Just Because It's Audio Doesn't Make It A Podcast

In this quickcast, we’re talking about the rise of AI-generated “podcasts” from companies like Amazon and Spotify, and why the word is getting stretched pretty thin.

Amazon is turning product reviews into conversational audio. Spotify is experimenting with personalized AI audio experiences. And suddenly, a lot of things that feel more like chatbots, summaries, or audio briefings are being labeled as podcasts.

So should podcasters be worried? We don't think so.

Links mentioned:

• Amazon shopping podcasts
• Spotify Studio's AI Agent 
• Alexa's generated podcasts

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• Tweet us at @buzzcastpodcast, @albanbrooke, @kfinn, and @JordanPods

Thanks for listening and Keep Podcasting!

Transcript

Video Podcast Adoption By The Numbers

Alban 0:00

Jordan, Kevin, I just got some breaking news from John. He ran some numbers for me and I was gonna ask uh, do you want to take some guesses about how many people are doing video with Buzzsprout right now?

Kevin 0:13

I shouldn't guess. I can't do it. I can't lie because I because you know I know the numbers. I looked at them this morning.

Alban 0:20

Because I made a I I also I need them for a pitch, and so I put them in a pitch that I did send to Kevin, so you probably did see it. All right, Jordan, do you want to play this guessing game against nobody?

Jordan 0:34

I was gonna say I love this game where I'm just completely uninformed and have no basis from which to jump off of, except for a couple weeks ago when we said that there was like a hundred and something. So wait, is this podcasters that are doing video or like video podcasts, like episodes?

Alban 0:51

So the first one will be uh how many people do you think are on a video plan on BuzzProwl?

Kevin 0:57

Oh, I don't know this number.

Alban 0:58

So this is just to give you an idea of percentage-wise how many of our customers are really creating video content right now.

Jordan 1:08

I think people are getting really excited about it and they're starting to make that switch, and they're finding that's a little bit easier than I thought. So I want to say I'm gonna be reserved and say like 200.

Kevin 1:21

I think it's more because we were at 120-ish or something within the first three days of launching, and that was over a weekend. So I'm gonna go, I'll go 500.

Jordan 1:30

Whoa!

Alban 1:31

We're up to 860.

Jordan 1:34

Oh, I was way up.

Alban 1:35

860 podcasters are on a video plan, and the only incentive to upgrade to a video plan is to get access to Apple Podcasts video. So first off, that's just a really big number. I'm really surprised at how quickly uh that's getting adopted and how many people are eager to get their podcast into Apple Podcasts. I imagine a lot of that is driven that we had lots of people who were doing video already, and now we gave them access to Apple Podcast video. It's not that we're getting a bunch of new people to start creating video. All right, another number tens of thousands of episodes get uploaded to BuzzBrow every week. What percentage of the episodes that were uploaded in the last week were video episodes? This is the one I can't guess on.

Jordan 2:24

This is the one you can uh okay.

Kevin 2:27

I'm gonna give her a hint though. Jordan is more than you think.

Jordan 2:31

Okay. Uh well it's hard because like I don't even think because I don't even know like how many episodes were even like oh just just give me a percent.

Kevin 2:40

Anywhere between zero and a hundred percent.

Jordan 2:42

I'm gonna say thirty-five percent.

unknown 2:47

Okay.

Kevin 2:48

Jordan, it's way, way, way less than you think.

Jordan 2:52

Oh, wait, what is oh no?

Alban 2:54

I mean, this is way more than I thought it would be, but it's 2.8%. So 2.8% of all episodes uploaded to Buzzsprout right now are video.

unknown 3:03

Okay.

Kevin 3:04

Well you have to remember the scale of yeah, like the number of episodes that get uploaded is just massive. Thousands and thousands of episodes uploaded daily, and now almost 3% of those accounting for video, that's a lot of video episodes going up. Yeah, like hundreds a day. And that's that was what was shocking to me.

Jordan 3:25

This is like when you ask someone to guess like the percentage of like planets in the Goldilocks zones in our universe. Like, I I don't know.

Alban 3:34

And you're wildly influenced by like the the how big the number you've just heard is. So if you hear a big number, you just guess big number. And if you hear small number, you guess small number.

Jordan 3:44

That's exactly it. I was watching like Neil deGrasse Tyson, like he had like a globe, and he was talking about when people go to this go to space and like the space shuttle when it's like orbiting the earth, it's actually like if you hold a globe, it's like like an eighth of an inch away from the globe. Like it's so small. And I was just like, what?

Kevin 4:05

That felt a lot like when my kids were super young and they were trying to guess like how much money does daddy make every year. And they'd be like, uh $17 a year. And you'd be like, no, no, way more than that. Way more than that. And they'd be like $47 a year. And you're like, nope, still way too low. The biggest number you can think of. And then they're like eight billion dollars a year.

Alban 4:27

You're like, somewhere in the middle of those two numbers. Somewhere in there. Right. Well, I think probably the best way for me to think about it is how long did it take us to get to where three percent of our podcasts had transcripts? And I think the number was like over a year of you know, having tons of support and telling people about transcripts and the value of transcripts to get to high transcript adoption took a long time. You know, probably now only 3% of people are probably using fan mail with any regularity. There's tons of features that we roll out that are end up being relatively niche, and others that get a lot of adoption. And video is being adopted super fast. And I think it's because people are excited to jump into video on Apple Podcasts and soon to be video in lots of other locations. But yeah, I I saw that. It just got me excited. You know, you work really hard on something, and to see lots of our customers using it is a positive. And to see them using it and not hear a bunch of feedback that it's blowing up uh makes me feel even more confident that it's going well.

Jordan 5:38

Yes, absolutely. Here we go.

Amazon Turns Reviews Into Podcasts

Jordan 5:46

One of the things that I want to talk about today is Wait, one of the things, this is a quick cast.

Kevin 5:50

It has to be the only thing, 10 minutes.

Jordan 5:52

Oh my gosh, I'm sorry. You're right.

Kevin 5:54

One topic, 10 minutes. Everyone knows the rules.

Jordan 5:56

Everyone knows the rules. Okay, thank you for reminding me of the rules. Okay. The one thing that I want to talk about today is how it's it's not exactly AI podcasts, but it's sort of how these companies, these larger platforms, are using AI podcasts and they're using that language, if that makes sense. So this started like four weeks back. I saw this crazy story from Katie Netopoulos, that business insider. She tweeted because she came across in Amazon, like in the actual shopping app, that she had the option to create a mini podcast going through and reviewing uh like uh diaper rash cream. And it's did you see this all?

Alban 6:41

Well, not this story, but I've seen this feature that you can just you can be looking at something on Amazon and say, like, make me a podcast about this product. And you can ask questions and the hosts, it's kind of like notebook LM. It's just like a fake podcast, but it's kind of like they're looking at all the reviews and trying to give you a feel for what is this product like, but it just feels like unhinged when it's like diaper rash cream, and you're like, no one would ever make a podcast about this, no one's doing a call-in show because you can like interrupt them and say, like, oh, I've got a question, actually, follow-up on this, and they're like, Oh, very important, you know. So yeah, it's just it feels totally off.

Jordan 7:23

What's so funny is like at first I was like, oh no, like this sounds terrible. And then, you know, people were being people and they started having it create these mini podcasts selling the most like unhinged things. Like I saw one for like fake dog poop, and they're asking questions about the fake dog poop, and they're like, Yeah, like this is you know, the length of it, like the the like the plastic fake thing that your kids use for a print. Exactly.

Kevin 7:49

All right, again, that not gonna be a shocker to any of you, but I did not read this article. I really have no idea what you're talking about, right? But I have some questions.

unknown 7:57

Okay.

Kevin 7:58

Is this uh something like uh like Amazon and Spotify are creating these podcasts and then putting them out there for people to listen, or do you create it yourself so you can kind of interact with it as it's as the podcast is happening? Can you like interrupt it and say, I have a follow-up question? All right, Amazon.com.

Alban 8:16

Famously started by Jeff Bezos with books. And then they started doing reviews at some point, and then they got tons of reviews. And to go through all those reviews was like really cumbersome. So then one of the first, and I think really good implementations of AI with shopping was Amazon going through all those reviews and kind of writing you a summary of here's what people seem to think about this product. And then they said, What we'll do is we'll actually create an audio version of this, like a podcast, like quote unquote, like a podcast. And you can listen to, hey, here's what this product does. But then they added the ability that you can just interrupt and be like a call-in show and ask questions. But you it ends up being this weird, it's almost like QVC channel podcast for any product. And so it just becomes very unhinged very quickly. Okay.

Amazon & Spotify's AI Personalized Podcasts

Jordan 9:09

But then I started seeing more things about AI podcasts popping up in like Amazon Alexa, and then Spotify announced that they are also doing a thing where listeners can generate podcasts based on like what's already on the platform. And I said, Oh, I don't like that. In my mind, the way they were pitching it, it was no longer like uh Notebook LM where it's clearly there's just them spewing out like daily briefings and things like that.

Kevin 9:38

All right. So wait, let me let me wrap my head around this scenario now.

Jordan 9:40

Okay.

Kevin 9:41

So this one is like, um, I like whatever, we'll just use a very popular podcast. I like the Joe Rogan experience, but I don't want to spend three hours listening to this episode. Create a summary version of the Joe Rogan experience for me, and then I can basically get the gist of it in 10 minutes by listening to an AI generated version of it. Is it something like that?

Jordan 10:02

I think that you could potentially do that. The example that they gave was like, let's say you want a personal podcast for an upcoming trip, and you can ask them to create a daily audio brief for my road trip through Italy, walk me through my day using my calendar and bookings, and then recommend memorable dinner spot.

Alban 10:20

Okay. I've actually run into another thing similar to this. Uh, YouTube Music has this feature where I turned it on at some point, and in between it playing songs, it would be like a music, like a DJ popping in to give you a little anecdote. But the anecdotes are like you know, it's really sad. I was listening to um some music, and then it popped in. It was like, oh, this song charted twice. Once when you know this happened, and another when the artist committed suicide. So it's really poignant when you hear the these lyrics about being sad, which remind you of their death. And I'm like, gosh, this is like dark, and this was dance music.

Kevin 11:00

And you're just bopping around and now you're sad.

Alban 11:02

And then it hopped back into another one of their songs, and I'm like, okay. The second time it popped in, exact same story. And I'm like, Oh no, dude, this just feels like gross. You know, if a DJ did it in real life, you'd kind of be like, oh, it's a person trying to talk through how they feel. It just felt weird. And I was like, I gotta get turned this off because there was no, I never got like an interesting story. It was mostly like these really mundane stories mixed in with somebody who knew like two trivia facts about you know each artist and then just kept telling them to you over and over. I could see how that could be fun though.

Kevin 11:38

Like I used to love you guys ever watch VH1 pop-up videos where you're watching the video and then they'd pop all these little like fun, interesting facts up on the screen.

Jordan 11:46

Oh, yeah. But is that like behind the music or something like that?

Kevin 11:49

It's kind of like that, but it was you were just literally watching the music video that the artist created and it's playing the song. And the most like uninterruptive way that they could do it, they wouldn't pop in with a voiceover because that would disrupt the song you're listening to, but it would just like little little bubbles would pop up on the screen and tell you like fun facts about like this scene in the video. They actually, you know, was an outtake that would blooper, but they loved it, so they kept it in. And the song was actually, you know, written in 10 minutes when the artist was in high school and whatever. Just fun facts about the song, but it gave you, I don't know, more interesting insight. Anyway, I I thought that was interesting. That would be fun to bring something like that to podcasting or whatever.

Alban 12:26

All the AI creating audio content. I think I'm we we all work in podcasting, so I think we have pretty strong taste around what is an appropriate way to implement it. And I think the it sounds like the YouTube one, at least my experience of it, was pretty poor. The Amazon, I'm a little bit more open to because it's pretty clear. This is a one per this is like for you. Do you want to listen to the reviews of this product? And if you want to interrupt and you want to ask weird questions about like fake dog poop gag gifts, then like you can. And Amazon handles it pretty well. Let's just burn some AI tokens. But like fun. I mean, why not? It's kind of impressive that Amazon handles it so gracefully. Um, there's so many times where the AI stuff blows up, and the Amazon one seems to be like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. I saw somebody, I don't know, they were like, oh, maybe this picture of a clown will trigger PTSID I have from seeing a clown in my childhood, and they gave this wildly unhinged story, and the host like kind of handled it gracefully, like, oh, I understand how that would really bother you. This may not be the right product for you. And I was like, that kind of did a pretty good job.

Jordan 13:38

Yes, not bad. Yeah, it's just it feels like the Wild West a little bit with like AI and all this like integration. I'm I'm starting to feel a little bit of like overwhelm with how many different things are getting integrated. Cause I think I saw something about Spotify like also adding the ability to create like AI generated music based on your music tastes and so like create like a new song. And to me, that's just it's just it feels like a bit much. And I will say, I'm normally not like this, um, especially with all the discussions that we've had, especially around like the companies, like uh, I actually can't remember what the company's called, but the one that is like generating hundreds of episodes every inception point, yes. So we already, we already talked about that. We we said our piece about it. We don't love it. And I'm also not too concerned about it. But then when it started like also introducing these like AI generated podcasts that like listeners can just do on the fly about like whatever topic they want, and it it made it sound at first like it was pulling from other podcasts and stuff like that. It just gave me the ick and it made me a little bit worried if I'm being honest. And then when I've looked into it a little bit deeper, I thought, oh, phew, this is just like notebook LM. They're not actually competing with real podcasters, they're just they're competing with other chat bots, and this is probably one of those fads that's gonna like like Clubhouse or whatever that's gonna like not be used as much and it's just gonna kind of fade into the mist.

What Still Counts As A Podcast

Alban 15:03

Yeah, I'd really point people back to this old article. I know you've read it, Kevin. All podcaster shows, not all shows are podcasts from John Gruber from 2019. He wrote it during you know, uh Luminary launching, which was gonna do a bunch, it was basically trying to be the Netflix of podcasts, you know, a bunch of really high-end shows. They're all behind a paywall. It didn't end up working out um like you know, many ideas don't. But he his whole point was a podcast is distributed audio through RSS feed on the open web. And it's worth like trying to keep that uh definition in place. We can have shows, and we've the further and further we've gone, we say, okay, video content distributed through HLS is now a podcast. And we're getting so far that you hear stuff, and it's like, oh, but you can listen to a podcast about the reviews of like stuff on Amazon. You can listen to a podcast that's a summary of a review. It's like it's just people are using it to mean, I don't know, listening to things.

Jordan 16:08

Yeah.

Alban 16:10

I think it's valuable to try to keep like the definition a little bit tighter so that it still has some meaning.

Kevin 16:16

Yeah. I I mean, I think that's a valid argument to be made. Surprisingly, I will be the I'll take the optimistic approach to this news and I will say that I'm sort of excited that these companies find it valuable enough to figure out we have a bunch of written content that people seem interested in, but we know a lot of people like listening to stuff. And there's a lot of environments where uh demanding the person's full attention to be able to read something, whether it be review summaries on Amazon or answers to questions um that you're typing into uh an AI chatbot or something like that, uh, your full attention isn't always available. It's not always the best experience. And so they are investing a lot of time and resources in and saying we can make those audio experiences as well. Uh I do think that that stuff will start to compete with podcasts because anytime you have available to listen to something, um right now you have like music that you can listen to, you have audiobooks, and like the traditional definition of a podcast. Those are the things that are kind of like readily available for you to listen to. And now if these experiences start getting better, there'll be another thing in the category. So it will compete a little bit, but I don't necessarily know that it's um I don't I don't know that it's like a big threat. I just think it's again my positive take is that I like audio experiences. There are times when I go on a long car ride and I'm like, I'm in the mood for a book, and I know that's different than a podcast, but um, for whatever reason, I just want to hear a book right now. And so I'll cue up the Audible app and I'll find a book that I want to listen to or resume a book I've been listening to. There's of course I have some of my favorite podcasts, and so if they've dropped a new episode, I want to listen to that. There's times when I just want to listen to music, and there's times when I now, a new thing in my life is that it's a short drive, but I've got something on my mind that I might want to have a conversation with my little chat GPT friend. So I pop her open and we start chatting about a topic, maybe something work-related or something, or a question that my kid asked. I didn't know the answer to. But I love that these audio experiences are getting richer and stuff. And and I think it's additive overall, but at the same time, you have to recognize that, well, that 10-minute drive that you were just talking to that AI bot could have been 10 minutes you were listening to a podcast. So it is gonna like raise the bar in terms of people are gonna have more choices. And if you want them to choose your content over something else, then we have to produce better content as podcasters. But I think again, being optimistic and the the rising tide lifts all boats, like the more people get into, I enjoy uh private time, I enjoy walking the dog, I enjoy uh exercising, I enjoy going for long car drives now because I enjoy audio experiences. I think overall it helps podcasters.

Jordan 18:57

I think that's well put. All right. So if you want to hear us cover a topic or um a current event or a question that you have in the future, go ahead and tap the Set Us Fam Mail link in the show notes. And until next time, thanks for listening and keep podcasting.