasting 2.0 folks. I am very excited to have Matthew on board. I am sure we will have Matthew on the show in the near future. And he will also be at some of the upcoming events that will be exhibiting at beginning next year. So Matthew, welcome to the Lipson fan. All right. And now we have a promo
right before we head into our stats section. And this is long term Arkansas. The land of sprawling landscapes, beautiful parks and overflowing prisons. Our journey begins. Welcome to long term, the podcast that dives deep into the pulse of recovery in Arkansas. We walk with you through the current state of what it takes for addictions to be treated, how far our services have come over the years, and how much further Arkansas has to go in treating recovery while battling
against stigmas. We also look at the dystopia Arkansas would be if there were no recovery services available. Long term takes you on a journey where every episode is a step towards understanding compassion and transformation. Join us in this incredible journey where the hope of recovery is long term. Subscribe to long term on Spotify, Apple podcasts, YouTube, and on all the major podcast platforms. All right. Thank you for sending that in. And folks, LC needs promos. Someone register
LC needs promos.com. And then we can just send you there. But it's LC needs promos. We've said it again and again. So send her your promos. Be a good marketer. Be a good marketer. Yes. Always, always. All right. You're ready for some stats, Rob. We are into the stats section. And the first up this week is country breakdowns for August per downloads geographically from all sources. USA 60.8% Canada 5.3% UK 5.0% Australia 3.4% Germany 2.7% Sweden 2.3% India 1.4%
and Spain at 1% that's everyone 1% or more. Rounding out the top 20 are China, Japan, Netherlands, Denmark, France, Mexico, Holland, Brazil, Ireland, South Africa, Norway, and Colombia. For August, we had South Africa, Norway back into the top 20. And between August and July, those with changes greater than 0.2% was the USA jumping up to 60.8% from 60% and the UK dropping to 5% from 5.3. Of course, check your stats and see how you measure up to these numbers for August.
And now per user agent. For August, across all shows globally hosting on Lipson and Lipson Pro for IAB stats, mobile downloads were at 87.41% of all downloads going direct to mobile devices. That's up a bit from July's 87.09%. Computers were downloads were down to 12.13. And home voice attendance plus set top boxes were at 0.46% in August. The iOS to Android ratio in August was 3.1821, which is down a smidge from July's 3.1921 ratio,
which was also June's number, which is also May's number. So for the last four months, it's either been 3.18 or 2.13.1921. So basically unchanged for four months. And by the way, May is kind of where I'm looking at the stats where the iOS 17 roll off from really the adoption rate got high enough. And that's where we really saw the flattening out of the effect of iOS 17 on overall downloads. So these ratios kind of proved that out. Mobile aggregator apps, not from Spotify,
or from Apple in August were 12.5% of all downloads. And the big dogging aggregator apps is still Apple with Apple podcast app and iTunes and Apple ecosystem coming in at 45.9% of all downloads in August. Number two in August was Spotify 21.9. Number three was overcast app at 3.8% kudos, Marcos. Number four was pocketcast at 1.9%, number five was iHeartRadio at 1.1%, and that
was everyone 1% or greater. Those under 1%, but greater than 0.3% in order were podbean Amazon music podcast addict, cast box antenna pod and player of M. And then those are followed by those in order between 0.2 and 0.02% and they are downcast evox podcaster pandora tune in radio, podamo, samsung podcast, teaser fountain, Google podcasts still kicking a little bit, not much kick left. Podcast guru real life appway Android beyond pod air pod catcher rss radio axiose castro
snipped dog catcher pod verse real life app iOS and mixer books. And then there were many more that come in less than 0.02% and don't want mentioning yet. Again, those were based on iHeartV numbers outside of aggregator apps. Those were there were some browsers and Firefox came in at 8.5% in Chrome at 2% overall. All browsers combined about 11% of downloads in August. And there we go. So we have the where have we been segment. I wasn't anywhere. Again,
if you want me to be a guest on your show, rob at lipson.com. Happy to come on. LC, we had a YouTube live event. We actually have a YouTube live event coming up. Wow. You see, we've got one coming up. And we are playing with, so if you consume this podcast, well, it doesn't really actually matter really. If you are consuming this on the day that it's released, the following day is our video editing for podcasters cap cut edition. And what Brian and I are
going to be doing is we're playing with the app called cap cut that lots of people use. And in fact, my kids are the ones that brought it up to me. They've been using cap cut for years, which is saying a lot to record their videos to use audios that they grab and things like that, which is kind of need. But we're going to try to use it to create a podcast, both audio and video. And we're going to show some examples and best practices and what we actually think about using
cap cut to create a podcast. So it's going to be really fun. There's going to be a link in the show notes. So either use sign up, I would say just click through to the direct link over on YouTube. It's going to be streaming there. The show is on Wednesday. So you're able to then catch it from that on. And yes, obviously, there's going to be a recording because it's on YouTube. So you can watch it afterwards. It is fun to be able to show up and ask us questions and things like that. So
that is the good stuff. But I don't think I've been anywhere other than preparing for 2025, Rob. That's where I've been. But where else are you going to go? What else is happening? Well, you know, you got, yeah, I have a lot of things happening. Yeah, it's more about where you going. You got stuff this year. I'm going to go on any I really I don't have anything planned for the rest of this year. Next up will be a podcast in January. I'm going to be speaking at
podcast. So I'll have a session. But before that, what have you got going on with your mentor? Yeah. So let's talk lips and first, lips and ads is going to be over at advertising week and in early October. So that's happening. Also, we are going to be over at afros and audio in October and mid October. And there's going to be a link in the in link in the show notes for you to buy your ticket. If you have not bought your ticket, it is a fantastic organization that really
could use help and support from the entire podcasting industry. So please check out that information from there. I'm also running my mentorship experience, my end of year mentorship experience. I tend to do it once a year. There's been other times that I've done it more than that. But this is the only time I'm going to be doing it. There's going to be link in the show notes. There is an application process because anybody who's in it, it's it's hand picked. It's a very intimate
experience. So please click through if you want to work with me. This is a really great opportunity to do so. So that is what's happening here at the end of the year. We do have other stuff that's going on in terms of live streams over in YouTube. So if you could follow us on the YouTube channel, it would be fantastic. If you could follow us over on Luma, which is where we feature or we publish our live events, you're welcome to check those out as well. We're going to be putting some
great stuff here towards the end of the year. So keep an eye out on that stuff. But then moving on to next year, like Rob mentioned, we're going to be over at podfest. But then we have other things, right, bro? Yes. Podfest January podcast movement evolutions will be in March, NAB, Las Vegas, in April. And then the podcast show London in May. So that is the first half of 2025.
Right on. So I would say just check out those shows, folks, that I mentioned. And if you host on Lipson and you want your cards at those shows, please send an email to me, robatlipson.com. And get there. But hopefully, folks, you'll be able to come out some of those shows, see some of us, say hello. We would love to have folks stop by at those shows. Switching gears to where are you going as the listener? Well, if you're looking for a job in podcasting, make sure you go to podcasting
jobs.com. As of the middle of September, we had three openings listed there, two of which are a remote and one is in Pittsburgh. Again, go to podcasting jobs.com to learn more about those things. And then finally, don't forget to send in your feedback for anything we did or did not mention on this episode. You can record that feedback and email it to us the feed at Lipson.com. Or you can call us at 412-573-1934. Or you can use SpeakPipe at SpeakPipe.com slash the feed.
Thanks, folks. See you next time. Ciao! Bye!