James Cridlan: 0:00

It's Friday, the 22nd of November 2024.

Speaker 2: 0:04

The last word in podcasting news. This is the Pod News Weekly Review with James Cridland and Sam Sethi.

James Cridlan: 0:14

I'm James Cridland, the editor of Pod News, and I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO of True Fans In the chapters. Today, amazon Music gets audible. How bad is podfade? Podcast lists of 2024 from Apple and others.

Neil Mody: 0:27

And Mule Modi, ceo and co-founder of Headliner and glad to be here. We'll be on later to talk about all our integrations that we released recently Hubhopper, tiktok and more.

Alberto Betella: 0:39

I'm Alberto Betella and I'm going to be on the show to talk about Ghost AI and RSScom. They will.

James Cridlan: 0:45

This podcast is sponsored by Buzzsprout, with the tools, support and community to ensure you keep podcasting. Start podcasting, keep podcasting with buzzsproutcom. From your daily newsletter, the Pod News Weekly Review.

Sam Sethi: 1:00

Someone's woken Amazon up. I thought sleepy Amazon was off on holiday for the rest of the century. Wow, I guess Spotify's announcement last week sort of rattled a few cages because it looks like Amazon's adding audiobooks to Amazon Music. Now what are they doing, James? Tell me more.

James Cridlan: 1:17

So this is a big, big, big deal, I think, and very clever. However, amazon has, of course, audible, which is the biggest audiobook website and service, and everything else. They are putting all of Audible into the Amazon Music app, Music, which is an extra set of money, but anyone who is a subscriber to Amazon Music in the US, uk and Canada can now listen to one Audible title for free each month, which is so super simple, isn't it? One book for free each month, or that also goes for one audio production that Audible has on offer as well for free each month. And, of course, that goes alongside Amazon's music. And also Amazon, let's not forget, also offers ad-free podcasts, so they actually pay money to take some podcasts which are ad-free and make those available for unlimited subscribers as well in the Amazon Music app. I think it makes a ton of sense, to be honest.

Sam Sethi: 2:31

It does, except no one uses it. I mean, I'm an Audible user and that one credit, which is fundamentally £7.99, is what they're now giving to Amazon Music. So that's the value proposition that they're offering. I've got a Lexus. I don't set my Lexus to use Amazon Music. I don't use it in the car, I don't use it on my phone. I'm a Prime member, I'm an Audible member, and yet I can't be bothered to go to Amazon Music and I don't know what's causing that. But I don't think I'm alone.

James Cridlan: 3:05

No, I'm sure you're not alone. And actually Amazon Music it's got a free tier for Amazon Prime subscribers already. Unlimited is an extra 10 US dollars a month. They've got 200 million Prime subscribers across the world at least, because that was the last figure that they released and that was in 2020. So that was the last figure that they released and that was in 2020. So you can imagine how many that they've got now.

James Cridlan: 3:29

But Amazon Music, I would agree it really isn't used very much. If you look at OP3, I did a snapshot of that in August 1.5% of all podcast downloads, which is actually more than Buzzsprout say. Buzzsprout only say 0.9% in October. So I wonder whether a free audio book will actually get people using the Amazon Music app a little bit more for their podcasts. But also Amazon Music, of course you know I mean. One thing that Amazon does have, again that Spotify doesn't, is Spotify Hi-Fi. Amazon launched HD audio back in 2019. Spotify Hi-Fi was announced in February 2021, but it still hasn't launched. So Amazon is actually a much better experience in terms of the content that they have than anything else. So I do wonder why people don't actually use it.

Sam Sethi: 4:26

I think Amazon have missed so many tricks. I don't know what it is. The Alexa hiatus was massive. At one point, you know, I had six Alexas around the house. I can now probably think three are active, three are collecting dust. The uh skills just were useless. They didn't really do what they were supposed to do. The promised open ai llm type upgrade to amazon alexis nowhere near and I think they're now saying you have to buy new ones. Um, they should have made amazon music a default. I think audible should have been part of amazon Music years ago. I don't and I've said this before on this show I don't get why they have a separate Audible podcast division. It really probably only reflects internal politics between two directors who won't merge their little fiefdoms. I'm sorry, I just don't think this is going to move the needle for Amazon at all.

James Cridlan: 5:21

I think you're right. Sadly, which is weird because Amazon Music does pretty well if you look into India and in Japan, where they are the number two open RSS podcast app, but everywhere else they're virtually nowhere, and you know it's a little bit weird, I suppose if you were to have a look elsewhere. Obviously, apple offers audio books in the Apple Books app. Obviously Apple offers audiobooks in the Apple Books app. Google offers audiobooks as well in Google Play Books, but obviously there's no subscription offer on either of those and both of those are so separate from podcasts they're not cross-promoted at all. So you've got that sort of side as well.

James Cridlan: 6:00

I have to say, if you're a fan of audiobooks and you really like audio books, then you should be using the Libby app, which is completely free. You plug in your library card in there and you can download as many audio books and indeed you know eBooks as you like. So you know, perhaps going away and using that, but yeah, it's a really good move from Amazon Music. Is it going to be enough to move the needle? I don't think so and I do wonder why that is, and I wonder whether it's just you know, at the end of the day, people who are interested in that sort of thing have Spotify already, or people who are interested in that sort of thing find that the Amazon Music app, for whatever reason, isn't quite as good as the app that they're currently using. I don't know.

Sam Sethi: 6:52

Could it be just as simple, as it doesn't say podcast in the word Amazon Music and no one thinks there's podcast there.

James Cridlan: 6:55

I mean, but there again, nor does Spotify no but it doesn't say Spotify Music, it's Spotify.

James Cridlan: 7:02

Ah well, yes, absolutely, and also I do. I do notice that in the UI for Amazon music it says audible. It doesn't say audio books. And you know, I can understand that, because actually they're offering more than just audio books. They're offering all of audibles. You know audio fiction and you know all of the paid podcasts that they have there as well. But again, I don't know how obvious that is going to be to a typical user. If they know Audible for audiobooks, are they going to know Audible for all of the other stuff that Audible does? I don't know. So, you know, it's really interesting. I'm always fascinated at Amazon because they clearly have an awful lot of good people working there, but I am fascinated at seeing why that product just simply doesn't get there, when actually, on paper, it's a much better experience, you know, in terms of content, than anything else which is available.

Sam Sethi: 7:59

Yeah, I mean, it's weird that also. We've tried on numerous occasions I know I have, I'm sure you have as well, james to try and get amazon spokespeople to come on this show to talk about their strategy, to tell about new product announcements nada, nothing, um, and I don't know what it is. I don't know if they're going to be too cool for school. Like apple you, you know we can't talk to anybody, we're Apple. I don't know if Amazon's just trying to copy them, but it would be nice if an Amazon spokesperson from somewhere around the globe actually decided to talk to the press and it would be helpful to tell us what they're doing, because, again, they're out of sight and out of mind to me. That's fundamentally what I think the problem with Amazon is, and I don't think this is going to make any difference.

James Cridlan: 8:46

No, I mean, I would say, as we may get into at the end of this show, I would say that Amazon's PR people are lovely and obviously I have not a beef with them at all. They are fantastic people and I wish them all very well. But what I would also say is that for many years, amazon wasn't sending me any press releases at all about the Amazon Music app, because I'm based in Australia and so therefore, it was the job of somebody in Australia to send me the information, even though all of the information was, of course, coming out of the US. So it ended up being a real sort of messy, you know, territorial thing of people in the US said well, he's in Australia, so the Australians should be dealing with that. And the people in Australia were going well, you're coming up with all of the ideas and the stories. You should be helping him with that. So it was just, it was a bit of a mess. So I mean, you know, but, as I say, amazon's PR people are talking to me now and they're lovely human beings.

Sam Sethi: 9:59

I will praise you that for you then, Joe. That was Sam Sethi who had a go at Amazon. James loves you. You're okay, yes. Now just one thing. You mentioned Spotify not releasing the hi-fi version of their audio tracks or music tracks. They're not stupid, so why do you think they're not doing it, James?

James Cridlan: 10:18

I wonder whether or not actually it's a bit of an issue with the record companies. The record company is playing hardball with Spotify and basically saying no, you don't get access to our high quality master tracks until you do X, y or Z. And Spotify have said well, we don't want to do X, y and Z, so we're just not going to bother. I wonder if it's just purely that it's a contractual argument with the record companies. If they've got some leverage over Spotify and you can see them wanting to have a little bit of leverage over that company, then this is a great place for them to do that, because they can just turn around and say, well, no, we're not going to give you our high-quality masters. So I think it just could be, frankly, just as simple as that.

Sam Sethi: 11:16

James. Moving on then, spotify was a big conversation piece for us last week, and Spotify, we talked about a few weeks ago, has rolled out an easier way to share podcasts to TikTok both music and audio books and we talked about their integration with Instagram. But we also touched on the fact that a company called Headliner has done a lot of work with Spotify, youtube, tiktok, and it seemed that it would be a good time to talk to somebody at Headliner. They've done deals with Hubhopper and they've done deals with video creators as well. So, headliner, we use it, don't we, james?

James Cridlan: 11:48

Yeah, we use it for this very podcast. We use it to get this show onto YouTube for the three people who listen there every week. So that's a good thing. But Headliner has all kinds of very cool things, both video support for podcasters, headliner's Eddie, which is a audio editor, and plenty of other things. You caught up with Neil Modi, who's a lovely man and also the CEO and co-founder of Headliner, and you started off by asking what is Headliner?

Neil Mody: 12:22

We try to build the easiest ways for people to grow their podcasts. So now it's become, I wouldn't say a platform, but getting there basically a suite of tools that really help you try to grow your podcast. Everything from the smallest podcaster, the individual kind of hobbyist, all the way up to some of the biggest podcast operations and large organizations are using Headliner to really attract new audience, either through making short social videos to posting on YouTube or through our new product, disco, that helps them basically take readers of their website and convert them into podcast listeners. And so, yeah, we just keep on building to try to find new audience for podcasters and the tools come from that mission.

Sam Sethi: 13:06

You got one other product as well in that suite, which is called Eddie. What's Eddie?

Neil Mody: 13:09

Basically, what we found is for the social video tool that we're kind of known for, or kind of our main product since 2018, people started increasingly wanting to use the transcript as a clipping mechanism. Right, so when you want to find a clip, there's a bunch of ways to do it. There's a kind of legacy ways, which is using a waveform which audio creators are very familiar with, but for a new podcaster or a new creator, the waveform's kind of something new that they're not familiar with and a transcript becomes a much easier way to figure out what clips you want to maybe share to social. So Eddie was basically an add-on product for our individual creators all the way up to kind of big media companies who are trying to figure out which clips pack with all the kind of AI powered LLM generated social kind of descriptions, keywords, all sorts of meta information that helps podcasters kind of streamline their workflow as well.

Neil Mody: 14:17

So it's kind of grown into this tool that's now used by thousands of podcasters a week. Actually, it just keeps growing, and so we're kind of lucky to have it at this point.

Sam Sethi: 14:26

We started using Headliner just for audio clipping with nice graphics and throwing that out of social media. And then you did the YouTube integration and it was like, okay, well, james and I don't do video, but hey, we can put a still graphic, but we can still post automatically. That's the key to YouTube as well, and that was great. I then used it for my own radio station, river Radio, which was really useful. You've also got an analytics engine built into Headliner, so this is really good first party data on who listened to my clip, which platform listens to my clip, et cetera, et cetera. So that's really cool. Is there an open API around that as well that I can use that with my other analytics anywhere?

Neil Mody: 15:11

It's a good question. We don't do it because we're actually pulling it from the APIs, from the platforms. But in terms of the data from our consumption platform, we should, we can and should build that. I would say we haven't had the users who are trying to pull that in yet. We're just pulling data from what's out there and already available. But on our platform side, it's actually a very good question and something we can and should do to the extent that people want to pull in that information.

Neil Mody: 15:38

We've gotten to some serious scale now with Disco, and so the question is for some of these publishers using us, we're bigger than Apple and Spotify in terms of audience, and so I know that's crazy to think about in podcasting, but again, their websites do so much traffic and so our data is actually more interesting and we're more transparent about it. So getting that out in API form is probably useful, but right now we've been doing the tooling to make it more interesting than what the hosts provide and the platforms provide, and that's kind of what we've been focused on. That's a whole nother topic, but yeah.

Sam Sethi: 16:16

So talk to me about your integration with HubHop Two parts of the question. One is talk to me about the HubHopper integration and what that is, and then, secondly, are you going to be partnering with any other hosts as well?

Neil Mody: 16:28

So the HubHopper integration is actually integrating Eddy, which is that transcript-based, you know tool to generate transcripts, all the AI show notes and keywords and social post copy, et cetera, all the kind of meta packaging information, as I like to say content, and really enable kind of meta packaging information, as I like to say content, and really enable kind of fast clipping all the way over to make by headliner for the social posts, etc. So we integrated, I think because generally, you know, gautam kind of saw that you could and he's a CEO of HubHopper I think you could see that we were committed to building a tool that would easily integrate white label, no us, which you don't see from a lot of people in the industry but allow their users a quick way to do this instead of building it all from scratch for themselves, which, by the way, I would say most hosts have done for make with the social posting tool that we have. Again, you know, building all this stuff and supporting all the different social networks. It's an ongoing lift right and so focus on what you do best for the customer, and I think he saw that as a hosting provider and I think other hosting providers have looked at other companies for this.

Neil Mody: 17:39

We just tend to generally be the most white label and best mix of cheapest, best and most accommodating, and that's what's led us to dozens of integrations and HubHopper is one of the newest ones and I would say more integrations. I mean we've got a few more coming and you guys will be the first to know, but definitely some more hosts are looking at these tools because, first of all, the transcript and getting it is a cost for the host and we, given our scale, get it much cheaper than anybody else and we pass that back to our host and then staying up on all the LLMs and all the things that they can do is its own engineering effort. So we've taken that away and the host can focus on building the best hosting platform connecting with all the actual consumption platforms. We'll take care of this for them, neil.

Sam Sethi: 18:30

I had one question I really wanted to ask you and I think you'd be perfect for answering the question. The big debate right now is Spotify video and YouTube. Video versus audio. What constitutes a podcast? Spotify talking about shows, changing it from spotify for podcasters creators, given that you are one of the biggest now out producing clippings and videos and everything else, where is your head around the market, around spotify, youtube and podcasting?

Neil Mody: 18:59

it's an excellent question, I would say. I would like to see the creators and the consumers decide and I think they've largely decided that for some genre of podcasts, namely interview podcasts, you can attract an audience better on video than you can on audio, attract again, bring them in the door and then the hope is, over time, you can retain them better, I believe, on audio rather than video. It's early there, but that's the data I'm seeing, and so for a company like YouTube and Spotify, that's what they need to do. Well, youtube was already there. Spotify needed to grow into that.

Neil Mody: 19:45

Again, this is kind of remnants of what happened with the Joe Rogan deal and his numbers.

Neil Mody: 19:51

Again, I like to point out, joe Rogan, even when he was exclusive on Spotify, had more subscribers they still call it subscribers on YouTube than followers on Spotify. Okay, so you have an exclusive show on Spotify that actually has more subscribers followers, whatever you want to call them on a different platform that doesn't even have the show anymore, and at some point you have to ask yourself what is the strategy? And they figured out we're not going to keep these shows closed. And now the question is if video is where people want to consume this stuff, we have to support it. So the question is, what happens to narrative fiction podcasts, comedy podcasts, etc. I think interview podcasts, generally speaking, again to attract audience you almost need to do video, and that class has moved there to attract audience again to keep them different story. But I think we're all in the business of trying to find more audience as creators and videos, kind of piece of that for sure at this point and of all your end points that you spread clips to, which is the most active coming back?

Neil Mody: 21:00

I'd have to check the data. I actually think it's youtube. We have the most data from youtube. We publish to youtube more than any other platform. I believe Social social is an awareness play more than a click through, kind of, to final consumption. When you get someone listening on YouTube, they generally want to dig deeper and making that available is useful. And I think three, four years ago probably, you and I had a conversation.

Neil Mody: 21:25

Most of the podcast industry was anti-YouTube, maybe a little more than three, four years ago. Maybe four, five years ago, five, six years ago. They were anti-YouTube and, to your point, earlier, you got to go where audience is. If you want to grow audience I'm sure you're tired of hearing me say this and maybe some of the audiences podcasting is still really small. There's 5 billion people online. There's only 500 million listening to podcasts. That's one-tenth. 500 million to 5 billion that's one-tenth. So nine out of 10 people online haven't listened to a podcast. So between Meta and YouTube, if you're not posting to those two platforms that's half the internet you're not getting to Right Like easily, easily Now are you going to get discovered there?

Neil Mody: 22:09

You know, I think those debates are valid, like, hey, how big can this get for me and all that stuff, but to not be there at all, I think, again, that's just a mistake from a customer acquisition. If it's a strategy decision, monetization decision, hey that's all good. But to say you're not going to get audience on the biggest platforms, you know, would you not want to be on Google search in any way, shape or form? That's basically what you're kind of saying, right, and I think that has handicapped podcasting to some extent, and I think we're just growing out of that.

Neil Mody: 22:42

And video, I think similarly for some class of shows, to the extent that people are comfortable with it. And yes, I know it sucks to get camera ready and all those kinds of things and you'll be judged in a different way. But hey, this is what the audience wants, as Spotify has done all the data and research on, and YouTube knows all too well, and this is where creators are going, and so you either embrace it or you buck the trend and keep the audience where you want, and that's totally fine too. There's always going to be a market for only audio consumption, but clearly, to grow videos are a component of it and we've been saying that for a long time. As you know, the internet is a visual medium first and you need to hook people visually before you can hook them with your audio and Headliner's kind of been at the forefront of that for six, seven years now.

Sam Sethi: 23:35

Remind everyone very quickly if they want to go and find out more about Headliner, where do I go?

Neil Mody: 23:40

Headliner. The best place to find us is headlinerapp. So on the web, headlinerapp, headlinerapp, and then all the socials. I think we've got some different handles, but you'llapp and then all the socials. I think we've got some different handles, but you'll find us and me directly. If you want, best place to reach me is actually email. I'm kind of old school neil N-E-I-L at headlinerapp.

Sam Sethi: 24:00

Neil, thanks so much mate.

Neil Mody: 24:01

Thank you, Sam.

James Cridlan: 24:02

Neil Modi, the CEO of Headliner. There is, of course, a full version. Plenty more to listen to in the Pod News Extra feed, including Neil talking about interview-only shows and video and also talking about the fact that podcasting is still relatively small as well. You'll find the Pod News Extra podcast wherever you found this one.

Sam Sethi: 24:26

Now, another company that we have a fondness for is RSScom friends of the show, alberto and Ben, and they announced a few weeks ago that they had successfully got a patent for AI-driven scalable ads. It's the idea to allow you to replicate hosts' authentic voices and then customize those with contextual data. So hello, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Rather than re-recording that, I caught up with Alberto Botella to ask him about the patent. But I also, in this interview, learnt a few things James, prosodic features, monodirectional and parasocial relationships, james, hey, and something he called empathetic AI. He's a super smart man, alberto. I don't know if you remember, but he's got a PhD in this stuff. Yeah, he's got a PhD. I've got a little MBA nothing useful there but he's got a big, big old PhD. But I started off by chatting with Alberto and I said you've got a patent, alberto. What's in the patent?

Alberto Betella: 25:29

It's a patent on voice cloning or voice mimicking to produce programmatic ads for audio podcasts and broadcasts in general, so it's very nice. We filed it in November 2021, so it literally took three years for it to be approved. It was a lot of to and from with the reviewer, but we're very happy to have this as a patent, so very excited.

Sam Sethi: 25:56

Why did you start to put this patent together? What was the thinking about it?

Alberto Betella: 26:00

Well, the original thinking was an idea that came from Ben, who is my co-founder. He went to a conference, got the idea and we noticed there was no prior art specifically patenting this idea. So we thought it would be nice to pursue it, and really the main goal initially was for Ben and I to have a badge to be inventors. We never filed nor got a patent before, so we thought back in 2021 or even before, we thought we should do that. And yeah, so that was the first driver.

Alberto Betella: 26:35

The second one was that we feel we are a tech company, but most of the time we are labeled as a podcast hosting company, where hosting per se is not a cutting edge solution. People use third party services like AWS, CloudFront. So really it was a statement for us to be there and say you know, we are also building technology and we have a patent on the market. So really the first drive was let's get a badge. You know, you get a college degree, you get a degree and a patent is one of the things we didn't have, and so we are very happy on a personal level. But then we saw there was a need for something like this in the industry.

Sam Sethi: 27:13

So now you've got the patent, where do you see it being used? I mean, are RSS going to do this? Is it a third party thing? How do you think you're going to enable people to use the patent that you've got? Or how are you going to use the patent that you've got?

Alberto Betella: 27:31

use the patent that you've got, or how are you going to use the patent that you've got? So the patent itself is going to be commercialized with the business name ghostai g-o-s-tai, which is actually also the website you can look at, and the idea is either building it ourselves sooner than later, or license it if we find a great partner. Actually, this interview today, perhaps it's going to be very useful to throw a stone out there and see if someone picks it up and comes back. So the idea is building, but partnering would be also a great option, just for the sake of speed. But really, what we've seen in many occasions the use of text-to-speech to generate ads, contextual ads, so that you can use placeholders, like you said good morning, good afternoon. Good morning New York, good morning Chicago, good evening LA.

Alberto Betella: 28:24

So I think this is just a natural evolution where, instead of using a generic text-to-speech voice, you can create a model of the host. This would be done with the full approval of the host, so following all the ethical guidelines, the FTC guidelines. So, really, this is not about cloning a voice without consent and using it to, let's say, fool the listeners. On the contrary, it's a technology that is going to streamline the workflows for podcasters. They want something close to host thread ads, but they don't want to invest the time that often is required for host thread ads, especially when they need variants, many variants. So really, I clone my voice and then, using scripts of advertisement, they can be generated programmatically in the thousands or hundreds of thousands with no effort except cloning my voice for a few minutes initially.

Sam Sethi: 29:22

It also works very well, I guess, when you want to do internationalization. So if you wanted to do a script and then put that into a foreign language again, there was no limits or bounds there, I guess.

Alberto Betella: 29:34

Absolutely. That's one of the best parts of the patent and of the technology per se. So when you clone a voice, the underlying mechanisms are based on voice features and these features are called prosodic features. For example, the accent like my accent the intonation, the pitch, the rhythm. These are prosodic features, and prosodic features are what make my voice, or your voice, you know, the personal voice, right? So it's not just the so-called utterance. The utterance is, you know, the basic speech, but really these extra features are what makes a voice more personal. And that's exactly what we are going to be doing. We are going to be mimicking or even cloning 100% the voice so that the listeners can identify themselves more, they can be more engaged because they've been listening to a host, they trust them, and so if there is something which resembles their voice, unconsciously, it is more engaging. It doesn't mean you're fooling them again, but it's just. You know, instead of skipping the ads, naturally you are more prone to listening to it, and that's really where the technology taps into.

Sam Sethi: 30:49

Recently, you presented something called empathetic applications. What are empathetic applications, Alberto?

Alberto Betella: 30:57

Okay, that's very interesting. This is something I've been working firsthand in a previous life. I was for almost seven years in academia doing my PhD specifically on this topic. Academia, doing my PhD specifically on this topic. Actually, my specialization is affective computing. That is a discipline that was created in 1992 with a book from Rosalind Picard at MIT Media Lab, but later on it has been called also emotion AI.

Alberto Betella: 31:28

Nowadays everyone wants to use the AI. You know AI everywhere, so, but substantially, what this is, emotion AI is machines that can interpret, read, convey and even induce emotion to the listener, to the user. So the application of these are infinite, literally, and there can be good application and bad application. But among the good applications is interfaces that understand how the users feel and adapt to them so that it's a better user experience, and also mental health, digital mental health application. You know, and you can go all the way to speaking with someone who's not here anymore. Some people already cloned Albert Einstein voice and we can go there and go into philosophical conversations very soon. But really, emotion AI leverages emotions and therefore prosodic features in a voice to convey something and to make this message and narrative more engaging.

Sam Sethi: 32:35

Are you introducing an element of emotion, and how? I mean, how will I feel more emotion to what is clearly an AI?

Alberto Betella: 32:45

machine. Okay, so this is deeply rooted in how our brain works. So what you're tapping there is really some circuit, for example the limbic system in the brain. Let me step back is that there is a concept in psychology that we all know. Maybe we don't know how it's called, but we know the concept and it's called parasocial relationship. And it's called parasocial relationship.

Alberto Betella: 33:11

It was created in the mid-50s, especially with the media growing TV, radio and parasocial relationship means that a host of a TV show, of a radio show, of a podcast or even a personality on social media has this unique relationship with their listener and followers, but is a mono-directional relationship, meaning the host doesn't know the followers at the personal level. But followers, especially after a while following the host, feel the host is their friend. They know details and nuances of the host's life that the host maybe doesn't even remember he mentioned or they mentioned at all. So this is called parasocial relationship. And the parasocial relationship is, after all, an emotion, it's intimacy, it's feeling close to someone and therefore you feel you can, can speak, you feel you can open to them.

Alberto Betella: 34:13

And that's why, when you clone a voice or you mimic a voice you could just have, I don't instead of cloning completely. You, sam, as a host, you may want to opt for a british accent, a certain male, certain age range. That's mimicking. But closer the outcome, the voice is to the original host, the higher this parasocial relationship taps into the listener and therefore the listener feels that's the emotion part. They feel that the message they're receiving is close to them. Does it make sense?

Sam Sethi: 34:53

It does. Yeah, I've heard James do a version of Pod News Daily in Spanish and I've heard him do it in Italian, and I can hear the intonation of James's voice, which gives me an element of, as you say, the parasocial, is giving me a trust level. I know James. He knows what he's talking about when it comes to podcasting. I don't understand exactly what he's saying in Italian or French, but I do know that it is James, so there's a level of trust and that's, I guess, what you're introducing with Ghost is the fact that it's not just a AI, unknown voice which I have no relationship to. You're introducing a host voice that I have a relationship to through this parasocial relationship.

Alberto Betella: 35:41

This is precisely what we address with our patent and the technology. That's precisely that.

Sam Sethi: 35:48

Alberto, thank you so much. If people want to find out about ghost ads, where would they go? Let's start there.

Alberto Betella: 35:53

They would go to ghostai G-O-S-T.

Sam Sethi: 35:57

And if they want to find out more about what rsscom is doing with its podcasting 2.0 and the dynamic ad insertions, where would you go?

Alberto Betella: 36:06

Well, you could go to rsscom. But also, if you are curious about the day-to-day and what we create, you can go to changelogrsscom. This is where you really see our daily operations and how our product evolves Amazing, Alberto thank you so much, my friend. Speak to you soon, thank you. Speak to you soon. Thank you for inviting me.

James Cridlan: 36:26

Alberto Patella from rsscom. I'm an advisor to the company. Just to let you know and there is a longer interview from that in the Pod News Extra feed, in case you want to learn about monetization models in podcasting and value for value and what he thinks of Spotify's newly announced ad-free podcasting initiative as well, it's all in the Pod News Extra podcast and you can find that wherever you get this one.

Speaker 2: 36:51

The Pod News Weekly Review. With Buzz Sprout Podcast hosting made easy.

Sam Sethi: 36:58

Moving on, james, there was a report in Pod News Daily about podfades, so it was how bad is podfade? The phenomenon where podcasters stop podcasting? So, james, how bad is podfade?

James Cridlan: 37:14

podcasting. So, James, how bad is Podfade? So I looked at the podcast index data for January and February of this year because I thought I wonder how many podcasts started in January turns out 25,000, and how many stopped posting new episodes by the end of February. And it turns out that of the 25,000 podcasts that started in January, 7,000, more than 7,000, haven't posted a new episode since the end of February. So 30% of people podfaded in less than two months, which I found fascinating.

James Cridlan: 37:45

And it's not who you think it is. I thought it'll be Anchor, it'll be Spotify. For creators, it'll be their fault. So it turns out that it's the podcast hosting companies, the paid podcast hosting companies with the free trials, that show the highest levels. So I imagine that that's people who have started podcasting, who have got into month number two, they haven't got the numbers that they're expecting and then all of a sudden they're being asked to pay, and I suspect it's those two things at the same time actually means that it ends up being pretty high. So RSScom 71% of their shows pod faded in that time. Spreaker 40%, and that was pretty interesting data and it occurs to me that what I could do is go back to that data and use that data as a new shows on these podcast platforms as a ranker for every single month, and that might be interesting to go and take a look at as well.

Sam Sethi: 39:07

No, I think that would be fascinating, because I was going to ask you what happened in February, march, april, may, and is there a trend? I mean again not asking you to do too much more work, but is there a trend over years? Is this, you know, a normal. I'm bored at Christmas, let's get a new microphone for Christmas. Oh, let's start a podcast, and then, oh, that's hard work, I'm not going to bother doing that again.

James Cridlan: 39:28

Now the only problem with this data is, of course, that some podcast hosting companies I believe Buzzsprout, our sponsor does this. They delete free accounts when the free trial ends, so therefore they won't appear on the data as I've downloaded it now. So perhaps what I should be doing is downloading the data on the first of the month and looking at the previous two months and actually seeing what happens there. That would require me to be organised and so therefore that's never going to happen, but I quite like that. So therefore you know, other podcast hosting companies may be a little bit higher in terms of that, but just so that you know the top five companies with new shows in January Spotify for Creators, at number one, rsscom at number two, so well done RSScom. Buzzsprout at number three Well done, our sponsor Spreaker at number four and Acast at number five. Which was surprising, in between all of those five, they attracted 60% of new shows in that month. So how consolidated is podcasting? Well, 60% is done by the top five podcast hosting companies. So that was quite a thing too.

Sam Sethi: 40:38

That could be even skewed further, because how much is Spotify of that 60% taking?

James Cridlan: 40:44

Well, yes, indeed, how much of Spotify is that 60% taking? I mean, I could tell you that number if you wanted to know, but yeah, I mean I think that there's definitely you know something there in terms of that, of the 25,000 shows that started in January, 7,000 started with Spotify, 2,500 with rsscom, 2,400 with buzzsproutcom. So you can very clearly see that Spotify is still doing incredibly well, but, yeah, so really interesting numbers. I'd not considered using the podcast index data in that way, but that was something that I found quite interesting, I thought.

Sam Sethi: 41:29

Is Podfade? Only because you know they realised that just rocking up to a mic isn't just rocking up to a mic, but there's all the other stuff you have to do, which is, you know, promotion and post-production, editing and all the other bits. Or is it a case of oh, I'm not going to get Joe Rogan levels of audience and I'm not getting paid, so I can't be bothered? What do you think pod fade happens for?

James Cridlan: 41:52

I think there's a load of different reasons.

James Cridlan: 41:54

I think, firstly, it's people just not getting the numbers that they were expecting.

James Cridlan: 42:00

I think it's another thing is it's an awful lot of work to put together a podcast, to find the right people to interview, if you're doing an interview show, to do the research, and blah, blah, blah, and so quite a lot of people don't get the workflow right.

James Cridlan: 42:13

And one of the things that I've been doing a lot of podcasts on recently has been about workflow and making sure that you get that workflow right.

James Cridlan: 42:20

If you're working on a new project and I don't think that quite a lot of podcasters do that and then obviously now it's even worse because people are sitting there going well, I've got to do video, haven't I, if I'm doing a podcast, and so then they're investing in cameras and lights and you know, and all that, and so it gets even more complicated for them. So you know I mean I think you can have a look at the numbers very clearly you see that a lot of podcasters actually give up after doing one or two episodes. I mean, it really is as simple as that. So it's a case of just making sure that you start and consistently go on with something that you can actually do on a consistent basis, and I'm sure that a lot of people suddenly realise that producing a podcast isn't quite as easy as just hitting record talking nonsense for an hour and a half and then hitting the publish button. I know that some people do that, but most of the time it's much more complicated.

Sam Sethi: 43:25

Now one of the other things that, of course, is coming out. Now. We are beginning to see two things One is the prediction shows and one is the uh podcast lists of the most popular podcasts of 2024, and now apple, of course, have put their list out, and you did some extra work with that, though, james, so tell me more about the list from apple first, and then what you've done yes.

James Cridlan: 43:47

So the only thing that apple did is they released a press release which had the us um top top 10 shows on there and a few other charts that they put together, which is very Apple podcast. If you look at their Twitter account, for example, it's all US stuff. They seem to really only care about the US. So I thought wouldn't it be more useful if as I've done in previous years, to be fair I went through and had a look at all of the other charts that were available? It's much, much easier now because Apple Podcasts has a web interface which you can have a look at this information in, as long as you defeat some of the clever stuff that Apple has done on there, some of the clever stuff that Apple has done on there. So I had a list of the English-speaking countries and then a link to as many of the charts that I could actually find. I went through every single country in the world. I only found 33 charts available in the Apple Podcasts app. The Apple Podcasts PR said over 100 territories. It's not, it's only 33. They never thought anyone would check. I know. I have a feeling that that is exactly the case.

James Cridlan: 44:57

I did ask Apple whether or not I'd made a mistake or something, but of course heard nothing back, because why would Apple bother to reply to any of the emails that I send them no-transcript. So you go into the Netherlands, for example, norway, sweden they don't have any charts whatsoever. Mexico, yes, poland, yes, seemingly an awful lot from the Arab states as well Qatar, saudi Arabia, bahrain, you know all of those places Kuwait all of those places have lots of charts. But then you have a look at you know Thailand has one, but there's none from the Philippines, there's none from Indonesia, and so on and so forth.

James Cridlan: 46:12

So I just found it really interesting I'm not quite sure what it says, but I just found it really interesting the editorial focus of the Apple Podcasts team which countries that they had bothered to put charts together for and which they just hadn't bothered at all, and, of course, where Apple Podcasts isn't actually available because, surprise. And of course, where apple podcast isn't actually available because, surprise, surprise, actually apple podcast isn't available in a bunch of places which I was unaware of. So, um, yeah, so that was, um. That was an interesting experience going through um, all 190, you know countries in the world and seeing where the, where the charts actually were.

Sam Sethi: 46:50

You'll be presenting at the UN next if you keep doing this. Now I think we've talked on this show about how, outside of the English-speaking countries, how Apple's penetration has been reducing, how Spotify's increased, and certainly in the countries where Android is the predominant phone of choice because of price. Then Apple doesn't actually appear anywhere really.

James Cridlan: 47:14

Yeah, no indeed. And you know, and the Apple podcasts on the web thing isn't a proper PWA, so still doesn't work properly on Android phones. Still looks as if it's just a website.

Sam Sethi: 47:30

It's one line of code and I have. They only get the coder for one time a year.

James Cridlan: 47:32

You know that they only get the Coda for one time a year. You know that. Well, I did tell somebody at Apple Podcasts that in August and I reminded them last week and they said, oh, thanks for the reminder. So, who knows, they might fix it at some point. But yeah, but it would make for a useful thing. Yeah, I do look at Apple Podcasts and I think there are so many good things that Apple Podcasts does, but there are so many things that Apple you kind of wish that they would move a little bit faster on. Video is another interesting thing where obviously the Apple Podcasts app supports video but they never promote it and it might just be that they don't consider it to be a good enough user experience, and perhaps they're right. But you know, yeah, I do find Apple Podcasts, you know, a little bit weird from that point of view.

Sam Sethi: 48:27

I'm excited for the new feature we get next year, whatever it is, because we only get one, but I'm excited. I am excited. I don't know what they're going to give us, but I am excited now um other ones that are there on the lists pod track have got their top podcast by country james. That's just been recently updated for october. That was quite a good list actually. I went through that um looking at different countries. That was quite nice, yeah they're not bad.

James Cridlan: 48:51

They um, part of the data is estimated and so, or in other words, made up, and so it's not necessarily perfect, but it's a useful you know view into some of those countries, so it's worth a peek. Magellan AI also has released a ranker as well, but this time it's a ranker for top podcast advertisers. So T-Mobile at number three, BetterHelp at number two, Amazon at number one. The biggest movers this month, interestingly Robinhood, who are an investment company, so you can buy stocks and shares with that, and AI company Anthropic. Are they the people that own OpenAI or is that different?

Sam Sethi: 49:35

No, no, anthropic are basically perplexity, oh right.

James Cridlan: 49:42

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they were the second biggest mover, ie, they spent much more in October than they did in September, which I thought you know. That's just interesting An AI company actually spending big bucks in terms of, you know, in terms of podcast advertising. Magellan AI also has a webinar. Interestingly, magellan AI also this week became the latest company to be compliant with IAB podcast measurement guidelines. They are version 2.2 compliant as of this week, which I think they're joining PodScribe, which is another. They do attribution, as does PodScribe, obviously. So I think that's interesting seeing that they are jumping in. And, as we mentioned yesterday, we learned that there are a few companies who will be removed from that IAB measurement guidelines list by the end of the year because they have chosen not to recertify. So the IAB won't tell us who they are, but we do know that some companies are going away from that list. So there's a thing.

Sam Sethi: 50:53

Yeah, we've also got Time magazine have produced a top 10. I like looking at these top 10s only because it's often different ones in the top 10 rather than the normal same old, same old. So that gives you just a perspective. Going back to what you said about lots and lots of other people in the industry talking about Spotify YouTube video Mark Asquith, on his show with Danny Brown in and around podcasting, had a really good discussion about it. Harry Duran has had a really interesting insight into what Ariel said, so he's responded. John McDermott from Calaroga Shark Media had a good post as well. If you want to go and read lots of interesting comments, there's a lot of people out there, james Bishop being another one. So I think people are having conversations now around Spotify. What we were talking about last week YouTube and the direction of the industry. I suppose it's the end of the year people thinking about what's happened and what's going forward for 25.

James Cridlan: 51:53

Yeah, I think you know. One of the things I do worry about is, you know, I mean James Bishop, for example. He posted this long screed about why I believe YouTube will dominate podcasting in 2025. And he's sitting there dribbling about how wonderful YouTube is and you know, and how many people use YouTube and it's great for monetization and it's great for community building and all of that stuff. And get your bleeper on the ready because I'm about to drop an F-bomb.

James Cridlan: 52:26

But I replied to his breathless excitement about how YouTube is the future and I said if YouTube leads podcasting, then heaven help us, because you've f***ed the entire industry. I replied to him. I did notice that no programmatic ads dependent on Google's algorithm, run by people who don't care about podcasting, massively increasing podcasting's costs with video editorial control, with big tech in America and plenty of other dumb, stupid ideas. If you want, I said, podcasting to retreat into 5% of all YouTube views and to lose the benefit of a multitasking medium like an audio podcast, then go ahead. But when podcasting dies and the entire industry falls over and closes, don't say you weren't warned. We should be fighting YouTube's apparent ascendancy, certainly not giving bad hot takes in a misguided chase for LinkedIn hits.

Sam Sethi: 53:14

Anyway, 42 likes I do love it when you sit on the fence. I so love it.

James Cridlan: 53:20

And a bunch of people. Irene Hume, a friend of the show from the Game Changers podcast, saying well said. Andrew Menzel from Piccolo podcasts 100% agree, and so on. Shrikant Joshi, saying I understand your frustration, but I think YouTube's ascendancy is practically inevitable as things currently stand. I feel you are missing a key point. The dominant platform is not chosen by the creators, it's chosen by the audience, and I think I responded correct. But the creators do have a say as well, and we can sit on our hands and do nothing and let fools give away the entire industry to YouTube and Spotify. It's really up to us, but it just worries me that we are just lying back and going okay, YouTube and okay, Spotify to a degree, but okay YouTube particularly. Come, know, come and steal all of our stuff, Come and do whatever you like to our business. We'll all be out of business if podcasting turns into YouTube.

Sam Sethi: 54:24

Well, we've got a WhatsApp group that I'm on with quite a few hosts.

James Cridlan: 54:30

It's a secret WhatsApp group I don't get to go in.

Sam Sethi: 54:34

You have been invited and never responded, may I add? Have I Okay? Check your inbox, Mr Cridland.

James Cridlan: 54:45

I bet I have them. Anyway, go on.

Sam Sethi: 54:46

Anyway, you will find one soon after that. What was interesting, rob Breenley was talking about the whole of the YouTube Spotify discussion and he said I do wonder if we've gone past the point of no return on adoption of these new RSS ideas and the big platforms have won the market. So that was one view of it. He was talking about Apple being missing in action, which we know, and not putting video forward, which we know and not putting video forward. And then Todd came in and I got slightly annoyed because there's a new tag that's being put forward called content links, and I understand why certain people want that tag. It works well for their business. I get it.

Sam Sethi: 55:30

Not all tags are going to be something that, with my True Fattens hat on, that we are to implement, and this is one is one we won't, because what it is is, instead of using the alternative enclosure, todd is saying no, we'll put content links for Spotify and YouTube within the RSS feed and therefore, when you land on any podcasting 2.0 app that supports the content links tag, guess what? You'll get a big, beautiful Spotify and YouTube logo and then the person will just click there to watch video. And I went well, you've got two chances me putting that fat chance and no chance, because I'm not driving traffic to them and I went. And why are you driving traffic to them? Why are you? I said, as far as I can see, hosts are turkeys voting for Christmas right now.

Sam Sethi: 56:12

Anyone who implements this? Because our turkeys voting for christmas right now? Anyone who implements this? Because all you're saying is we're not going to do video, we're not going to support the alternative enclosure, we're just going to point links and just drive all our traffic and we're still going to give them the rss and, as you said, we're just watching them suck the data in. And there's no response, zero response from hosts at all to this yeah, it's, um, it's, it's, it's.

James Cridlan: 56:33

It's really interesting watching. It's like a large ocean liner. We're sailing towards an iceberg and nobody seems to care. Everybody can see the iceberg and they're going. Brilliant. Look, there's an iceberg. Nothing else is going on.

James Cridlan: 56:53

We're not making any decision because we have no industry trade association. That is, a global association about podcasting. There may be some about podcast ads, but there's none about podcasting to actually turn around and say, no, this is not what we want as an industry. You know, I find it fascinating. John McDermott comes up with a lot of great stuff. He also links to us an awful lot from Kalaroga Shark Media. He says a bunch of really good things in the postings that he is making and again, he's very focused on making sure that it's not just handing everything over to YouTube and handing everything over to YouTube and Spotify. It's more than that. So, yeah, it does make me quite weary about some of the industry where we can just sit back and just wait for us to be, you know, speared by the iceberg and then start sinking and then we'll go oh, I'm really glad that they're sinking our entire industry.

Sam Sethi: 58:12

It frustrates me. I think you know we've talked about it. Maybe are they are the ones who are there. Let's say there's 10 or 15 hosts I don't know the number exactly. Are they going? Oh well, those six have gone, so we'll get a few more percent from the ones that have left. Uh, and not saying that they're going to go to spotify. Is it the last man standing strategy? Because I don't know if that's what they're going for. Yes, I Spotify. Is it the last man standing strategy? Because I don't know if that's what they're going for.

James Cridlan: 58:36

Yes, I mean it might be that I had a good chat with Ben Richardson from rsscom recently about this sort of thing, where he was worried that the age of collaborative growth in the industry had gone. And if you remember back when Acast were, you know, sending everybody emails saying you should be switching to Acast's hosting hosting, by the way, which they have very, very much ramped back in the last couple of weeks you know that was rightly, you know, seen as a bad thing because it wasn't the way that the industry had worked in the past. But now, when you have a look at Spotify, a lot of their revenue generation tools are only available if you host on the Spotify for Creators platform. They are promoting that platform as often as they possibly can to you if they're there. And, yeah, maybe that the collaborative world has finished.

James Cridlan: 59:39

Chris Peterson from Download Media wrote a blog post this week which I linked to yesterday. This strategy, he says, feels completely one-sided, talking about Spotify, focused on growing Spotify's premium product rather than growing the podcast industry, and I think that is the entire point. And the more that we see of that going on, the more concerned that I get about where this industry is going.

Sam Sethi: 1:00:03

I don't know where it will stop, but at the moment I can't see the Spotify juggernaut changing direction at any time. Moving on, then James awards and events what's been happening?

James Cridlan: 1:00:15

Yes, you can clearly see that YouTube are slightly worried about Spotify's big announcements about video because YouTube, just days after that big announcement from Spotify, youtube comes to me and says we are running an online Q&A session on December the 12th with Kai Chuck and Steve McClendon. Apparently they will be spilling the tea, whatever that's supposed to mean. They will be talking about platform updates and answering your burning questions, and Stephanie Chan will also join them, who is a strategic partner manager for YouTube podcasts. That's free. If you want to take part in that December the 12th, you'll find all of the details on the Pod News website. So funny that YouTube all of a sudden is talking to its creators as well, but I would imagine that the podcasting accounts for about 2.5% of all YouTube plays. I can't see them caring too much about it, to be frank.

James Cridlan: 1:01:12

But there we are, and if you're a journalist in Europe, then you should be at least considering taking part in the European Podcast Academy. It's in Milan, in Italy. It's in mid-March. It's a five-day educational event dedicated to advancing the art of podcasting. They plan to have a bunch of really good speakers there. Now, the event is free, but if you are taking part as a journalist and there are various things that you have to do in order to take part. They don't pay your accommodation and they don't pay your travel, but if you can get to Milan and you are chosen as one of the journalists who get to take part in this, then the European Podcast Academy might be for you Slightly frustrating that they've called it the name of something which is an entirely different organisation in the US, but still there. We are More details on that, of course, on the Pod News website. The Tech Stuff on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridlan: 1:02:18

Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the Pod News newsletter.

Sam Sethi: 1:02:20

Here's where Sam talks technology, so let's kick this off then. Olby appears to be shutting down its remaining lightning wallets, pushing people towards the Olby hub. That was the announcement. Boomi, when I posted that on to Mastodon, came back pretty quickly. So Boomi is the CEO of Albi. He said Legacy shared Albi wallets will be discontinued in January 2025 in favor of the brand new Albi hub. Users are getting migrated to the new system. No feed will break and there will be some changes for the users. It's actually getting better, more scalable and future-proof, and to that I say no, no, no, no, yes that's nonsense.

James Cridlan: 1:03:01

Yes, I'm sorry.

Sam Sethi: 1:03:03

I'm not Sorry.

James Cridlan: 1:03:05

I love Boomi dearly, but no, that is absolute 10,500 sats for you to sit and run an Albi hub in the cloud. 10,500 sats per month. What's that? That's about $10, something like that is it. I'm just making that up.

Sam Sethi: 1:03:25

It's not expensive if you're a company. It's not expensive if you are a business, but it's absolutely ridiculous if you're an individual.

James Cridlan: 1:03:32

Yeah, yeah, so that doesn't work now. Yes, you can run it on your own, you know, on your own system and all of that kind of stuff. That's absolutely fine. But, um, yeah, it's, it's. You know what a shame that, um, essentially the company that was responsible in many ways for um, the whole streaming sats, stuff in terms of podcasting, appears to have changed their mind and closing pretty well all of that down and killing all of that stuff.

Sam Sethi: 1:04:05

Well, I mean, I wouldn't go that far. I had a conversation with a couple of people about using the Albie Hub. So, obviously, I had a conversation with Alberto. I've had a conversation with Russell from Pod 2. I've had a conversation with Russell from Pod2. I've had a conversation with a few other people. Now Russell sorry, russell at Pod2 is going to, you know still use the Albi Hub and it's a business, and so is RSScom, and so it's true, fans, we will all stay using the Albi Hub, we'll still use the API.

Sam Sethi: 1:04:32

What I think is crazy is we were talking about, you know, if it was my wife, who is technical but doesn't understand a thing about sats and micropayments, and she was going to come to a decision to start an Albee Hub, even I, james, find it. As somebody who I think is fairly technical, I still don't understand why I've got multiple channels. I don't know why it's 250,000 sats and not 150,000. I just don't get it. I just follow the to-do list and I go okay, it worked. But I have no idea why, let alone somebody who's a what I would call normie, who has no understanding of the technology or even wants to use sats because they didn't even have a why statement. I posted something this week which was in the podcasting 2.0 community. We understand what and how. So what is a sat? How do we implement it with wallets? We get that. We've all been working on it for two years. I still think we don't have the why statement.

James Cridlan: 1:05:33

No, I agree. I mean the why is a technical answer, which is that micropayments don't work with, you know, in inverted commas, proper money, but that's not a why for the user, that's a why for us, you know Exactly. So, yeah, no, I would agree with that, and I also think it's highly confusing because, in one side, we are saying, don't worry, you're not investing in the stock market, you're not investing in Bitcoin, by, you know, turning some money into sats, but on the other side, their sats have gone up in value by 45% over the last month. That's how much Bitcoin has increased. So, all of a sudden, actually, you've got that complication as well, in that sometimes people will see the SATs in their wallet increase or the value of their money increase, sometimes they will see it decrease, and so they've got that to bear in mind as well.

James Cridlan: 1:06:32

I mean the whole thing, um, it's it's it's quite frustrating, isn't it? Um? And you look at things like, um, you look at some of the tools, um, that are out there that are a bit more user-friendly, um, but they don't accept, they don't use, uh, lightning, and so therefore, they can't be used with the current streaming sats plans and all of that. So it's a bit frustrating really, isn't it?

Sam Sethi: 1:07:00

Yeah, I mean, I had some of the tech bros giving me grief because we create virtual wallets as a way of overcoming this issue, with Albi deprecating wallets, and they were like, well, why can't I put lightning payments into your wallet? And why is it this and this and this? And I'm like I don't want you to use my wallet to buy coffee and pizza. It's not a universal wallet. It has a function within my application and, yes, we might allow you to bring sats in shortly, but it's not my primary driver or goal as a business. My primary goal is for you to listen to a podcast and, if you choose to make a payment, that's great. And again, I had a conversation with a friend about why don't we just put a filter over the top of the sats and just show the local currency? Because I actually think you know, I hope I've been one of the advocates trying to push the micropayment rock up the hill. I've tried everything I can. We've got one click integration with Apple Pay and Google Pay, which no one else seems to have yet, but we don't see people going oh yeah, I've topped my wallet up, that's great, I want to use Sats now. They just don't understand it. And again I go back to the why statement. That's great, I want to use Sats now. They just don't understand it.

Sam Sethi: 1:08:17

And again I go back to the why statement. That's what I've had an epiphany of this week. I don't think we have a. Why should I spend money on a podcast anyway? And then, why should I use Sats? They don't know that there's a technical challenge around, you know, not being able to do splits or having clever programmatic money uses. They don't see that. They just see this funny currency which they have no relation to. And it goes back to what Alberto was saying about parasocial relationships. We fundamentally can anchor our brains oh, three cents, okay. If this in total is then 13 cents, oh, okay, that's. You know, that's like buying a Mars bar or something or whatever. We can anchor it to things in the real world that we are prepared to pay for. But when I say it's 6,000 sats, there is no anchoring, there is no. Oh, is that a lot, is that a little? I have no idea where that sits in the lexicon of payments. Um, I think that's the problem anyway, on james, yes, moving on.

James Cridlan: 1:09:21

Uh, clean feed, clean feed has made a number of clean feed.

James Cridlan: 1:09:25

uh has made a number of improvements to the core audio quality of its remote audio tool. What does clean feed sound like? Well, it sounds like this because this is what we're using, um. The benefit of using clean feed over and above things like Riverside and Squadcast, are, apart from lower latency. So when Sam tells me to shut up, then I get that instantly in my ears, rather than a second or so later. So not only that, but also what you hear is what you record, and that's something that, um, is not the case. If you're using Squadcast or the Riverside app or whatever it might be, you hear something, but the systems are recording something else and quite often you end up with really crappy audio and you've no idea why that's the case. So the benefit of Clean Feed is I'm recording, I've got the record button on here and what I hear is what I'm recording.

Sam Sethi: 1:10:23

Hmm, and it is true, because the interview we did this week with Alberto from RSScom was done last week as well.

James Cridlan: 1:10:31

Yes, it was take number two, wasn't it?

Sam Sethi: 1:10:33

Yes, and post-recording. All I could hear was a clicking sound from Alberto's side. Now Alberto and I were like he's got a Shure microphone. It all sounded great while we were talking, there was no issue. All sounded great while we were talking, there was no issue. I've had the same thing with Ellie Rubenstein when she did an interview and it was pretty inaudible when we actually had it. We had to put it out. It's yeah, it's one of those things that Clean Feed does really well.

James Cridlan: 1:11:00

Yeah, so it's a very excellent thing. I should say that Clean Feed give us Clean Feed Pro as a little gift, because they're lovely people, but frankly, the free version is just as good. Cleanfeednet. Slash podcasts is, I think, the one, or maybe slash podcasting one of the two, but worthwhile taking a peek at. Interestingly. I mean, they are so geeky at that company I know the two marks well but they are so geeky at that company that they say that they have made a number of improvements to the core audio quality. They haven't gone into what those improvements are because it's just too complicated to understand, but you know why not, but they are super clever. What else is going on? Osha has launched two new tools as part of their podcast search optimisation stuff, which is worth a peek.

James Cridlan: 1:11:49

Digital Music News says that Spotify playlists and podcasts are being abused by spammers to link to pirate websites.

James Cridlan: 1:11:56

Well, that's something that we could have told them three years ago and in fact we did, because back in 2022, well, that's two years ago Alberto Botella, friend of the show, friend of this show particularly he wrote an article about how rsscom deals with spam podcasts, because there are an awful lot of them and an awful lot of spam podcasts on the Spotify for Creators platform as well, but clearly that's now hurting Spotify a fair amount.

James Cridlan: 1:12:29

And I read a bunch of tedious stuff about the WebVTT format and basically saying, if you're only going to use one podcast transcription format, then use VTT, because it's better than and apart from anything else. Your web browser understands it and Apple Podcasts understands it Two ticks that you can't get with any other transcript format. So if you're only going to support that, if you're only going to support one, then support that, but you should just, for podcasting, make sure that you only use 65 characters a line, no more than that, because otherwise you're making life harder for podcast apps. But anyway, wrote a lot about that on Wednesday, which was a special extra version of the tech stuff in the Pod News newsletter. Had nothing to do with the fact that I forgot the sponsor for the tech stuff on Monday. Nothing to do with that. I just I just fancied on doing another one.

Sam Sethi: 1:13:33

But you also. I mean, I do love these when you get into this. This is when you get into your geekiness. And I do love it because you also wrote these tricks to get live captions for every podcast you listen to. And again, I highly recommend looking that up because it's really good stuff.

James Cridlan: 1:13:47

Yeah, live captions exist on every single system with the possible exception of the iPhone, but certainly on Macs. You can get them on Windows machines, on Android, and they're really useful because they do also work on things like Clean Feed and Squadcast and those sorts of tools as well, so worthwhile. Turning on what else is going on? The podcast location tag, the version two of it, the enhanced version, which can now tell you where the creator is as well as what your podcast is about.

James Cridlan: 1:14:23

Finally, finally yay, so, um, that uh is on the way. Uh, I have written a javascript tag generator which is super easy you just type in where you are, you press the button and it fills out all of the tedious stuff for you. Um, there's a full specification uh conversation going on at the moment. Hopefully that will be ratified soon, or agreed, or whatever the phrase is, and we can move forward with that. But if you are a podcast host and I know that we have many who listen to us then you can close that Google Maps API down. You can use the API from the OpenStreetMap and use the free JavaScript tag generator that we have, and it couldn't be any easier. So, yeah, and if you are good at JavaScript and you can add a few bells and whistles to that, then go ahead. It's on GitHub and you're more than welcome for that, if anyone wants to see the podcast location tag working.

Sam Sethi: 1:15:24

Go into TrueFinds and look up PodNewsDaily and just go and look at the episodes, because you traveled around the world so you were putting locations for Dubai and Heathrow and Stockholm and LA and that all worked and when you click on those links it takes you to the map and you can see where James was. It's a bit like where's Wally's James, but yes, if you want and you are building an app and you want to see how it looks and works as well from the front end, check out Pod News Daily on True Fans and you'll see it all working. Boostergram Corner on the Pod News Weekly Review.

James Cridlan: 1:16:03

Yes, it's our favourite time of the week. It's Boostergram Corner and, just as a reminder, we share all of the week. It's Boostergram Corner and, just as a reminder, we share all of the money that you send us very kindly for your support of this show between Sam and I. Nothing goes to the rest of the Pod News team, because why should they get any of this money? And you can press the fan mail button in the show notes for this very podcast and send us a text message. You can press the boost button in your favourite podcast app and some people have done that.

James Cridlan: 1:16:38

Here's one from Cy a thousand sats from Fountain. Thank you, it was interesting to hear all your thoughts about the additional exodus See what he's done there to social networks like Blue Sky and Threads. But it got me thinking if there's a way of correlating or bridging all of those accounts and habits like truefanssocial activity pub between them all, especially with features like Blue Sky's AT protocol domain verification. Wow, there is, there's a thing. Yeah, I have actually sat and written a piece of code which I haven't yet put live, but the idea is that it will take new posts that I put onto the Fediverse and it will automatically pull those out onto BlueSky, because there's an open API for the BlueSky platform. So yeah, so there is a way of doing that and there's something called Bridgie, I think, which allows you to do that.

Sam Sethi: 1:17:32

Yeah, that's one of them. But also from a user perspective, there is an app called Croissant which allows you to post from multiple, from one Croissant app to multiple endpoints. So if you wanted to do Mastodon, blue Sky and Threads all from the same one app post, then it will do that. So it's built in all of the bridges to those back ends, all those social media apps. So, yeah, that's one app. I mean I'm sure there's others coming. I mean my point is and I don't trust Threads as far as I could throw them but basically, if they do proper two-way federation, that will actually be the road forward so that you can use any one app and then you can follow people on any other social media platform. That's the goal, that's the idea. But of course, threads do it one way which is like Spotify suck data in but give nothing out. Anyway, one way which is like Spotify suck data in but give nothing out.

James Cridlan: 1:18:30

Anyway, moving on, what else have we had? We've had 20,000 sats from Martin, from Podfriend. Hey, martin, thank you so much for that. Yeah, where have you been? Yeah, where have you been? Thanks for what's always great news, james, he says, boosting the pod news daily. That's very kind of you, martin, thank you. Wonderful to hear from you. And what's this one from Silas on Linux? 10,000 sats from Fountain. What does he say, sam?

Sam Sethi: 1:18:56

You should be more clear when talking, guys. You should call TrueFounds the one open RSS player that supports every open RSS podcast namespace tag built on open html and open internet. Thank you, uncle. Um no, thank you, silas. It is it. It is a hard, hard sell. We, we, we shout and shout, but I think I'm shouting into the void some days.

James Cridlan: 1:19:20

I think he's taking the piss about me saying open rss. Um, I think. I think this is what's going on. Sil Silas seems to comment on every message that I put on the Fediverse with some sarcastic comment, and I have a feeling this is one of those.

Sam Sethi: 1:19:38

Oh, okay, so he's taking the Michael, isn't he I?

James Cridlan: 1:19:40

think he's taking the Michael rather than saying that you're a brilliant person, Sam, and that you're doing an excellent job. But I think you're a brilliant person and you're doing an excellent job. So there you go. Thank you very much.

Sam Sethi: 1:19:50

Well, if, silas, you want to do it yourself, mate, crack on, get an app, do it yourself, because he was one of the bros who was moaning at me about not having lightning into the wallet and I'm like you know what We'll get there, the world.

James Cridlan: 1:20:04

And also thank you to the magnificent 11. I met one of them this week, rachel Corbett. It was very good to meet Rachel again. I was down in Sydney and she was there at something I'm just about to talk about in just a minute, but it was great to see Rachel there. Also, dave Jackson, mike at the Rogue Media Network, matt Medeiros, marshall Brown, cameron Moll, si Jobling, david Marzell, jim James, rocky Thomas and Neil Velio it's very kind of you. Weeklypodnewsnet, if you would like to support us with your, or indeed your company's, credit card, go there. It can be as low as $3 a month, but most people pay more, so why don't you? What's happened for you this week, sam?

Sam Sethi: 1:20:49

Well, I am going to try and convince you that the Ray-Ban Meta sunglasses that I have, which I love. They've now enabled AI in the UK and Australia on those glasses. No longer do I need to use a VPN and pretend I'm in America. I can now go back to actually being in the UK. They've updated it with a few other bits and pieces. It's getting much, much smarter. You know your AirPods. You have the option to have transparency mode, where if someone talks, the volume drops down. They've added that. They've added much more to do with languages. It's now available in Europe. They're getting smarter. These glasses, and you know, the hardware is the hardware. It's the software that's updating, and I think you know, james, I think it's time you got a pair.

James Cridlan: 1:21:31

Yeah, no, none of that, Although I have actually just bought a new pair of glasses. I am that old now, sam, sadly, that I need to wear multifocals, varifocals, whatever they're called. Yes, I know, but I'm only wearing them in one eye because I'm weird like that. So I'm looking forward to getting hold of those in the next couple of weeks.

Sam Sethi: 1:21:55

I was going to say. My wife thinks I'm odd because I used to have glasses and now have perfect eyesight again as I've got older.

James Cridlan: 1:22:01

And now you wear glasses.

Sam Sethi: 1:22:02

And now I wear glasses. I went in to see if I needed a pair of glasses to go into those Ray-Bans. I was thinking, okay, if I need glasses I might as well get them for those. And it turns out I don't need glasses at all, but they're good fun wearing them still.

James Cridlan: 1:22:15

Well there you go.

Sam Sethi: 1:22:16

The other thing I talked about earlier. I went to the WonderCraft announcement. They had a wonderful panel there. There's a guy called Daniel Hume there, dr Daniel Hume, who's the head of AI for WPP. He was a really interesting guy, very, very knowledgeable, so I had a chat with him. That was very good. Saw Oscar and Dimitri and they're going to be on the show, hopefully pre-Christmas to talk about a few more announcements they've got coming up. And then just a bit of a of tidbit, because you know my village has everyone in it. I just thought you'd love this for your radio. Yeah, here we go. Newsletter. Uh, radio was invented in my village, james, and it's official. There you go. Uh, marconi lived on the road next door to me, but one, and uh, he basically did the first transmission from his home in cookham. So radio as well was invented in my village. I thought you'd love that In Berkshire.

James Cridlan: 1:23:11

Yes, yes, just at the end of the road from Cookham Dean Cricket Club, 142 White Ladies Lane, and that is where Guillermo Marconi lived and apparently he did experimental transmissions in 1897. Let's see if I can get an interview with him as well, oh no. I can't, yeah might as well, see if he's well. I mean, you know, you might as well just knock on the door of 142 and see who's there and see if any of his equipment's still there. They've got a blue plaque. Yeah, there is a blue plaque there.

Sam Sethi: 1:23:44

yes, Unveiled on the 3rd of september 1996. I'll have you know. Yeah, I've got a blue plaque on my door, by the way, do you only indian in the village, aren't you lucky? Yeah, so what's happened for you, mate? What's happened?

James Cridlan: 1:24:01

uh, I was down in sydney on monday for an apple podcasts event. Um, in Sydney, in true Apple Podcasts style. I cannot tell you anything that happened there because they said they said this is just for us, but it was super good. Actually, it was a really nice experience of just seeing a bunch of people who are involved in the Australian podcast industry, seeing a bunch of people who are involved in the Australian podcast industry.

James Cridlan: 1:24:28

My favourite bit was there was one guy from a company called Audiocraft, which I've been writing about for a while, used to run a podcast conference in this country, but no longer. And, yeah, and he looked at my shirt because, of course, I was wearing the Pod News shirt, and he looked at my shirt because, of course, I was wearing the Pod News shirt. And he looked at my shirt and he said, wow, so is that actually a whole news service, but just about podcasting? And I said, yes, it is. And the guy standing next to him said, what, you're not subscribed to Pod News, you should fix that immediately. It was just hilarious. So, yeah, so that was really nice. So Rachel Corbett was there, of course, and plenty of other people. It was just a super nice chilled out couple of hours drinking Apple's coffee and eating Apple's canapes, and yeah, so that was a good thing, so you can't tell us anything that went on there, but you just went to Apple Nice.

James Cridlan: 1:25:26

Yeah, I just went to Apple. I mean, to be be fair, they didn't say anything either. Um, they did. They did have a few nice numbers, um, which I'm trying to get, um, uh, acceptance for me to actually to actually report on um, but, um, but no, it was just, it was just an interesting thing. Quite a lot of it was just. You know, look, um, here's how transcripts work. If you haven't seen transcripts, this is what they look like, this is what we're doing. You know, blah, blah, blah. So there was nothing new there at all, but it was just a nice experience just to say hi to a bunch of people.

Sam Sethi: 1:26:01

Dare, I say embargo.

James Cridlan: 1:26:05

Is this. You sent me a very pained message on Wednesday saying James, james, the Amazon story. It seems to have disappeared from your website and I don't understand why that is, but I got the email, okay.

Alberto Betella: 1:26:21

Yeah.

James Cridlan: 1:26:22

Yeah, yeah. So what happens is, if I was so excited about Amazon's news that I read the embargo I mean any news, but they are lovely people at Amazon's PR department. So I read the embargo time and it said 6 am Pacific time, 9 am Eastern time. And I read that as 6 am Eastern time, which it was not. And so I thought, brilliant, brilliant, I can get that. I can get that as my main story. Blah, blah, blah. I sent it bang.

James Cridlan: 1:26:51

And then, all of a sudden, my phone went absolutely crazy as Amazon said what are you doing? What are you doing? We have an embargo and you've just driven through it three hours early. First time, sam, in seven years that I've screwed up an embargo. And of course, I had to do it to one of the biggest companies in the world, didn't I? And I was, and they said take it off the website now. And I said, well, okay, I've already taken it off the website, but the problem is I've sent it to 32,000 people's emails and you could see the colour draining from their face at the other end of the telephone line. So they've all been very, very understanding. And, yes, I felt dreadful, but yes, that was definitely a bad thing.

James Cridlan: 1:27:35

And the final thing, just on a very geeky technical note, I've been using a company called Uptime Robot for a long time, which sends you an email when your website falls over, which, if you remember, I had to deal with an awful lot a few months ago. Touch wood, everything is all good again now, but anyway, that was a super useful service. Anyway they have, because, of course, all good things must come to an end. They have turned around and said, ah yes, uptime Robot is now going to be free only for personal use, not for company use. So all of a sudden I had to cancel that and then I thought well, who else should I use? Then I had to look at my Umbral, and my Umbral has on it a piece of software called Uptime Cuma, which you just install on your Umbral and it sits there and does the automatic checks, and so that's what I've got working now and it's fine and I'm in control of it and everything else, and I've got it sending emails and sending Slack updates and all kinds of stuff. So very cool. So, yeah, so if you are stuck in the same boat and you happen to have an umbral all two of you then take a look at Uptime Kuma, which you can also find and download and install on your own box wherever it happens to be, and that's a super useful thing if you have servers out there that you want to keep an eye on.

James Cridlan: 1:28:57

And that's it for this week. All of our podcast stories this week were taken from the Pod News newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter at podnewsnet. There are longer interviews in the Pod News Extra podcast. I really want to point you in that direction, because you've only heard a third of both of the interviews today. You'll hear all of them in the Pod News Extra podcast, but otherwise this podcast ends up being four and a half million years long and nobody wants that.

Sam Sethi: 1:29:22

Pardon, joe Rogan.

James Cridlan: 1:29:23

Pardon Joe Rogan, you'll find the Pod News Extra podcast wherever you find this podcast you can support this show by streaming sats.

Sam Sethi: 1:29:30

You can give us feedback using boss sprout fan mail in the link in our show notes and you can send us a booster gram or become a power supporter, like the magnificent 11 at weeklypodnewsnet our music is from studio dragonfly.

James Cridlan: 1:29:45

Our voiceover is Sheila D. We use clean feed for our audio, hindenburg for our editing. I should say that because I've just got another free year from them and we're hosted and sponsored by Buzzsprout. Start podcasting, keep podcasting. Get updated every day. Subscribe to our newsletter at podnewsnet.

Alberto Betella: 1:30:04

Tell your friends and grow the show and support us, and support us. The Pod News. Weekly Review will return next week. Keep listening.