It's Thursday, the 23rd of May 2024. This is the Pod.

News Weekly Review Live at the Podcast Show in London with James Cridland and Sam Sethi.

Yes, I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News, and I'm Sam Sethi the CEO of True Funds. In the chapters. Today, podx makes another acquisition, spotify's, even larger than we thought. And how to get beautiful show notes and rsscom are lit, and also they are. This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout. Podcast hosting made easy with easy and powerful AI tools, free learning materials, remarkable customer support and now with fan mail.

Live from the Talking Podcast business stage at the podcast show. This is the Pod News Weekly Review.

Okay, james, let's kick off Now. Podx looks like they've bought another company. James, it's the largest acquisition of PodX. We can play a game, because they said it's eight figures, so we can play how many figures that is. Is it 10, 11 or 12 million? We don't know.

But my question is or 99 million or 98 million. If it is, I'm going to go meet them for a drink, yeah, and see if they've got a job.

But other than that, PodX now owns three London-based companies Goldhawk Productions, Listen and now Platform Media, who they've just bought. What are they doing, James?

Well, they seem to be buying a ton of different companies all over the world. They own a company in Finland. They own a company, I think, in Argentina or in Brazil, one of those two places. They seem to be getting a ton of different podcast platform podcast production companies together and it's a really interesting company to watch.

With what aim? What are they hoping from the synergy of all of this together?

Well, so I was talking to somebody who knows a thing or two about how PodX operates and it turns out that the way that they work is that all of the back-end stuff you know, the accounts and the boring you know that boring stuff is all dealt with by PodX. So these companies Listen, which is a pretty big podcast company here in the UK. Goldhawk Productions makes some really interesting radio shows, but it's relatively small, and now Platform Media will all have all of that back-end stuff taken away from them so that they can some really interesting radio shows, but it's relatively small, and now platform media will all have all of that back-end stuff taken away from them so that they can concentrate on content, which is a good thing so this reminds me of web one today.

I was the marketing director for a company called CMG I, out of Boston if anyone remembers CMG I know everyone's too young in this room thanks. We owned AltaVista, engage, lycos too. Oh, I remember AltaVista, yeah, snapfish, yesmail, and it was actually at one point 70 investments, 20 subsidiaries, it was worth a tonne of money and it all went pop when Web 1.0 went pop. But PodX feels like they're trying to just emulate that strategy Aggregate, aggregate, going, going pop. Yeah well, I don't know about that. Anyway, I'll tell you what we will do. We'll have matthew sherry, who's the ceo of platform media, on next week on the show. We can ask him instead very cool, excellent booking.

Sam uh spotify the walled garden.

Have you seen it out there? It is a bit like a walled garden, I mean, if that's ever a metaphor for spotify, but it's changed, though. It's a walled garden. Have you seen it out there? It is a bit like a walled garden, I mean if that's ever a metaphor for Spotify.

But it's changed though.

It's a walled garden that you can peer over the top. Now, yeah, Okay, and still see nothing. Now data shows well, your data shows, James that Spotify is now dominant outside of the UK and US. You did a keynote speech at the show here. Tell us more.

Yeah, I did. I looked at a ton of data. So OP3, as we know, is a fantastic analytics service. It's got quite a lot of data in there now and I asked John Spurlock for a week's worth of data so that I could do a little bit more diving into that week's worth of data. So when you're looking at the excellent stats from our sponsor, buzzsprout, then what you see is you know, spotify is at number one in terms of total downloads, apple Podcasts at number two, but it doesn't break Spotify's data up in terms of country, doesn't break it up in terms of Android versus iOS. You know none of that actually happens. So I was able to grab this data and take a look in from the data from OP3 and take a look at how everything split Fascinating stuff.

So in Mexico, for example, spotify is 90% plus of the market. So Apple Podcasts is tiny. Apple Podcasts is 5%, 4%, which is really interesting. And there seems to be something around Spanish language places, because Spain it's very high. You know Colombia, which I spelt wrong on the slides yesterday, no one noticed, or at least, if they did notice, nobody complained. Alberto is nodding his head and going yes, you did spell it wrong, I noticed.

Yeah, it's not spelled with a C like cocaine.

I spelt it with a U, okay, and there's no U in Colombia, anyway. So clearly something's going on and talking to people. It seems that Spotify does a lot of investment in terms of creators and does a lot of investment into, you know, helping individual podcasts in a way that Apple does do in the US but doesn't appear to do in other parts of the world, so perhaps there's something there.

So I was talking to Gautam from HubHopper, who's here in India. I think Apple has 2% of the market share. The rest is local platforms like GeoSav and others, but Spotify dominates there as well.

So, james, and, by the way, number two in, according to my data, number two in India is Amazon Music. Yes, yes, who'd have thought?

I've never come across it. I get it for free. Never used it Now, but does this mean that Apple might eventually do Apple for Android?

Well, I mean, obviously they're going to do an Android app because they're not stupid.

Obviously, this podcast is mostly now done on catchphrases. I don't know if you've noticed. Yeah, I think there's a real question mark for Apple there in terms of how much how important it is for them that Apple Podcasts is available on Android and that they are playing the game in terms of being available in lots of other places as well. You know, I mean, I don't know the audience here, right? Did Spotify, being very big outside of the UK and the US, Did that come as a surprise to people here? Or there's some sort of shaking? You're shaking your head in an excellent way. Why were you not surprised by that? Why were you not surprised by Spotify's growth?

I think it was the fact the Apple ecosystem is such an expensive entry level for most markets.

Yeah.

Whereas South America don't have the finances that you might have in other areas of the world, so Spotify is a cheaper entry level for them.

Yeah, I think that might. That might be the case. I did notice that as well. If you want to be a creator and you need an Apple ID, then you have to have a credit card in order to get the Apple ID, and no one in you know many of these countries has a credit card, and that's an issue as well, I think, yeah, yeah, no, that's interesting. Anybody else have anything to say about Spotify versus Apple? The size of all of that. Now, you see, nobody's even daring to shake their heads, because that's how that works. Spotify also released some data, didn't they as well?

Yeah, some global trends which said 63% of people asked said they trust their favourite podcast host more than their favourite social media influencer or the barman. No, just a social media influencer.

Why it was interesting. It was a tonne of data which they clearly released to coincide with this event, with the podcast show, in that it's plastered all over the walled garden downstairs. So, yeah, which was interesting because I managed to negotiate an early embargo for that only to come in here and see all of the data was actually on the wall anyway. But one of the interesting pieces of data that they came up with was average daily streams of video podcasts are up 39% on Spotify year on year. Now you kind of expect that because there's more video podcasts in Spotify now. But yeah, it's not just.

I think we kind of forget that everybody's talking about YouTube. Youtube has been here today talking about new and exciting things, but we kind of forget that Spotify has been in the video game for quite some time as well and they are unique to Spotify and of course, apple Podcasts also plays videos as well. They are unique to Spotify and of course, apple podcast also plays videos as well, which we shouldn't forget too. I mean, you know YouTube has been very vocal here a quite last minute, getting involved in this, in this show, but they've been quite vocal in here as well. Does say anything new? They didn't say, I did ask the nice woman from YouTube who was on a panel with me, alison Lomax. I said no, it was Carol from New York, and I said did you announce anything today, because I wasn't in that session? And she basically said no. So that's fine, but they did talk about stats and they did talk about, you know, quite a lot of the information that they've, you know, actually got there. So yeah. So I thought that that was Interesting.

Moving on then. Edison Research says we're all attractive, james. That's good. It says that more people than ever are listening to podcasts. Listeners are spending more time than ever with podcasts, and podcasts reach all generations. All of this is good. It says it's very diverse, increasingly female, highly coveted audience, affluent, educated. I feel good on this. I should put it on the CV, yeah, and we are very receptive as well. So all of this is good, but what's the research behind it and should we trust the data?

Yeah, I think the research is pretty good. Research, edison research, I mean, they wouldn't do what YouTube, what YouGov did last week, or YouTube, yeah, they certainly wouldn't do what YouGov did last week and claim that South Africa had the most amount of podcasts listening, and then, in a little tiny asterisk, they said among internet-connected people, and it turns out that only 15% of South Africans have adequate internet anyway, and so therefore, the actual numbers are about, you know, 9% or so. So, yeah, no, edison Research is much, much better at that. I think there's some really good numbers there for advertisers, basically for you to be able to go to advertisers and say actually, you know, 56% of monthly podcast listeners have annual household income of more than $75,000. I mean, that's a useful figure to go in, which is essentially far higher than the US you know normally is. So I think that there's some really useful stuff in there.

Okay, well, moving on, James, let's get some of the tech stuff.

Oh right, yes, it's time for this. The tech stuff.

Tech stuff On the Pod News Weekly Review.

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter. Here's where we do all of the tech talk. Breaking news Sam.

Sethi Breaking news. Have you got a jingle for that as well?

I don't have a jingle for that, no.

RSScom, friends of ours, friends of the show have just 20 minutes ago officially launched and released their live item tag interface. It looks beautiful. We just played with it outside. I used it myself what's a live item? Tag sam sethi, ah, okay so, uh, in podcasting 2.0 you can now extend rss to include a live show like this. We could have actually broadcast it live via our RSS feed, and any app that supports the live item tag would have been able to broadcast and receive it.

Okay. So if I'm listening to my favourite app, my favourite show, my favourite podcast, then I could get an alert on my phone that says you know you really like the Pod News Weekly Review. Well, that show is broadcasting live. If if you want to listen to it going out right now, exactly, right.

And basically like a radio show in effect. So I'm really excited because what the guys Alberto and Ben have done is created a beautiful interface, for it made it super, super simple for people who don't need to understand the technicalities of things like HLS or any of the underlying streaming technologies. They simply have to click live or new, and they click live. They just put in their details, press the button, go on air and then apps like Fountain, podfans, truefans or Podcast Guru can literally then play it and it worked.

Well, it just so happens that in the audience are rsscom Shall we ask Ben there? Ben, you're looking at me because you wanted Alberto to answer this, didn't you.

I definitely wanted him to answer this.

Why are you getting into the live item tag? What's important for you in this?

You know we had a really good experience in mexico city when we broadcast podcon live. You were there, um, we had a lot of interaction online through those apps and we just saw the value in uh and how useful it was to people that are fans of yours, for instance, to boost and send value while you were speaking, but as well as to include others. You know there's only 700 of us that can fit in this room and you know we're being very quiet, but you know there's probably 7,000 other people that would like to participate live, and so it's just going to be a great way for people to get their message out.

Yeah, it's super good and it's part of some of the Podcasting 2.0 features that RSScom has been quite behind. I think you do transcripts and you do exports to YouTube and all kinds of stuff.

Yeah, yeah, we're having a great time with the stuff that they're doing at the podcast index, which is leading kind of the development of some of these things, and at the podcast standards project, which Sam has been helpful with. We're taking up these tags that go right into an RSS feed and take the useful information that's there and make it even more useful, more dynamic, and we extend it, as RSS is meant to be, into something new and exciting. This is one of those things.

Yeah, so it's very much adding new and interesting features for podcast listeners, and I think it's interesting. One of the big podcasting 2.0 apps is an app called Fountain. Nick from Fountain has literally just walked into the room so he has no idea what we're talking about, but Fountain supports live podcasts and so basically that rsscom will you know that is a good app if you are following a show on rsscom that wants to do live shows. Yeah, it's actually beautiful.

I don't know if Fountain does it, but you can even stream video and watch a show while it's being broadcast live through a streaming service. So these apps are great apps. Download one or two or four if you want to try them out. They're all wonderful, beautiful examples of what can be done in podcasting, and so, yeah, very grateful for the apps that are picking up these new features.

Quick question For RSScom users. Is this now a add-on that they have with their existing subscription, or is this a an additional value that they have to pay?

no, no extra charge. That's how we like to roll at. Rss is deliver more value for free. So you can go sign up, get your first episode. You will have to find a streaming service to to use, but pretty simple to find those quickly and you know, add video do some fun things.

Excellent. Now moving on. Then Wondercraft, who are here at the show, released something called Parrot Mode. James, explain what's Parrot.

Mode. Parrot Mode is really cool. So actually, on this very podcast, I think last week, I showed off a tool from a company called Eleven Labs and that, I think, called it speech to speech. So you say to a, you record yourself saying and now it's time for this, and you say I would like that, but in a woman's voice, please, and in an American woman's voice with a deep voice. And so you press the button and it does it. So it copies your intonation, your tone, your pace, but it uses a cloned voice for that, which is really cool. So, yeah, so that was very cool. I really like the name Parrot Mode, because it's obvious what it does, isn't it? Yes, pretty bolly, yes, yeah. And so they have had a stand here for the last couple of days and they've been doing some really interesting things, I think.

Yeah, I mean one of the things. I bumped into the two founders and I'm quite surprised. They weren't aware of the alternative enclosure tag and I explained to them that what they're currently doing is having five or six RSS feeds of the same show but in different languages, and then I explained how the alternative enclosure works. They fell off their chair because they weren't aware of it and now we're going to be demoing, in two weeks' time, the alternative enclosure for Stephen Bartlett's show. They weren't aware of it and now we're going to be demoing, in two weeks time, the alternative enclosure for Stephen Bartlett's show, with it in Spanish and multiple languages in the same single RSS feed.

Okay, so that means that you could follow the Stephen Bartlett show, and it would actually say a supporting app would actually say do you want to listen to this show in English or in Spanish or in German?

Yes, because it can actually see all of those individual files in the thing that's really interesting and what makes it better is because the transcription is a JSON file. The minute you change to the MP3 file of your language choice, it will re-pull the transcription for you in that language as well.

Oh, that's very nice. Yeah, that's very clever.

There you go Well there you go.

There's another thing I can see Nick from Fountain going. Oh God, I've got more work to do.

I know I keep giving him features to put in place, he won't do it.

Talking about apps, Justin Jackson from Transistor has done something quite neat in terms of looking at show notes and things.

Yeah, one of the things that he wanted to know was which apps support which HTML tags. So he did a test of headings, paragraphs, hyperlinks, block, quotes, and it was quite interesting to see which ones did. Apple did fairly badly at it, spotify didn't do well, some other the apps did very well, but fundamentally all the apps struggled to support html properly. So what he's done is written a test script that all the html apps can go back to use, and we are doing that now. I know several of the apps talk to me.

Yeah, so this is important. What so that we know that links work in our episode descriptions, for example?

Yeah, there's no point putting an H1 header and then seeing it as plain text in the show note Right. Or there's no point putting a link in and not having the link actually be.

Yeah because links are important for something like Buzzsprout's fan mail, where you can click a button and it will send a text message, for example. You want that link to be a link, don't you? If that link isn't a link, then you can't actually use fan mail. So that's an important thing.

So Justin's done that, which is a great thing, so all the apps are now looking at it and re-updating that. They've also. Evo Terra, a friend of the show, has put out two great posts recently. One of those was about how app developers support audiobooks and how app developers support fiction podcasts as well, and the critical element was that we have to really support the serial tag properly. Most apps don't. There's no point in listening to the last chapter of a book other than unless you're Spike Milligan.

Spike Milligan used to read the last page of the book before he died. That's what he said. So, yes, so he's done that. And then chapters James. That's another test that came out. What were we saying about chapters?

Yes, and so chapters. There are lots of different ways of doing chapters in podcasts. Chapters are super useful because if you've got a long podcast, this podcast is normally 90 minutes long, which is why we look as if we're really rushing through things, because we are. Chapters are super useful because it allows you to skip from one bit of the podcast to another bit of the podcast, except, there are loads of different ways of doing that. There's ID three chapters, which is the thing that Apple supports, which goes into the audio. That's great, but you end up having to re-upload the audio if you change the chapter information, which is quite annoying.

There's podcasting 2.0 chapters, which which are a separate file. There's another thing called Podlove chapters, which is kind of used by Spotify and kind of not. There's a really ugly thing in terms of putting chapters into descriptions, which Spotify uses and YouTube uses Brilliant. So you end up with all of this mess in terms of chapters. And so John Spurlock ended up checking every single podcast episode in April and he's found out that ID3 chapters are the most popular, except chapters only exist in 1.9% of all new podcast episodes. So why are we bothering with chapters if no one uses them? Sam.

Well, we use them. So if you want to skip ahead, you can right now. So that's the value of chapters. Yes, one of the drawbacks of IDV3 chapters are they can't be viewed in web-based players. Oh, yes, as well. True fans can't use them. Yeah, yes. So Apple, thank you for keeping your proprietary technology in there as well. How about supporting open standards, apple Now? Now Talking of open standards, the podcast namespace has released three new tags. One's called the podcast social interact tag. Basically, you can say where you want your social commentary to be placed, so LinkedIn, twitter, mastodon, wherever, and that's in your RSS feed. And you can also see a new podcast chat tag. So if you want to have a live show and a chat session, like XMPP can. And podcast publisher tags what's that one, james?

Well, podcast publisher tags are. If you are, say, global or the BBC, and you want to link a listener to all of the shows that you do in their podcast app so that they can subscribe to more, then that's what the podcast publisher tag is all about. So all of these tags are new parts of Podcasting 2.0, which is just adding new features in selected podcast apps. There are some really good podcast apps out there that support all of these things. True Fans is obviously an excellent one. Other podcast apps are available so you can play around with all of those, but it's really exciting to see a ton of new and interesting things in there.

And actually we've just seen AntennaPod, which is a great podcast app for Android. If you are missing Google Podcasts and you want an app that works pretty well, like it, then AntennaPod is good for you. It's free and they are releasing support for transcripts in the next version, which is version 3.5. Shout out to Tony Tam, whoever he is, but he's done the majority of coding for that, which is really good. Transcripts super important for all manner of reasons, which is really good. Transcripts super important for all manner of reasons. And, yes, and there's a thing called Pine Pods, which is very, very techie, but that's some kind of podcast app if you want to install a podcast app on a server somewhere, like everybody does. But it's worthwhile taking a peek at so lots of tech stuff. There's lots more in the Pod News newsletter every Monday.

Boostergrams. Boostergrams and fan mail. Fan mail On the Pod News Weekly Review.

Sam what's a boostergram? A boostergram is very simple. It's a comment that you can leave a podcast creator and it comes with a micro payment attached to it.

Excellent. Like Gene Bean, who sent us a small amount of money 2,222 sats which is a small amount of money, but it's a very welcome amount of money. Thank you, Gene Bean. He's mentioning something that we did last week. The female James, responding to Adam, cracked me up. I'm glad it cracked him up.

Yeah, I think Adam wanted you to do it permanently, though for this show.

Yeah, well, no, that's not going to happen, adam. Thank you very much. We also got some fan mail, in which is the Buzzsprout thing where you can click a link in the description for this show right now and send us a message and that's all good. Loving the show says, um, somebody from the united kingdom of great britain and northern ireland. Uh, loving the show and the fact that it's so actionable and tactical is a breath of fresh air. Keep up the great work.

Yes we had another one. This is york from welcome to earth. Stories podcasting is alive and well in great white north, aka canada, great white north. Okay, yeah, um, your canada lands guest from last, stories Podcasting is alive and well in Great White North, aka Canada, great White North. Okay, your Canada Lands guest from last week gave a bleak report. I admit it's not bursting through the seams, but it's gaining a sizable audience. Anyways, it's always good to hear from my fellow Canadians. Take care and happy podcasting.

That's a very kind thing, and I think we mentioned last week that we could have used fan mail for this, and then I said something like but we don't want everybody sending a text message to an American number, because that would be a bit mad. But apparently the way that it works is here in this country you press that fan mail link in our description and it knows to send a UK number a text. So it should be free for everybody in here, which is really interesting. A bit late so, I mean it's a bit late now, but thank you, Buzzsprout, for letting us know about that as well, and also thank you to our power supporters at weeklypodnewsnet, who are Dave Jackson from the School of Podcasting, Mike Hamilton, Matt Medeiros, Marshall Brown and Cameron Mould. If you want to support us, then you can do that in any number of ways, and more details at weeklypodnewsnet. We've got three minutes left, Sam, what's happened for you this week?

Well, I saw a report that said that 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible. It just made me wonder, James. I wonder how many podcasts are no longer accessible.

Wow, well, I mean, I suppose it's the other way around. Podcasts are becoming more accessible, with transcripts at least. So there is that. Oh, no, they've gone, oh I see what you mean Podcasts which have gone. So how many have podfaded? Oh yeah, Well, there's podfaded and been deleted from the internet. Yes, that would be a fascinating figure from the internet. Yes, that would be a fascinating figure.

I've got no idea how to find that out. Yeah, it's really interesting. We had a great chat, benjamin Bellamy and I, about Activity Pub and a new version of Caster Pub 2.0 that's about to be launched next month.

We will doubtless hear from Benjamin about that, which should be good, yeah, so what's happened for you, james? James, I have been quite busy, it turns out, yes, yes, and flying all the way here. I must congratulate Todd Cochran both for being here in London on the blueberry stand outside, but I came here using finnair, because obviously I came here using finnair. Why would I come here on a direct flight to London when I can go via Helsinki? But anyway, finnair is fascinating, but they give you a choice of drink on the plane of either water or blueberry juice. So I thought blueberry juice was very clever. Well done, todd Cochran, for sponsoring that. Excellent. I'm not sure that he did, but still. But there we are and that's it for this week. Thank you so much to our guests, the audience. Hooray, you can also listen to the Pod News Daily. You can subscribe to the Pod News newsletter for more of these stories and an awful lot more. That's free at podnewsnet.

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