Why Our Last Episode Got 42.5% More Downloads

In this episode, the hosts experiment with growing their audience, try to reach the pinnacle of success on IMDB, discuss the benefits of spatial audio for podcasts, and let an AI bot write Buzzsprout's catchy new theme song.

FOLLOW-UP: PODCAST RECORDED IN FIGHTER JET
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_J040T9HiU

MAKE IT IMDB OFFICIAL
Get credit as a "podcaster" on your own IMDB page. These professions can be selected by IMDbPro customers via the primary profession control page, and searched for in the IMDbPro Discover feature.

THE LAST YARD
Read the blog that made history:
https://podnews.net/article/the-last-yard-adam-curry

SAMSUNG FREE DOWNLOADS BUG
They're working on it.

FALSE ENDORSEMENTS
https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/28/23482636/google-iheartmedia-pixel-4-ads-ftc-radio-hosts

SPATIAL AUDIO
The New York Times R&D Guide
NPR Training: Audio

POST SHOW: CHATGPT
 ChatGPT

PODCAST COMMENTS
You can comment on each of these episode topics on this Twitter discussion.

Transcript

Alban: 0:00

Jordan, this is unhinged. This is, this is nuts.

Jordan: 0:06

But it's so good Well, we have some follow up from our last episode in which we talked about the first podcast ever recorded in a fighter jet.

Alban: 0:22

Yeah, Dusty, who is in the Blue Angel actually reached out and thanked us for discussing the Blue Angels said he had a ton of fun producing the episodes, and that the jet ride was the coolest thing he ever got to do in his career. So yeah, I always love finding out people listen to this podcast, I guess. The numbers just don't feel real. I mean, I talk about this all the time. But like, you could see the numbers get up there. And you're like, it doesn't feel like something until people reach out. And now, especially when we're talking about Dusties, podcasts lead balloon, and then all of a sudden, he's reached out saying, Hey, thanks for discussing. And I'm like, oh, so there's people listening. And some of the people listening are people that we're paying attention to and talking about. So thanks for reaching out to us yet, we appreciate it.

Jordan: 1:06

He and I exchanged a couple messages. And he let me know that they had hard wired into the fighter jets onboard intercom system, which is why the audio is so good when they're speaking. And he also had two separate recording devices as well. And they ended up doing like I think it was like 12 separate tracks to complete the episodes. So yeah, it was pretty audio intensive.

Kevin: 1:29

Yeah. So I said on the last episode that I wanted to listen to the audio version before I watched the YouTube version. And I did do that I did listen to the audio version. First, I have not since gone back and watched the video version almost because I feel like I don't have to, like the audio version was so great. He did a really good job describing what he was feeling. And I did see a little bit of the clip, because you guys linked to the video. And I did click on it. And I saw a little bit the video looks amazing as well. But hearing the audio version, how he's describing what's going on and what his body feels like and what he's seeing. And all this stuff is amazing. Like at one point he was talking about, you know, he was he was afraid he had cameras flying around, and they were doing zero gravity. And then, you know, massive G polls and also other stuff, he was afraid his equipment was going to break the jet. And I don't know, it just really felt like you were gonna be there. I was actually driving I was on a road trip, I was driving down the interstate while I was listening to this. And I'm like, I feel like I'm driving 150 miles an hour down. It was such a good podcast.

Alban: 2:24

It's the sign of a really good recording, when those kinds of questions don't pop into my mind to later like how did they actually film this, I'm now imagining like the fear, I would feel suction cupping like a GoPro to the fighter jet up until like the cut top of the cockpit. And then it's like you're doing these big spins going, if this thing pops off, it's gonna slam it Yeah, and never even considered it. So they did a great job. I mean, it makes sense that the Air Force has figured out how to do some noise reduction and keep it sound pretty good inside the cockpit. But it was really impressive and dusty did a great job. And we're thrilled that he reached out.

Kevin: 3:05

And if you haven't listened to it, I guess we'll link to it again. But check it out. It was really great.

Jordan: 3:09

Alright, so we've been doing an experiment to try to grow Buzzcast we're gonna be trying different things throughout the next probably, I don't know, year or so maybe even longer if it keeps going well. So how do we want to do this? Like this might be like a segment? Actually, now that I think about it. We might have this recurring segment, maybe like once a month or once every couple months, we check in and talk about how well Buzzcast is growing and what we've done that has worked for us. And you know what maybe fails.

Alban: 3:40

I think it should be an experiment. We talk about things we're trying and we could maybe each time report on hey, here's what last week's episode got in its first seven days. Now we have one stat we give that we talked about something we tried.

Jordan: 3:53

Yeah. So our last episode had a pretty big spike in downloads. And I noticed that and I was like, Whoa, what happened? It was on a Tuesday, which is not the day that our episodes drop. So I was a little confused until Alban, you told me what you had done to make our downloads increase.

Alban: 4:10

Tuesday is the day that we send our weekly email, there's an email that goes out to everybody on Buzzsprout people who have ever signed up for Buzzsprout who still want to get the email and even though we regularly like cut the list from anybody who doesn't, you know, regularly open it, it's still really, really big. And so when we send an email, like we do typically get a spike. And so Tuesdays you do see a bit of a bump each time we release an episode, but overall the episodes on Buzzsprout I'm looking at like the first seven days for a new episode. So this would include people who are really subscribed to the podcast, a and that first Tuesday where we promote the episode that's all this really gonna be included. Typically we get somewhere between 1200 maybe on the low end looks like some get down about 900. 900 plays is to 1200 a good episode, we might be up near 1400. This week, we had 2263 downloads. So almost double as much, we have over 1000 additional clicks. And you know, a bunch of our stats start kind of moving in the charts. I know you and Kevin both started seeing some of those alerts. And what we did is we made the whole episode, or excuse me, the whole newsletter about that episode, I worked with Megan, who's on the support team, and is now helping a lot with the newsletter, we spent a few hours just going through the episode talking about what's really important. And for somebody on Buzzsprout, who does not listen to this show yet is probably not, you know, super deep into the podcasting industry, they're more interested in just getting the word out about their particular show what was really valuable to them. And so it took a while to craft it, I think we put a few hours into writing a few paragraphs. But in the end, we're really, really proud of what we came up with and the leads for that podcast. And it was our biggest episode, I think so far, it's already the biggest episode of the year. And we get a significant amount of plays well, after a week, so it was a huge success. And I think it'll probably change the way we start promoting Buzzcast going forward. And if you're somebody who clicked on that email, and subscribed and are listening to this one, welcome to Buzzcast. We appreciate you being here.

Jordan: 6:27

Yeah, it was a noticeable difference. Because normally, what we do is we'll just sort of reword the description of the episode. And you guys took it like a step further and put more value into it.

Alban: 6:39

In the YouTube world, we constantly hear podcasters just say, I put more work into the title and the thumbnail of the video than the actual video. And no matter how many times I've heard it, I'm like, that doesn't make sense. That sounds crazy. But what they're realizing is, you know, getting people to click is super, super important. And often what we've done is we create content, we say, What's the best content? And then at the end, we go, oh, yeah, we got to get it out there. And what's the title for this episode, just get it up, you know, we're not going to create custom show art. So we got the title, we've got a description, which is telling you what it's about, but not really telling you the why of why you should click it. And then we promote it that way. And I think this experiment showed us there's some real value to sitting down and going through the process, taking a few hours of saying what is compelling about what we've created in this episode. And then using that to sell the podcast for years Buzzcast. We weren't trying to grow it, it wasn't one of our key goals. But now I think the more we're talking to people about growing, we need to be running these experiments ourselves, and then reporting back. So this one one was our first experiment, and it was highly successful.

Kevin: 7:51

One of the things that we track with Buzzsprout, because it is a software as a service product, so people pay monthly for it. One of the statistics that's very important to our business is churn. So how many people are paying you this month? How many people are paying you next month, and you take out any new people who signed up? So let's say you have 100 customers in January, don't worry about any new customers that come take them out of the equation, but in February, you have 98? Well, in that case, your churn rate would be 2%. So you lost 2% of your customers. And I wonder if there's is a similar metric that you could track for podcasts listening, or if you can try to figure it out just from looking at your stats. So last week, we had maybe 1000, maybe 500, maybe 100 people who listened to Buzzcast, for the first time ever. How many of them are going to come back and listen to this episode? And that would that would give you a good indication of the quality of your show? Or the people that you're targeting with your marketing? Are they the right people? So are they listening? Are they subscribing? Are they coming back? I'm interested in figuring out how we can maybe get a pulse on some of those numbers.

Jordan: 8:51

It would be a lot easier wouldn't it, if we had the ability to see our subscribers or followers across all the platforms. I know that that's not possible. But I think that that would be a really good metric to to see how many subscribers we had gotten.

Alban: 9:05

I love the idea of thinking about podcasts has with churn like what is the amount that you're adding? How long do they stick around? And do you ever do anything that's so far off brand that you actually kind of alienate the people have been listening for a long time. And the best way I can do this is by looking at Apple podcasts connect. So I just logged into our account and under their new followers, which is the people who are clicking that plus button and are following the podcast, you can actually see day by day, how many you gained and how many lost. So we can see November 21st to 27th. We gained three but we lost eight

Jordan: 9:43

Ouch.

Alban: 9:44

So there was a big there was a big downer. But then when we promoted the podcast, we gained 36 and we lost sit Whoa. So we have a net of plus 30. So I'm looking at this 36 gained in that period and then going over to our Buzzsprout stats at Apple podcast conveniently, is 36% of our place. So assuming that the apple podcast listeners are, you know, similar to everybody else, which they are, that means we probably gained about 100 listeners from that email, you know, people who actually follow the podcast.

Kevin: 10:19

Yeah, followers, I think is what you call them maybe?

Alban: 10:21

Yeah, followers, and we lost maybe, I don't know, we probably lost 30 across all of the apps. So there's a significant amount of churn. I'm a little surprised. It'd be fun to a track this number over time to see what percent people stick around and what percent of people stay engaged?

Kevin: 10:38

Yeah. How often do you guys unfollow podcast?

Alban: 10:40

Oh, all the time.

Kevin: 10:41

Do you?

Jordan: 10:41

Oh, really? I almost never do. I've got podcasts sitting in my library that, you know, they haven't produced a new episode in like two years. But I don't know. I'm just subscribed to them in case they come back, I guess.

Alban: 10:54

So I definitely have those the like, you're kind of holding out hope that this dormant podcast will come back. And you would love for them to be there. So I have those. But I don't like this feeling of subscribing to so many things, and not listening to them. And I don't like that feeling of like building up all this, like should I should listen to all this. And so regularly, I just like delete everything. And then I just re subscribe to the ones that I want to listen to. So kind of clean house.

Jordan: 11:22

Now that I think about it. There are some podcasts I do unfollow. And they're usually network podcasts that maybe the show is on a hiatus or it got cancelled, because Spotify or whatever. But they still have that feed open. But what they're doing is they're just constantly promoting other shows doing feed drops. So I get excited because I'm like, Oh, this podcast got a new episode. And then it's just a feed drop for another show that I'm not interested in. And that's all they ever post is feed drops. So I have unfollowed shows like that.

Kevin: 11:53

I'm kind of in the middle, I probably add new shows into my podcast listening app. Maybe every week or two. I'll add a new show here or there. It's more rare that I go through and clean out. So over the past couple months, my new way of listening to podcast episodes is, Castamatic has, it's like kind of the default listing on your episodes, where it just shows the newest episodes on top, like doesn't matter which podcast it's from just newest episodes on top, and it goes down from there. And I found out there's a way in overcast to do that as well. And so regardless of which app I'm in, I can use shows that way. And so now it doesn't bother me as much to have shows that I'm not listening to as often as I used to like there are some shows that I wouldn't be sure to listen to every week now I don't. But I still see when the episode comes in. And I kind of you know, kind of pick and choose as I'm going down like what do I feel like listening to today? So do I feel like comedy? Do I want to hear tech news? Do I want to hear podcasts about podcasting? Do I want to hear, you know, True Crime storytelling stuff. And that's been great. But what I find is that I'm now following a lot more podcasts. And I'm not listening to every episode from every podcast I follow. I'm really hopping around a lot. And I don't know how normal that is. The only thing I can compare it to was like back in the day when I used to watch a lot of television, I used to always want to see every episode of my favorite TV shows, I wouldn't just like grab an episode here and then grab an episode from another show over there. I would want to watch them all. But I only had four or five shows that I was really into. And it seems like for podcasting, at least for me, it's changing. Now there's so many good podcasts, very few of them are serialized. And so you can just jump in and just listen to a great episode of whatever. They all stand on their own. But I think the drawback is I feel like a little bit less connected to certain podcasts that I love. I felt bad. I was on Twitter the other day and somebody one of the podcasters was tweeting something and somebody wrote back like, Don't you listen to the episodes. I listen to most of them, but not all of them.

Alban: 13:41

I remember in law school, I had a roommate who the way he watched movies was he would just fast forward any part that was boring. And it was like sacrilege to me. I couldn't handle it. He just be it's not movies that even I was interested in. He'd be watching like some kung fu movie. And he'd be like boring, boring, boring. Here we go. Here's the fight scene. And I'm like, This is how you're watching this movie. I'm like you've really didn't you can't ever watch it. He's like, Alban, there's millions of movies. I'm never gonna run out. And if there's something boring, I'm skipping ahead.

Kevin: 14:14

Yeah, I totally do that. Did you guys watch Handmaid's Tale? No, oh, I skipped it so much of that.

Alban: 14:21

Were you skipping it because it was boring or because it was like traumatic content.

Kevin: 14:25

Well, it's like the overall storyline is really interesting. But there's it's just every episode is like you could skip 30 minutes of it and still be tracking along just fine.

Alban: 14:34

I listened to a really good episode of the Decoder today. And they were talking about Disney and Disney Plus and Disney getting a new CEO or their old CEO back again. Yeah, one of the things that they talked about was a lot of streaming services intentionally stretch out shows. And so something that has like they're like this is the content would have been like six episodes on HBO. We're stretching it out to 12. And so we Keep people like watching and engaged even longer and how that's kind of a more some that happens on streaming. So maybe that's a maybe that's a little bit of what you're experiencing. Kevin, you were just identifying like, Okay, this could have been edited.

Kevin: 15:13

Yeah, it's kind of like a new superpower. When you used to watch stuff on network TV all the time, you didn't have that superpower. I mean, I guess as DVR started to come on the scene, you started to get it a little bit. But TV is also more social, there's a good chance that when you're watching a TV show, you're watching it with somebody else. So you don't get to just like give in to your desires. Like this is boring me, I'm gonna go fast. Well, there's somebody sitting next to you, and they might not be bored. But when you're listening to a podcast, or if you're just sitting on your phone, watching a streaming show or something like that, you get to do exactly what you want. This part's boring me. I'm going fast through it. This part was really cool. I'm gonna go watch it again. So yeah, listening habits, and viewing habits. And all that stuff is certainly different now with the way that we're consuming stuff.

Jordan: 15:53

Yeah, we get to be a lot more choosy about the things, and I guess that's kind of a lesson in, you know, what we were talking about how the title and the description are so important now, because with things being just kind of like episodic, you know, people can just like go through and be like, Meh, boring, boring, boring. Oh, that one's interesting. I guess I'll listen to that. And so it is really important to make sure that you catch listeners attention right away.

Kevin: 16:17

Yeah, and I think a lot of podcasters don't like the idea of doing chapter markers. Because of this, the idea that, hey, if I'm creating a show for somebody, then I want them to listen to it exactly how I intended it. You know, start at the beginning, listen to the end, some podcasters don't even like the 1.25 or 1.5x, or they just want you to listen at 1x. This is my art form. You need to consume it the way I intended it to be consumed.

Alban: 16:40

Yeah, this is the criteria and collection of for podcasts. That is a hundred percent how I listen, by the way, Kevin, I listened almost every episode, 1x, straight through. And for somebody who works in podcasting, I listened to a very few number of shows. But I think I'm much more of a completionist than you are. I think that's always the way I approach media. But then it means you don't experiment as much. Or if you want to, there's a pretty big investment.

Kevin: 17:07

Well, I do this in books, too. So it's not just just not audio visual stuff. It's also books.

Jordan: 17:11

Are you one of those people that like skips pages like skips chapters?

Kevin: 17:15

100% 100%. Yeah. I'm like reading a chapter. And then I'll like skip to the end of the chapter. I'm like, where's this going? I figured that's where it's going. Alright, moving on.

Jordan: 17:26

Oh, my gosh. I tried doing that with my daughter for that time. One time, I was just tired. I didn't want to read a book. And I did that thing where you just like kind of secretly grab like three pages and turn it. She was four. And she still was like, Oh, Mom, you miss some pages. And she goes back. Like, oh, thank you. Oh, good. Good job. Oh, wow. Yeah, you're right. I'm so silly. IMDB has added music videos and podcasts to the IMDB website. And so now they have the ability to label people as podcasters or musical artists. It's not just you know, writers, movie stars, things like that. Now podcasters can have an IMDB page, which is very cool. I mean, that was just kind of like the standard. I you know, I knew a lot of people that did commercials or TV shows and things like that. And it was always like so cool when they had their IMDB page. Now I can finally get mine.

Alban: 18:28

No, no, in fact, my wife has an IMDB I just pulled it up to make sure it was still there. She was, I think an extra Oh, a production intern and an extra in a 2008 film called a gothic tale. I've never watched this movie and I'm pretty sure she's just walking in the background. But yeah, she has the IMDB so now if podcasters are allowed that No, I can do it as well.

Jordan: 18:52

I did look and see and for whatever reason Buzzcast isn't on IMDb. I don't know how to add it. So I got to figure that out.

Kevin: 19:00

I think when the process of getting your podcast listed on IMDb came out I think a couple of us looked at it and it was like it was really intensive. The forms were ridiculous and so I just don't think we thought it was worth it.

Jordan: 19:11

That's so strange because I looked in my personal podcast is on there but I didn't submit it. I actually didn't even know it was on there.

Kevin: 19:18

Yeah, see, you a fan base that does work for you.

Jordan: 19:21

They need to add a good photo of me though. There's just like a faceless avatar on my thing. It says Star: Jordan Blair, which is so cool, but there's no photo. I need somebody to go find a flattering photo of me on the internet and plug it in there.

Kevin: 19:36

That's probably not something you want to ask people to do.

Alban: 19:42

It's interesting that they just launched this after Podchaser was acquired. I mean, Podchaser pretty much was I don't know if they ever said this like publicly but they were being the IMDB for podcasts you know the internet podcast database I P dB. And they were doing a really good job of it. And it was interesting for so long I figured like the most logical company to try to acquire them would have been Amazon and IMDb would roll pod chaser in. And it was interesting to see them end up with a cast instead. So maybe that's why IMDb is kind of starting to try to launch this. Now they realize they missed out on pod chaser, and now they need to kind of build up their competing service.

Jordan: 20:23

Yeah, actually thought of that. That was the first thing that came to my mind was oh, no, was this gonna mean for pod chaser. But I do think pod chaser has a lot more features than IMDb anyway. So it's a little bit more interactive and community based than IMDb is, at least I know of, I guess I don't spend a lot of time on IMDb.

Alban: 20:39

IMDB feels very similar to another Amazon property, good reads like there's so much good information on there. But like when Amazon acquired them, they must have just fired all the designers and all the UX people out there just like you're no longer needed. This is a data product. And like it hasn't changed, it looks exactly the same. And I don't understand, there's got to be some good write up or a deep dive into why this products have not evolved. But like patches, or just looks so much better is so much more user friendly. And so it may actually be a good thing for them that they get to go and actually make this data usable. Rather than just being I don't know something. It looks like it came from 2008 and hasn't really changed since then.

Jordan: 21:23

I mean, IMDb, they've made a couple updates, just in recent years. Actually, I think this year, it looks a little bit more updated. There's just like cleaner lines or using a bit more of that yellow color. I don't know, I just noticed that they've been putting in more like widget kind of looking things as opposed to just like boxes everywhere, if that makes sense.

Alban: 21:42

Okay, cool. So maybe they did update, maybe they didn't update for a long time. And then I just missed out on it. I'm pulling it up now. And you're right, it looks better. It's not good, but it's definitely a lot better. So I would like to

Jordan: 21:55

So I guess if you want to update your podcast or Or maybe he wrote this blog post after he'd already started retract my. profile, again, IMDb Pro account, and add it yourself. That's the only way to do it, I guess. Don't know if you guys remember this, but Eric Nuzum wrote this piece about "the poorly documented history of podcasting". And in it, he talked about what he had gathered from other people about how podcasting got started. So basically, he said that in October 2000 Dave Winer went to meet Adam curry in a New York City hotel room. And before that meeting, Adam Curry had written a blog post about his idea for how podcasting should work. So they're saying that, while Dave Winer didn't understand what Adam was talking about, he actually worked on the code to develop an RSS feed, and the feed launched on January 20 2001. So what's interesting about this is when Adam Curry's blog posts just recently resurfaced, it turns out that the timestamp on when this was written was January 9 2001, at

2: 23:03

20am. So what's interesting about this is that it did not take a year like we originally thought for him to write this RSS feed code. I mean, that's like, what, like a week, two weeks baby for him to do that. Do you think that's accurate? Oh, that would make sense. I mean, it's kind of interesting that Eric's Poorly Documented History of Podcasting. Is this accurate? Because I cannot remember dates and times from 20 years ago. I don't know about you guys. Like, I could not tell working with Dave? you what I was doing in January of 2001. You know, I could not tell you at all. So this was fairly accurate. So maybe, yeah, maybe Adam had written it after meeting with Dave Weiner in New York City.

Kevin: 23:50

Yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking. Yes. I mean, it's amazing that they were able to find that the Wayback Machine is impressive. It seems like the reason that they weren't able to find it for such a long time is because they were convinced it was called The Last Mile when it was actually called the last yard. Obviously, if we'd known the right name of it, we probably could have found it sooner. But either way interesting that it came up and fun to go back and read it. I don't remember reading it back then. I mean, I was on the internet and reading lots of blogs back in 2000. But this one never came across my newsfeed stream. I can't remember what news reader I was probably using at the time. What were the different RSS readers? There was NET News net newswire, I think is what I was probably using around the Google Reader became the big news reader for a few years before Google shut it down.

Alban: 24:35

So for people who haven't read this, I mean, this is the blog post that kind of kicked off podcasting. So it's Adam Curry, who wanted to be doing broadcast on the Internet. He wanted to be a broadcaster and I think kind of his background with being on MTV and being a VJ and doing radio. He kind of figured out like you want to be doing this yourself without all the restrictions that you yet from kind of these more corporate environments, and it seems that he identified RSS and some of these, you know, the Napster, he's referencing Napster in the blog post, some of these technologies is like these could help us make content, put it online, and even with slow bandwidth, download it to our devices, and then listen to it on demand. I mean, that was one of the interesting pieces from the blog post is like the talking about, this doesn't have to be streamed in real time, bandwidth isn't there to do that. But what we can do is download and have it ready for you and alert you when it's ready. And so I think that was kind of the genius of RSS. You know, adapting that for audio is a really great idea. I love reading it because there's parts of it that seem like it's really interested in what looks like podcasting. There's another bit that kinda looks like is this is also about like pirating movies as well, like, there's a lot of Napster stuff. If you told me this is a blog post about building BitTorrent later on, or something else for pirating the pirate, this is the founder of the Pirate Bay. And this is what he was thinking in 2001. I kind of want to believe that as well. So you could read it different ways. But super interesting just to go back and read this history of podcasting. I mean, this is not very long ago, 21 years ago, there's blog posts going up about what podcasting could be. And 21 years later, you know, this is a legitimate type of media that tons people are making their lives and their livings and their art with podcasting.

Kevin: 26:37

Yeah, I think it's very interesting that the aha moment, I think, for Adam, is that this stuff doesn't need to be streamed live 20 years ago, 22 years ago, there were bandwidth constraints. There was some people had always on bandwidth like, gosh, what the heck did we even call them?

Alban: 26:56

T1 connections?

Kevin: 26:57

There was a name that we I don't know, what did people just say high speed? Do you have high speed internet, whatever it was, as people getting?

Alban: 27:03

Broadband? DSL?

Kevin: 27:06

Now it's just internet. It's like, do you have internet or like, that's what it is. But back then it was a thing, right started in the 90s. And by the 2000s, most people had it. Most people had broadband, right? Or always on internet connections. But it wasn't super fast. It was pretty reliable, but it wasn't super fast. And so the idea of being able to download entertainment stuff movies, or audio files or anything, he uses Napster as an example, Napster was a big thing back then, even just to download a song off Napster. And that wasn't even just coming from one source. It was like a multi threaded connection that was downloading bits from all different people could still take 1520 minutes just to get one song. And so that sparks his this idea in his head of what with Napster, I'd queue up all this stuff that I want to download, I can go to bed, and the next day I wake up, and I sort through it all, I figured out what was a good download what was a bad download what was you know, Metallica or another band trying to mess around with me and serve up a bad song that was named like a good song. For anybody who lived in the Napster days, you know, it was part of the fun. And so he wanted to do that with podcasts.

Alban: 28:07

The fiun was like accidentally downloading computer viruses. The people that upload it with a song name?

Kevin: 28:13

Yeah, do you remember when bands would start to do that to combat the pirating of music is that they would actually take their own, they would see their own music out there. But it would be listen to 10 seconds of a song. And then it would be like one of the musicians being like, "Stop stealing our music!" and then it would go back.

Jordan: 28:28

Yeah, my computer barely survived Limewire. So I remember.

Kevin: 28:35

Anyway, why I think this is super interesting is because not only is that a magical idea that set up podcasting to become what podcasting is today, but also now we're in this time where people are getting drawn to this light of life and video. And it's like podcasting was the solution to not have to do live, you know, the arguments that he makes are that 95% of what you see on TV is pre recorded, including 80% of the live news that you watch at six o'clock. Like even the news, if you think about that you do have an anchor sitting at desks that is live, but they keep cutting away to pre recorded bits. And then they just come back to themselves. And they set up the next story. And they cut away to a pre recorded bit. What podcasting was solving that podcasting is like since most of the stuff that we enjoy is highly produced. It's edited down. It's concise. That's really what you want to listen to something good. That's all pre recorded stuff. Why do I need to do that live? Anyway, I just think it's interesting now because people are very drawn to this idea of doing live shows. Well, live shows for most things don't work really well. It's not going to be as good. It's not gonna be as entertaining. You have to be very good at your craft to be able to do it well. Now, interestingly enough, Adam curry is doing podcasting to no show. He does the no agenda show. And he does those with very little to no editing at all. And he doesn't live and they're great. But he's also an amazing talent. He is one of those rare birds that was born with a gift and he's worked hard to hone it and craft But over years and years and years, and so he can get on and go live for three hours. And it's an amazing entertaining show. That's not everybody. And it's certainly not where we start. So I just think that the original nugget, the original magic that he captured here, in this blog post is still very important and relevant. And so even though live is kind of interesting, and new and fun, I think it's gonna be hard for people to, I don't know, build an audience, if you're not a professional, if you're not seasoned if you haven't, you know, honed your craft three years of doing pre production and lots of editing. And then you get good enough, we're finally you can do live shows. That's how I think the path of progression needs to take place.

Alban: 30:34

We saw this with Clubhouse, right, the serendipity of clubhouse, the fun of connecting to people, especially during the pandemic, when a lot of people were at home, like the ability to interact, those were so exciting. But they were exciting, because they were novel. And they're exciting, because we weren't getting that in our day to day lives. And then as soon as like the novelty wore off, and like the scammers kind of started moving in there a bunch of like really kind of weird rooms, then everyone kind of realized, like, Oh, I'm actually doing this in real life. Again, I'm going out to dinner, and I'm talking to friends, I don't need to do it. When people are doing live, you have to think what is different about live? What are the advantages that life has, and it's like interaction with the audience. I'm not really sure what else there is that I'm thinking, I really want to be live so that I can have it. You know, I think, Kevin, I both used to listen to ATP, which does a live show. But in their live show, they've got a chat room going the whole time where the chat rooms kind of interacting with the podcast, and then they do edit it down to remove all like the dead air. And you know, the parts that weren't interesting. I like that because it's including the interactive element. But I think a lot of times people are going, Oh, I'll do it live. And that's my excuse for not editing, and not really thinking through like which of these pieces is valuable. And which of these parts are just me rambling with my friends. I think it's a skill you have to hone is a skill that Jordan has that I do not. And I think is what people need to be considering whether we're doing podcasts, because if you ever go to live, you need to start being able to do that on the fly, like you're coming up with good content, but you're also in the back of your brain going. Yeah, this segments kind of dull time to move on, I need to direct the conversation elsewhere.

Jordan: 32:21

I think another thing that has made live audio, live video, live performances, live productions, whatever, not as successful as podcasting as being like a pre recorded thing is I think it goes directly against what Adam is proposing in this thought piece. You know, he's saying like, I want the media, but I want it on my terms, I want it when I have time to consume it, if you are doing live entertainment, but you're not posting it later for people to enjoy on their own terms, or making it easy for people to access on their own terms when they're ready to, then that also can be a recipe for disaster. And you're not going to have a lot of people tuning in, you know, whenever you decide you're going live. At the end of this piece. He says every business needs customers, and you get customers by solving a problem for them. enough customers makes an industry and it kind of gave me goosebumps a little bit because it was him saying no, this is viable. This is important. And this can be an industry all its own, and it totally has come to fruition. And that was really, really cool for me to see that.

Kevin: 33:29

Yeah, I I loved now I'm assuming maybe he was writing at 2am. I don't know if that was like local time. But I love the fact that this is like such a historical document for podcasting. And it's chock full of typos and spelling errors. And it's great stuff. Because, you know, like the perfectionist type one Enneagram one in me is like, it can't be like this, you can't just spit ball off a bunch of ideas and not have somebody edit it not have it proved and throw it out and expect to make any difference in the world. And yet, here is the exact counter example. And I love it that it's not about perfection in like sentence structure. It's not about grammar. It's not about spelling or typos. It's about the idea. And just getting the idea out there and getting it in front of enough people who can see the magic behind the idea and then do something with it. He probably had no idea at the time, how revolutionary what this was going to turn into. But just think if he just sat around and said, you know, like, I can't hit publish on this yet because I'm not sure I captured my thoughts perfectly or I haven't had an editor do it. Maybe it would have never gone out at all because maybe insecurity would have stifled the idea or I think it's cool, but is anybody else gonna think it's great or whatever innovation and genius requires courage and Adam displayed a ton of courage back in 2001 when he hit publish and we thank him for it because we wouldn't have the jobs we do today or enjoy the podcasting industry as we do thing unless he was brave enough to put his idea out there.

Alban: 34:52

A lot of stuff going on with Samsung these last few months. Y'all want to talk about this for a second?

Jordan: 35:01

Yeah, it first came to my attention in the Facebook community group, there was this podcaster who posted saying, Okay, this is not like a bragging post, but my episodes normally get like 100 to 200 downloads, and I just had an episode gets 17,000 downloads. You know, they were saying, I don't know what happened. I don't know what's causing this. And that's kind of what led us to go, something's off something's not right. As exciting as it is.

Alban: 35:30

Yeah, back in September, I was seeing these like Twitter posts where people were like, my episodes are blowing up on Samsung, does anybody else seeing this? And none of them were on Buzzsprout. And I was like, highly skeptical of it. And then someone we're friendly with one of our competitors reached out, they're like, I actually talked to Samsung. And they said, all these are podcasts that they featured. And I'm like, wow, that's really incredible. That sounds legit. And so we wrote and published a guide on how to submit your podcast to Samsung podcasts. And we were excited that people on Buzzsprout started seeing these incredible download numbers. At some point, they were so incredible, they start actually taking the literal meaning of that word, they are no longer credible. That's when like Jordans talking about 70,000 downloads for a podcast that regularly got 100. When we dug into it, it's this bug that Kevin, I'm sure you remember this, we saw this back with like IEA, there used to be a bug that anytime you had a Buzzsprout embed player, ie eight really wanted Internet Explorer eight, this is a ancient web technology used to download the audio file as soon as you got to the page. So if you went to, you know, cnn.com, and they had a Buzzsprout player on there, well, it would automatically download the episode right then. And it seems like this is exactly what Samsung was doing through like, well, these are being featured. And so people are probably going to click on them since they're featured. So we're just going to auto download all of these episodes to people's devices, whether they listen or not. And so it will lead to these truly astronomical download numbers, but very low conversion rate, I'm sure to actual place.

Kevin: 37:11

Yeah, I don't know if they were downloading entire episodes, but they were downloading enough for it to count as an IRB certified play. So at least more than a minute of the audio was being downloaded. I don't know how to call it a bug, ie thing was definitely a bug. Since embedding has been a thing you've been able to toggle pre loading on or off. And so for podcasting, you want pre loading to be off so that it doesn't register a play before the user actually clicks the play button, right? That's when we want to kind of play and an eighth, there was a bug where even if you had pre loading toggle off, it was still pre loading. And so that legit bug has since been solved. This one might be more of like, oh, we think this is a good idea. And turns out, it's while maybe a good idea, really messes up podcast that's so needed to be changed. And it sounds like Samsung has since made a change. I don't know if they've deployed it to everyone yet or not, not my department. But it is something that we've had to handle. On the technical side, we did have to update our statistics to make sure that those plays coming from Samsung from this pretty generic user agent. We're not being counted. And the challenge with that is like how do you block since they're not using a specific user agent, you end up blocking more traffic than you intend to. So sometimes the cure is the best solution. But it's it does have side effects. So some legitimate plays, were not being registered by our sets, counters. Like other podcast listening apps, like Podcast Addict was looking very similar the way that the stats came in. And so some Podcast Addict plays, we're not being registered. It's just stuff you deal with, when you're a podcast host trying to give you give our customers the most accurate stats that we can get, it sure would be a lot easier if these podcast listening apps would correctly registered their user agents. So now the possibility exists on both iOS and Android to correctly identify your app. And yet still, a lot of these apps have not updated to do so. And if they would, then when one of them has a problem, we could clearly identify that one app and deal with it with them only without impacting anybody else.

Alban: 39:01

It's like, wear a nametag when you're requesting the audio files. Let us know who you are, wear the name tag. And if you're wearing a generic name tag, or the name that everybody else uses, it's much harder to identify or if you do identify it, and you have to make a rule to block it or not registered place or do something to mitigate the ill effects. You do end up with, sorry, the only solution is all Bob's are banned from the conference center. So like, we're like, hey, but last names would be good too. So we could stop banning all the poor extra Bobs that are not causing problems.

Kevin: 39:37

I mean, that's the thing like Podcast Addict got caught up in this. They didn't do anything wrong. They didn't have any code that was pre loading anything and yet they didn't properly identify themselves. So you're the analogy is great that they are just coming into the conference wearing a nametag called Bob and there's one Bob, one time, did something wrong so now all Bob's are banned in Podcast Addict. You just want to tell us who you really were wouldn't have been caught up in it.

Alban: 40:00

We're looking forward to getting this sorted. It sounds like Samsung has solved the problem on their end. And so soon as we verified that which might even be by the time this is released, then we'll be able to update all the stats on the Buzzsprout side, and everything will show up normally for you, because we want to make sure that the stats that you're getting in your Buzzsprout account, our job is to make sure those are the most accurate stats on the web, we'll be working with them, man with everybody else. And all these are agents and we'll be doing our best to figure out what's legit. And what's a bot and make sure that we're showing you the

Jordan: 40:30

So for a lot of podcasters host-read ads are the right stuff. way to go if you have a sponsorship. And a lot of those involve talking about the product like you have used it or like you know somebody who has used it. And given kind of personal experience, a lot of sponsors ask for you to give personal experience. And it's important to make sure that you actually have personal experience. And so Google and iHeartMedia, they are being sued by the FTC for airing nearly 29,000 endorsements by radio personalities on iHeart promoting their use of the Google Pixel for phone in 2019 and 2020. And what happened is Google bought these ads, these endorsements from iHeart. And they insisted that the radio personalities user script and give a personal spin of their experience. And Google said that giving the phones to I heart for the radio personalities wasn't feasible in 2019, because the phones weren't even out yet. They weren't on the shelves. So the radio personalities couldn't have the phones because they're not out. And so I heart kind of pushed back on this, but wound up running those ads anyway. And then in 2020, Google came back diehard asking for them to run ads again. And I heart said no, we're not going to run them unless you give us phones. And so Google was like fine, and then gave them five phones and I heart wound up running the ads.

Kevin: 41:59

That script they provided them was amazing. Can you read it to us, Kevin? Yeah, I love taking perfect photos. Taking imperfect photo night is super hard, yada yada, yada. I've been taking studio like photos with my phone of everything like my son's football game, a meteor shower, a rare spotted owl that landed in my backyard.

Unknown: 42:16

I've been taking studio like photos of everything my dog chance the Chicago skyline from my balcony. My daughter's checking out the full moon maybe doing some night skiing. And look, I'm a musician. Most of the shows I do there at night our new baby smiling in her sleep. Even some of that crazy meteor shower. I mean, if you don't have pics, did it even really happen? My friends hanging out in a dark bar. You

Kevin: 42:36

Pics, or it didn't happen? Am I right? That was the know, pics, or it didn't happen, right? I think that's exactly what happened. The FTC was listening script they wanted these people to read. Think about the crossover. If you listened to somebody say that on one podcast, and then you listened and heard it on somebody else's podcast. You're like, why are these these rare spotted owls are all over the place. to a bunch of podcasts and like, man, so many kids are playing football and catching these rare spotted owls. Which meteor shower was that? Wait, there wasn't a meteor shower in the last two months? Wait a second, we need to investigate. Yeah, I need to Google and I need to write a little bit more generic strips. They don't want to get busted.

Alban: 43:22

It was already unethical to lie and say I have personal experience with this product. And I think it's great. And I have kids. And this photo is amazing because it's on the Google Pixel four phone that was already unethical before. But the penalty $9.4 million for 29,000 deceptive endorsements, a grand total of what $325 An endorsement. That's not really a penalty. That's a like, Ah, you really shouldn't have done that. Don't do it again. And now they're barred from doing these types of endorsements in the future? Okay.

Kevin: 43:59

It says they're, they're barred from misrepresenting endorsers experiences weren't wasn't everyone always barred from that anyway? Come on. This is This is pathetic. This is pathetic. It's a terrible thing to do. And then the penalty was insanely low. I mean, you're talking about Google and iHeart$9.4 million. Like there's no reason for them to not continue to try to do stuff like this. It's I don't know what's lighter than a slap on the wrist like a flick of the year like it's actually worse. Yeah, there is nothing Okay, so it is a slap on the wrist. There's nothing less painful than a slap on the wrist. That's what this is.

Alban: 44:33

There's got to be more. Am, am I just miss reading this, Jordan? Or is it literally like they're like, one of their punishments is, you definitely can't break this rule. I mean, the guy robbed a bank. They're like, alright, you know what, every time you robbed a bank, you got to give us $5,000 And you can never rob another bank. It's like all US proved was crime pays baby, go for it again because the punishment has to be law. urge enough that there's actually a deterrent. And this doesn't look like a deterrent at all. This is one time that they did it. They got busted. Who knows how often I heart, Google, Apple and 1000s and 1000s. And 1000s of other groups are totally misrepresenting whether or not they're paid for something or whether or not they actually have experience with a product. How often are we getting lied to without any sort of FTC disclosure? And the one time someone gets busted, it's really pretty light. I mean, it's a slap on the wrist. Like Kevin said, Yeah,

Kevin: 45:35

I like I heart though, trying to be like, Hey, we asked them to send us the phones. Yes, we act like we didn't do anything wrong. But wait, they didn't send you the phones, right. Yeah. But we asked them, so we're in the clear, we're totally fine. We asked them, and then they asked us to do it again. And we said now you really got to send us the phones this time. So they sent them five for 50 radio personalities. Yeah, for 50 personnel. Unbelievable.

Jordan: 45:58

It reminds me of that guy who I don't know if you heard about this, he got one of those devices in his car that emergency vehicles used to change all the lights to green. And did you guys hear about this? No, no. Okay. So there's this guy, he gets one of those his hands on one of those devices. And the city started noticing that the traffic lights were just all wonky for like a year. And then they finally tracked it down that this guy was just changing the red lights to green and just going right on through and so they finally tracked it to him. They find him$500 And he said, Well, I only paid $500 to have green lights for an entire year. So yeah, I'm probably gonna keep doing it.

Kevin: 46:39

Exactly. Did you get subscribed to a red light turned green servers for $5 a year? A lot of people would pay for that.

Jordan: 46:45

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Alban: 46:47

This reminds me there is a I think this is an old Freakonomics episode. Or maybe it's from the Freakonomics books, there's a daycare that realized they had a problem with parents showing up late to pick up their kids, as they're like, alright, new rule, if you show up more than five minutes late, it's a $5. Fine. And what they realized was the amount of parents showing up late went way up, because all of a sudden, the parents went, Oh, I don't have to feel guilty, because I'm paying for this. And so the guilt has been relieved. And yet, the $5 is really not that big of a deal. So now that I have other you know, I've got another errand to run, I'll just run that one first, then I'll pick up my kid better for me. If you make these penalties so low, there's a point at which it's so low that people go oh, so we actually should do that. You're encouraging the bad behavior? Yeah, this seems like it's very close. And it's probably within the realm of, yeah, just go ahead and keep doing it, guys. You know, you get busted one out of every 50 times you do it, and you only get charged $325 per instance. Don't worry about it. Just keep going.

Jordan: 47:52

Yeah, I mean, and I get that, I think for me, I was viewing it through the lens of an independent podcaster. Who does run sponsorships? Who does talk about personal experiences, because that's what sponsors ask for a lot. And I've noticed that in my ad copies that I'm receiving from my sponsors, they're including language that is just in big bold letters, like do not imply that you have used this product, if you have not, you know, you have to do these mandatory disclosures, and they're really cracking down on that. And I know that for big companies, you know, it's not a big deal. If you have to pay 300 and something dollars for me personally, if I had to pay 300 and something dollars for messing up on an ad read and where I said I use something, but maybe I hadn't used it, or you know, something like that, like that would be horrendously bad for an independent podcaster who doesn't have that kind of money?

Alban: 48:47

I'd say like, the ethical reason is enough for me, so don't do this. Anyone who's worried about it, I would say I'm not really too worried you're gonna get busted by the FTC as an individual podcaster implying you use something you didn't. But it's wrong. So don't do it. I just think like, it's some point, they've actually like removed the ethical requirement. Like if you're I heart, you already were okay with this being shady in this instance, not actually the first time we've seen it from my heart. They're okay with doing this shady thing, not the first time actually from Google that we've seen this. So I feel like at that point, you just got to like really bring down the hammer. And this was not the hammer. This was a little slap on the wrist. But if you're a podcaster, like, just don't lie. These are your people. These this is your audience. These are the people who trust you. And they're going to buy Blue Apron, because you said you built made Blue Apron with your kids. And it was a nice experience. If you didn't just say blue apron is and then read the ad read you are free to do that. But don't imply you used it unless you used it, then your endorsement will eventually mean nothing, because your word means nothing.

Jordan: 49:53

The host read ad reads the entire point of it is to give personal experience and they want you to edit the scripts a little bit but I think that a lot of probably newer podcasters, maybe podcasters, that are just starting out with sponsors are scared to ask for product samples. I don't know what it is, it's almost like you feel like they're giving you money for an ad read, you feel so grateful for that. And you feel like it's going to be overstepping to ask for product samples. Always, always, always ask for product samples if you have not used it. And then that way, the ad read is actually more effective to because you are giving the personal experience and then you're also not getting in trouble with the FTC. So it's one of those things where if somebody is sponsoring you, even if you don't have the script yet, ask for a product sample before that, so that you can try it out. There's nothing wrong with that. And brands really expect to send samples to the people that they're sponsoring. Did you guys know that the New York Times has a research and development department that publishes guides for journalism?

Alban: 50:59

I did not know that. But I noticed the subdomain when you link to the story.

Jordan: 51:04

Yeah, it reminds me of I had found that NPR has that training to which I didn't know they have a training guide to like audio journalism and production and stuff like that, which is awesome. So it's really cool that New York Times also has something similar. So they have a research and development team. They say they explore how emergent technologies can be applied in the service of journalism. And they actually published a guide recently on creating spatial audio podcasts. And I don't know if you guys have ever heard of spatial audio podcasts or are familiar with that?

Alban: 51:38

Yes, spatial audio is when you record in a way that when you listen back, especially we have to be using headphones with stereo that it appears like some sounds are coming not just out of the right or left ear, but some are like way far ahead in front of you. Some things are all around you, something moves behind you. It actually feels like the audio experiences that you're actually there and there's stuff around you happening.

Jordan: 52:04

Yeah. And it's really cool. There's actually Aaron Mehnke produced a podcast called Bridgewater. And I think it was one of the first podcasts that had the 360 audio, they use the Dolby Atmos so that when you listen to it with headphones, it feels like things are just all around you. It's like actual surround sound. This study is actually like a little bit different, because there's different ways that you can have spatial audio, and you can record spatial audio. And what they're experimenting with right now is actually like audio moving through space. And this is so fascinating. So I played with it, they actually have a sample from the daily, they recommend listening to it, like with your phone, or with certain headphones that react accordingly to it, you can actually move your body in space, and it changes the audio that you're listening to. So if I turn my head one way, I can hear something a little bit different. Or if I go down a little bit lower, I can be like closer to the water that is recorded in it.

Alban: 53:04

So I've run into this good ways and bad I've experienced it. And this is years ago. And first spatial audio is just starting out, it was like this audio recording, there's supposed to be like, of someone giving you a haircut, and they're talking to you and they're walking around in like you're hearing snipping near each year. And it was a very cool experience. It was like the first time I'd ever heard something like that. And it was totally immersive. And then Apple added it to all of the air pod pros. And my experience mostly has been I'm listening to something, and I turned my head to reach over across my desk and I'm like, Oh, my headphones broke. Why is it sound only coming out of the left ear. And it's because I turned to the right and now the right years away from the computer. That doesn't make any sense to me to be honest, like if the audio is in relation to a story that's being recorded. So QCode does all of their shows with Dolby Atmos, and this is how they've recorded all the audio, I believe. So it makes sense when like you're hearing all the different sounds of the story around you. But for it to be in relationship to the computer that's in your home kind of like breaks the metaphor, right?

Kevin: 54:13

I totally agree. I was listening to one of these podcasts doing spatial audio. And when I first started, it was great. I was walking the dog and going down the street straight and I would turn my head left and it would sound a lot different to my head, right? It would sound look different. I'm like, oh, it's pretty neat. We get up to the end of the block and we take it left. And now I'm walking left. And I'm like now this sounds weird. No, like the audio just changed because I turned to walk a different direction on the block. And then like I got like 20 steps down and then it like kind of recenter itself. And then I'm walking a little bit more and I turn on the other corner of the block and it changes again. I'm like this is totally bizarre. It was actually taking me out of what I was listening to because I was just thinking more about how it sounded than what they were saying. And so I mean great that it's an r&d lab and one day it might be really cool, but I also kind of put this in the category of like fun experimentation. Not sure it's ready for primetime yet the immersive experience inside of it, like you go into a really high end movie theater, and you can hear like whatever waterfalls behind you and birds flying around and stuff like that stuff is fantastic. But the stuff where you're actually moving your head, and then it's changing the sound, I'm still finding a little bit too distracting, like, not quite natural yet.

Jordan: 55:17

I also prefer the audio where you're staying put, but like the audio is moving around you as opposed to you moving around the audio. When I was messing with this, I was walking around my office like an Oompa Loompa. Like just doing like doot, doot, doot doot, like messing with

Alban: 55:31

moving up and down.

Jordan: 55:33

I probably looked like a crazy person, because I was just playing with them like this is kind of cool. And just knowing

Alban: 55:39

that it's like, what are you doing? You're like, I'm trying to hear the Everglades better.

Jordan: 55:43

Exactly what happened. So, I don't know. It's it's interesting. I mean, it is they're presenting it as an experiment. And I kind of feel like this might be more useful for VR experiences, as opposed to like listening to podcasting or audio journalism or something like that.

Alban: 56:00

That's exactly what I was thinking. So your head is in a fixed position, don't really imagine like the head moving changes the audio, but the audio is mixed in a way that it's presented from all around you. I think that any fiction podcasts, any audio dramas, I can see how that makes sense for anything highly produced, like the daily that wants to have a little bit more of an immersive experience with like audio beds and stuff and sound effects, I can see a little bit of a value there, the like, turn your head and hear something different. The only two ways I can see that being valuable for me, are like, this is one of these audios that's like hey, solve the crime or something, solve the mystery. And so maybe you need to listen to like, different parts of conversations to get the clue.

Jordan: 56:46

Oh, that's clever

Alban: 56:48

I was stretching.

Jordan: 56:49

No, I love it. I'm in.

Alban: 56:51

So solve the crime and VR, I think VR, it makes perfect sense. Because if you're playing a video game, and you move to the left to avoid something like the Audio should change then, and so I could see it being valuable there. So it's good to see it's coming out. I don't think it's it like it's not 3d movies level where it's like, this will never be a thing, even though they're trying to make it a thing, I think this is actually going to be a thing, I just don't think it's 100% of thing yet, since the use cases are still a little bit off. Because I think VR is gonna be the really big one for a lot of these.

Jordan: 57:27

I mean, the other part of it that is not quite as accessible for the everyday podcaster. I mean, they do publish sections on how to create the spatial audio how to produce it, which was actually a really fascinating read my brain fried a little bit trying to understand the science of it. But besides that these files for spatial audio are massive, and pretty much any podcast host that you go with is not going to support these huge files. So it's not super accessible for just the everyday podcaster. At this point, it's interesting, but I don't think it's very practical.

Kevin: 58:06

Yeah, the tools are gonna have to catch up, right? Because right now you're editing audio, kind of linearly, like on a on a timeline. And if you want certain background tracks to sound differently, like you're going to have to visualize that in a different way, you're gonna have to have different controls to be able to move that audio around. Right now you can pan from left to right, but it's hard to move something behind or in front, and then figure out like, as the person's moves, their body moves their head, how do you want the sound to change? Those tools are they're just not consumer ready tools to be able to do that stuff quite yet. And as Jordan said, the distribution right now in podcasting to be as compatible with as many podcasts listening apps as possible, you need to publish an mp3 format. I don't know if any of that stuff works with mp3. Maybe some of it does, maybe some of it doesn't. So as those files come out, and they become standardized, then podcast playing apps have to update to be able to play them. So even if we get to the point where having a 500 megabyte podcast that's only 10 minutes long is acceptable. Once we get there, then the question becomes, well, how many player apps can actually play that file type? So it's neat that some people are experimenting and playing with it, but it's still a ways off but cool stuff.

Alban: 59:14

We got our first three star review from TShane. TShane sounds like you probably are like oil tycoon. T Shane Roberts, T. Boone Pickens. T Shane Robert says "Quit it with the Buzzboosts. Seriously. Let it go."

Jordan: 59:32

Wow. Here's the thing. Those podcast reviews show up to everybody. You could just write a message asking us nicely.

Alban: 59:42

You could send it as a Buzzboost.

Jordan: 59:44

If you don't like a segment instead of leaving a bad review for somebody just because of something small like that, I have painstakingly and lovingly put in chapter markers in every single episode for people like you if you don't like a segment, just click the next chapter and move on to our post show.

Alban: 1:00:04

Well, TShane, you can go ahead and skip ahead if this isn't your jam. I know not everybody loves Buzzboosts. So we have a few solutions. One obviously, is Jordans, that you can skip ahead. But two, we talked before about having an alternative way for people to leave us comments and reach out. Yeah, I created a Twitter account for Buzzcast. Like an hour ago, really. Fortunately, the handle Buzzcast was grabbed by someone back in like 2009. They've never used it. So we are Buzzcast podcast, it now follows both of you. And I was wondering, we could just post like a tweet a single tweet per episode. And it could be a place that people could go, we'd always link it in the show notes. And they could just drop comments. And those would be comments that we would pull into the kind of buzz boost follow up sections. What do you guys think of that like making it a little bit more accessible? For people who maybe don't want to use one of the value for value enabled podcast apps,

Jordan: 1:01:03

I gotta be honest with you, I do have a little bit of reservation, I looked into social media accounts for Buzzcast. Myself, I did like a quick search. And there's something that is a little bit troubling that I came across, there's a company that seems to be similar to only fans, that is also called Buzzcast. So when I search Buzzcast, on the social media, a lot of provocative things come up for me.

Alban: 1:01:33

I actually a few months ago, had somebody reach out, they'd started a new podcasting app, and they wanted me to look at it and give them some advice. And I ended up with the same apparently there's an adult entertainer who whose name match the same as their podcast app. And I was like, actually, your app is great. And it's doing a great service. You've got to change the name, though. You may not be aware, but like this is going to be a shocking experience for anybody who looks you up on social. So you know, Kevin, I think you named the podcast? Are you aware of any of this stuff out there when you created the name? Buzzcast?

Kevin: 1:02:10

No, I don't know that I created the name. Travis might have created the name. But I'm not aware and still have not until Jordan just said it was the first I've heard of it. Oh, by the look of album space, he's found some of this content. Yeah, so album to your idea. I think it's worth exploring. You know, one of the options for the social interact tag, which is a new podcast namespace tag for cross app comments plays on the same idea that you just had, which is that you can use a Twitter thread as your home base for all your comments. And so you can set that up in the social interact tag, you can use it, there's two ways to do it. Twitter being one of them. The other suggestion was using an activity pub service, and that is built more on like Mastodon, so Twitter is fine. If we want to start there and try it out. We can try it out just by manually creating a Twitter post for each episode, encouraging people to go there to have discussions about the episode. And then if it takes off, we can always figure out how to add it to our feed later. And it's good to experiment with it to see if it's something that we'd want to roll out for all podcasters. So I think it's a good idea.

Alban: 1:03:12

So there will be one in the show notes. So if you want to leave a comment, if you want to tell us that buzz boosts are the worst segment of the show. Feel free to let us know. There's a link to a tweet, and we'll put it out from the Buzzcast account. Don't search for it apparently, or you might dump stuff that you are interested in. So we'll link to it and let us know what you think. And we'll include it in the next episode.

Jordan: 1:03:37

On that note-- it's time for Buzzboosts. Genebean sent us 2000 SATs, the privacy invasive nature of the subscription printers is seriously disturbing to me. And this is in response to last episodes post show in which we went on a 10 minute rant about Kevin's printer subscription. It was the longest post show to date. By far the funniest, I think.

Kevin: 1:04:04

Yeah, I agree Genebean. So what he's saying is like they're monitoring how much you're printing, but they could very easily be monitoring what you're printing as well. And think about if you're printing bank statements, or I don't know, ransom notes. I guess I don't print a lot of ransom notes if anyone's listening, but you might be and you probably don't want people seeing those. So yes, you're right. It is it is weird. Everything is connected now. And so you you have to be a lot more conscious about life. It's all connected. And these companies are monitoring how much I'm printing so they can figure out when to send me new ink. Can they also be monitoring what I'm printing and yeah, they probably could. So you're right. I hadn't thought about that. But thanks for making me not sleep for the next week now, Gene.

Alban: 1:04:48

I think you gotta get rid of this printer. Kevin, you're paying a subscription to buy for a printer when you don't for it.

Kevin: 1:04:54

Now there's been more and more that now they sent me two more print cards. This week just arrived and the one that's in there is still totally fine. That system is broken. It's, it's a mess.

Alban: 1:05:05

The next one was from Genebean as well. 2222 SATs. Thanks for the tip of felt right. The panels look really nice. These are the panels that are the background of Kevin's video that we can see. And Kevin's designed the whole thing is behind his head. It looks great. So if you're looking for panels to help with sound treatment, checkout felt right.

Kevin: 1:05:25

Alright, our next boost is from Moritz from Alby sent 6000 SATs. Thank you. He says. Yeah, I appreciate all that you're trying to do with podcasting to do features with Buzzcast. Yeah, thank you. We are having fun with it and is a great test show for us to figure out what works and what doesn't and experiment as we continue to roll more and more into Buzzsprout. So all of our podcasters can take advantage of the Podcasting 2.0 features.

Alban: 1:05:47

Yeah, and we appreciate all the work that you're doing with Albie, to make all this value for value and Podcasting 2.0 features more accessible for everyone.

Jordan: 1:05:56

Mere Mortals Podcast sent us 1337 SATs

Alban: 1:06:00

Do you know what that's called? Jordan?

Jordan: 1:06:01

No. Oh, leet. It's a leet boost. I got it I'm learning elite boost and they say I actually listened to some podcasts on YouTube they are still image or waveform keyword here being quote unquote listen, I assume YouTube has noticed enough people like me who enjoy the platform for certain benefits comments related content timeline popups even though I put down my phone or leave it open, but don't watch it. That's interesting.

Alban: 1:06:29

Mere Mortals Podcasts also boosted us to 1222 SATs. Don't drop Buzzboosts. I'll pay you money. All right, we're gonna have to get Mere Mortals podcast and T Shane Roberts, into a room to battle it out whether or not we keep this segment. So thank you for the support. Mere Mortals podcast.

Kevin: 1:06:47

And Sam Sethi sent 3000 SATs. Said love the suggestion on labeling AI with the person tag. Great. I think we know some people, we can run that suggestion by and see if we can make it happen. And they'll send us another 5000 SATs and said what a great episode and chat about AI and apple and podcast production. Well, thanks, Sam. I appreciate you listening. And thanks for the feedback.

Jordan: 1:07:06

Thanks for the SATs and keep podcasting.

Alban: 1:07:11

Have either of you used chat GPT yet?

Jordan: 1:07:14

No. Is that like one of those bot chats where you can just like talk to a bot for a while? Yes,

Alban: 1:07:19

Jordan, this is not the same. It's totally different. It's gotten to a new level.

Jordan: 1:07:24

I remember doing this when I was like 10. I remember like sitting at the computer and chatting with a bot and it didn't really lead anywhere. So hopefully the technology has gotten a little better.

Alban: 1:07:36

It's it's not to the level of like her, but quite a bit improved. So open AI we've talked on before they invested in descript. They are the ones who open source whisper. It's the transcription model that they built, just released ChatGPT, which is a chat client on top of GPT 3. It's a large language model. So I've been playing with it. Let's let's do one live right now. Jordan, what do you want to know? What do you want to know about podcasting?

Jordan: 1:08:05

Oh, my gosh, okay, um, how? I got this, I got this, this is really important. How can I become the best podcaster in the world?

Alban: 1:08:20

To become the best podcaster in the world, there's a few key steps you can follow. Number one, develop a unique and compelling concept for your podcast. This could be a specific topic, format or angle that sets your podcast apart from others in the industry, to invest in high quality equipment and production. This includes microphones, recording software, and any other tools you'd need to create a professional sounding podcast. How is there good, continuously improve and evolve as the podcasting industry evolves, it's important to stay on top of trends and developments and constantly strive to improve and innovate in order to stay ahead of the competition. Wow. It's shocking how it writes stuff that you're like, Oh, this is actually pretty good. It's built to have a bit of like a back and forth dialogue. So I just had to write that. But now I could just write add MLA sources into what you just wrote. And then all of a sudden their citations in there. It's wild.

Kevin: 1:09:15

Yeah, ask it to write a Buzzcast opening theme song.

Alban: 1:09:19

Verse one to your opening theme song, Kevin. Welcome to the show where entertainments the main event from Hollywood to the red carpet, we've got it all covered. It's Buzzcast, the hottest podcast around Marie Marie and Jake, they keep you in the know about all the latest and entertainment. You'll never be out of the loop. celebrity interviews, gossips and news what's trending and the juice. It's all here for you. So sit back and enjoy.

Jordan: 1:09:45

Yeah, I think that's there is another Buzzcast podcast.

Kevin: 1:09:49

Oh, no.

Alban: 1:09:50

Oh, is it?

Jordan: 1:09:51

Yeah, I think there's three of them.

Kevin: 1:09:53

I think I think he got the wrong podcast.

Alban: 1:09:55

All right. I said that's the wrong podcast. I want the one from Buzzsprout I'm sorry, I must have misunderstood your request. The Buzzsprout podcast is a podcast about podcasting in the art of storytelling, hosted by Buzzsprout. co founder Dave Jackson. This weekly covers a wide range of topics related to podcast. Each episode begins with Jackson disgusts me just goes out about Dave Jackson render the show, but not hosted by Dave Jackson is a real person and a friend of ours. Dave works, actually, at Libsyn. That's really funny. Dave, I hope you're listening to you'd get a kick out of this. Yeah. So here's the problem with the chat. It does not know how to say, I don't know, it's just using like, what does it Think? Think of it as like your overly confident brother in law? Yeah, yes. Is no matter what, like you ask a question. They don't know anything about it. And then they just with 100% confidence, say, I absolutely know who won the 1986 Super Bowl. It was this. This is how it went? And you're like, let's look that up. That does. Yeah, no, it was the bears. What are you? What are you talking about? Like the Jaguars didn't even exist back then? No, no, no. 100%? I know, it's right. Like that's the way that this works. So when you start asking about things like real facts, or for descriptions of like historical events, they're pretty good. It just requires you to go and proof read some of this stuff. In fact, check it because there's just a lot of like, you know, somehow something got crossed. And there's just a complete overconfidence. So if you rely on it too much, you end up with some really wonky answers. I actually saw an article that GitHub actually sent any code that was written by open AI, any the chat GPT that it wasn't going to accept it anymore, because so many people were saying, hey, write code that does this. And it would write something. And then they would copy and paste it into GitHub. And GitHub was like so much this doesn't run. It looks like it should. But it's got bugs, or it's got issues and it breaks things that eventually they were like, we're just, you know, blocking all of it. So it's super interesting. It's fun to play with. But it's just funny to see something so confident and so often wrong. I'm asked to write a poem about Buzzsprout

Jordan: 1:12:08

Aw.

Alban: 1:12:11

I won't read the whole poem. I'll read you the first stanza. Buzzsprout, Oh, how you shine with your platform for podcasters. You make it easy to share our stories and connect with our listeners. Your tools and resources are invaluable to us helping us grow our shows and reach new heights. Thank you Buzzsprout for making our podcast dreams come true. We are grateful for all that you do. Buzzsprout Oh, how we love you.

Jordan: 1:12:40

I feel like we need to make this like you know how in school you have like the school song that you all sing. So we need to have somebody on Fiverr put this to music and then it'll be our Buzzsprout theme song

Alban: 1:12:56

So Kevin hasn't heard this song and I don't think we share it with him.

Jordan: 1:13:01

Yes, we are definitely not sharing it with him. It's gonna be just a surprise.

Alban: 1:13:06

It's not that Kevin will be against it. It's that Kevin's bar for excellence is that a very mature state, very high, he like thinks it'd be very good and it's gonna be hard for him to accept a Buzzsprout theme song of this caliber.

Jordan: 1:13:27

If we're not in the next episode, then Kevin has fired us.

Singer: 1:13:35

Buzzsprout, oh, how we love thee. Our favorite podcasting platform, you are the best. From hosting and publishing to stats in marketing you do it all. We're proud to be in the Buzzsprout family. Where our podcasts can reach the world. With your help ,will make our voices heard, Buzzsprout, we are one. Easy to use and always improving, you help us to create and share content. With your top notch features and support, you make podcasting a breeze. We're proud to be part of the Buzzsprout family. Where our podcasts can reach the world. With your help, we'll make our voices heard. Buzzsprout, we are one. So here's to you, Buzzsprout for everything you do. We're grateful and we'll keep singing your praises long into the future you'll be our go-to. Buzzsprout, WE LOVE YOU! We're proud to be a part of the Buzzsprout family, where our podcasts can reach the world. With your help we'll make our voices heard. Buzzsprout, we are one.