Jason Carter, Ruth Fitzsimons, and Spotify - what are they "play"ing at? - Podnews Weekly Review

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It kind of feels this year people know it's here
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Sam Sethi (00:28):
Jason Carter from the podcast show London on what to
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Ruth Fitzsimons from Bower on what Bower are doing in
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Plus, podx acquires Lemonada.
It's been a taxing week forApple and Spotify adds
PlayCounts.
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Sam Sethi (01:04):
Pod News Weekly Review.
Right, James, this is going tobe a seismic week, I think.
I genuinely think.
Some of the announcements thisweek are quite substantial, but
let's kick off with Spotify at aplay counter.
Go on then.
James.
What's the play counter?
Now, this is really interesting.
So some people have beenviewing this as being the world

(01:27):
is falling in and this is theworst thing that Spotify could
ever do.
Other people are going they'rejust doing what YouTube does and
we're all cool with YouTube, soyou know how.
Youtube has a plays counter.
So when you're watching a pieceof video, then you know that
you know 24,000 people have seenit before you.
Well, spotify is going to doexactly the same thing in the

(01:49):
Spotify app for podcasts, sothis show will have a play
counter.
May even have one.
Now, who knows, it'll probablysay three, no no, I've got my
grandma to listen.
We're okay, that's four.
There you go.
I would have thought that she'dbe listening on True Fans, but
anyway.
She hates me.

(02:11):
So they are adding a play count, and some podcasters have said
how dreadful you are sharing ourprivate information, which is
the amount of plays.
As you know, I've always beentalking about how we should be
as open as possible with that,and we should just be talking
about plays and how much playswe get, which is why the numbers

(02:32):
for this show are public,because I think that that's the
right thing, but there are somepodcasters who think that that's
a bad plan.
The other side of it, though,is what's a play?
What do you think a play?
is Sam.
It's a made-up number bySpotify and YouTube to increase
the amount of play counts.
Yes, correct.

(02:55):
It literally is a made-up number.
I asked them as soon as theymade the announcement.
I said so, what's thedefinition of a play?
And they came back with someflowery words and I said, yes,
thanks, but what's thedefinition of a play?
And they gave me nothing.
The following day, dan Meisnerand I thought that we had worked

(03:17):
out what a play actually was bylooking at some of the code in
the Spotify website, and so wewent back to Spotify and we said
okay, so a play is this then isit?
And Spotify actually turnedaround and said no, it's not
actually that, and we're stillnot going to tell you what it is
.

(03:38):
Well, it is that, but bugger offand stop being a pig.
No, I mean, it really wasn't.
They've just reused somethingon their website.
So yeah, so it was very odd.
The only thing that they havetold us is that it is a measure
of intentional engagement, whichis about as far as they went.

(04:00):
Um, I got a statement from themum on Thursday, which um said
that um, it it's intended tocapture user intent, it uses a
number of proprietary signalsand that's it, um so, yes, so we
don't know what plays are.
Bullshit.
Well, so we don't know whatplays are and on the other side,

(04:25):
um, uh, we should probably notforget that YouTube, you know, a
play is in YouTube Again, it'stotally made up.
It's um, it's something thatYouTube has never in all of
YouTube's history actually um,given a definition of what a
play is there.
So we're in a position wherewe've got IAB figures out there

(04:47):
which Spotify is you knowignoring and instead we've got
this thing called a play andnobody really knows who it is.
But on the other side, at leastwe now have a, you would assume
, relatively consistent way ofcomparing different shows on

(05:07):
Spotify, because they'll all beworking out the play number in
exactly the same way.
Yeah, but what if I hit start,stop, start, stop, start, stop.
Is that a play every time?
Well, we don't know.
We don't know on Spotify is thequick answer.
The one thing that Spotify didtell me is that they've been
pretty careful to make sure thatyou can't game it, so they've

(05:29):
presumably built something inthere.
I mean, if I was Spotify, justwork it.
Work a play out in terms of alogged in user, because that's
the easiest way to avoid peoplegaming it, because who's who's
going to sit there and log intodifferent users all the time, um
?
But so they say it's going tobe.
You know, um, you won't be ableto game the uh system, but

(05:51):
that's pretty well all that.
We know.
Good or bad, you think, sam uh?
mixed.
Actually, I think, good in thesense that, yes, it's more data,
it's more information.
People who don't want theirplay count revealed generally
are not getting high engagementanyway, and then they've relied
on that false number ofdownloads to basically say that

(06:15):
they've got a very high-ratedshow.
We always say and Dan Meisnersays it very well a download is
not a listen and you know.
So, yeah, yeah, people whodon't like it are going to be
those that don't want itrevealed, and those that are
getting high play counts anywaywon't care.
So, on that sense, I think it'sgood.
On the bad, if we haven't got auniversal metric, as we've just

(06:38):
described, and we have no wayof knowing how to measure a play
, then we can't measure theother parts that are important
listen time, percent completedunless they're already in the
Spotify dashboard.
Yeah, now those are in theSpotify dashboard, which is
interesting, and they are alsokeeping streams, which is the 60
second or over number.

(06:59):
They're keeping that formonetization, so that doesn't
end up changing.
But yes, I mean, I guess on theother side, truefans has a play
count as well, doesn't it?
We do?
How do you calculate that then?
So okay, is it a proprietarysystem?
No, it's a very open system.
It's physically you start hit,play and then you stop hit, play

(07:22):
, play, and then we basicallywork out within a session.
Um, so if you then do start,stop, start, stop, we don't
count that as multiple plays.
We know that you're in thatsession.
Um, it's when we submitactivity.
Um, yeah, when you finishplaying and you start to play
the next podcast episode.
Oh, that makes, that makes sense, doesn't?

(07:43):
it.
Yes, and that's how we do ours,yeah.
Yeah, nice, and is there aminimum 60-second thing?
No, we have.
Three minutes is a play.
We don't do 60 seconds, and so,for example, with ratings and
reviews, it's a similar thing.
You have to have listened to10% of the episode length before

(08:06):
we allow you to do a rating orreview nice, nice, well, well,
there we are.
Um so, uh, yes, so all of thatwas very exciting at starts are
going away.
Uh, is my understanding.
And um, yes, that's basicallyall of that.
They've also made a number ofother content announcements.
They're going to be on samsungtvs.

(08:27):
That's basically all of that.
They've also made a number ofother content announcements.
They're going to be on SamsungTVs.
That's exciting, isn't it?
You know they're doing morethings to do with apps and blah,
blah, blah, but yeah, that'sthe big exciting thing.
I'm looking forward to seeingthose play numbers appearing for
this show and for other showsas well.
I suspect that they may bequite revealing.

(08:48):
They will be, but once peoplehave worked out how to game it
and they will they will game it.
They will work out a way toincrease their play count, if
that's important to people.
Eventually, anyway, good luckSpotify.
Um, actually genuinely goodluck, because I think, look, if
they're going to give you moredata, let's not decry it, even

(09:12):
if we don't think it's validdata right now.
But it's a starting point and Ithink you know better to have
something rather than nothingyeah, no, I, I agree and I've.
I've always always beeninterested in open data, and OP3
is a great way to publish yourdata, make it visible, and I
think that's a great plan.

(09:32):
So go away and do that.
As long as, obviously, you knowGoogle isn't doing weird things
with your feed and giving youmillions of people in Malaysia,
then it all makes sense.
Your play count is through theroof Now.
Podx, the company that likes toacquire other companies, has
acquired Limonada Media Jamesfor $30 million.

(09:55):
Now, two things in that.
First of all, wow, it'sacquired Limonada Media and
moved into the US.
But they don't often give theamount that they've used in the
acquisition either.
No, that is interesting.
So the $30 million has comefrom Bloomberg, so that's Ashley

(10:18):
Carman's excellent reportingall over again.
It certainly wasn't in thepress release that they gave, so
I'm imagining that that's whatthey tipped, Ashley.
But yeah, I mean that is a bigdeal from a big European
podcasting powerhouse.
You know, as it really is nowswooping in and snapping up a

(10:45):
majority stake in Lemonada Media.
I think that that's reallyinteresting.
I do think that they're going toacquire more.
So my question to you, james,is who next?
They won't have just onecompany in the US, right?
That's a crazy strategy, sothere must be other companies in
play.
Now who?
would you guess?

(11:05):
Oh gosh, I wouldn't have thefaintest idea.
I mean, I know that Odyssey aretalking about can they get some
buyers for some of theirpodcast properties?
So maybe there's somethingthere.
But I mean, there are lots andlots of great US companies.
But if there's one thing thatI've learned from following PodX
and you know and you have aswell for a long time is that

(11:26):
actually, you know they are areally interesting company
because they make really bigpurchases.
You know, buying Listen, buyingPlatform Media in the UK.
Those were two big oldcompanies, so they don't do
things by halves, were two bigold companies, so they don't do

(11:47):
things by halves.
And I saw some disparagingcomment on the internet about
well, how is PodX funding this?
Is it just more debt andeverything else?
They've not seen how PodX works.
It's all being funded by a verylarge venture capitalist.
You know organisation and yeah,they've got the money for this
sort of thing.

(12:07):
So no fascinating, I think.
So the company I think theymight buy is Pave.
That is my thought.
Ah yes, interesting.
I think the CEO of Pave hisname escapes me for a minute Max
Cutler.
I think he's very good atbuilding and selling rapidly yes

(12:29):
, well, he is coming to podcastshow london and I'm sure that
the podx people will be.
In fact, I know that the podxpeople, all of the products
companies, are coming to podcastshow london.
So, um, let let the rumorsourscommence.
Yes.
If anyone sees Max talking toPatrick from PodX, we know the

(12:50):
answer.
Now the thing when I look atsomething like a PodX and you go
, okay, acquisition, acquisition.
The whole is greater than thesum of the parts.
What is the exit strategy?
Is it an IPO?
I can't see it as a trade sale.
I can't see an Amazon buyingthem, I can't see an Apple
buying them.
So I'm not quite sure whatthey're acquiring it for,

(13:14):
because those investors inSweden, as lovely as they are,
are not doing it for love ormoney.
Well, sorry, they are doing itfor money.
They're not doing it for love.
So, fundamentally, they want areturn, and I can only think of
an IPO as a return on this,unless you have a different idea
.
Yes, I, I, I, uh, yeah, I don'tknow, is the quick answer, Um, I

(13:36):
mean, you know, you, they couldbe playing the long game, um,
because you know, uh, and soactually just making sure that
all of these companies are lean,are working with a very low
cost and so therefore can justget more content out and earn
more money that way.
So that's what they could bedoing, but yeah, who knows?

(13:59):
Or Netflix could buy them.
That would be interesting.
Oh, it would indeed.
Yeah, in Web 1.0, I worked fora company called CMGI out of
Boston and they bought AltaVistato Rome Navier.
They bought 60 companies samemodel and then IPO'd, made an
absolute killing, yeah.
And then in the dot-com crash,they actually made a massive

(14:20):
fall.
But anyway it worked for them.
Ah, altavista, there's a, butanyway it worked for them.
Ah, alta Vista.
Yes, now it's been a taxingweek for Apple.
Are they cooked, james?
Are they cooked?
Hey, I see what you did thereWell, so this is important for
podcasting.
First of all, what we're goingto talk about, because

(14:46):
podcasting needs money thatdoesn't necessarily come from
advertising and, as we'll talkabout later, there is a lot of
money in podcasting which isn'tjust ad dollars, and so
conversations around Apple's apptax Apple's 30% tax that they
give on developers is a veryimportant thing for podcasting.

(15:09):
So what has actually gone onover the last week?
Well, from what I can read,apple basically lost one element
of the case.
They won nine elements againstEpic, but the one element's the
main one, which it allows appdevelopers to now point
externally to a website whereyou can complete the transaction

(15:31):
.
So, spotify, jesus, they werequick off the mark.
They must have had that in theold dev box waiting to get out
and go, because I think it wasWednesday that the court case
was announced.
Thursday they put it into theapp store Friday.
It was Wednesday that the courtcase was announced.
Thursday they put it into theApp Store.
Friday it was available.
So what they can do now is say,yes, you can change your

(15:52):
subscription or do other thingslike audio books or buy a
subscription.
Yeah.
Or audio book payments, and theycan now put the website that
Spotify will take thetransaction on and pay zero to
Apple, which is amazing.
Yes, um, no, I, I, I saw thatand that that was uh, that was

(16:12):
amazing.
I think the other company thatis apparently moving quite fast
is Patreon, um, which, which, uh, you know again, that is great
news for the podcasting world,because there is a lot of money
from Patreon into podcasting.
So, yeah, I mean, I found all ofthat really interesting.

(16:33):
Now, we should say it's only inthe US, so Spotify still can't,
in any other country in theworld, link to their website for
a way of purchasing a Spotifysubscription, because, typical
Apple, they're doing a bit ofmalicious compliance here.
They are allowing it in the US,but the US only, and so

(16:57):
therefore, if you're in Canada,as I am today, you still won't
be able to do that.
So it's quite interesting onthat side.
Of course, the EU is going totake a keen interest, and there
must come a point where Apple isgoing to turn around and say,
well, we can't allow it in theEuropean Union, but then not in

(17:21):
Canada and not in the UK, butyes, in the US.
And you can imagine that it'sjust going to be a game, you
know, for them, and at somepoint they'll just have to, you
know, open it up to everybody,and of course, they've filed a
notice of appeal as well, whichis interesting too.
Yeah, I mean they had to do that, I guess.
But the judge has said theyhave no grounds for the appeal

(17:46):
because it was a judgment andthey failed to adhere to the
judgment.
There's no appeal.
The original ruling is final,that's it.
So why they're appealing thejudgment, I have no idea.
And something that you've alsospotted is that Amazon have been
quick off the mark as well interms of their app.
The Amazon Kindle app nowactually allows you to buy books

(18:10):
, not just read them, which, ofcourse, you know if you're a
consumer.
It must have been really weird.
You go into Amazon Kindle Infact, I remember doing this
going into the Amazon Kindle appand you're going OK, well, I'd
like to buy a book, where do Ibuy a book?
And it turns out that you can't.
No, you had to preload, you hadto buy it outside.
Yeah, yeah.

(18:30):
Yeah, so what a mess.
I think the CEO of Basecamp,david Hanson, said it
beautifully.
Cook should have listened toSchiller.
Give this one up, apple.
By doubling, tripling orquadrupling down on this
malfeasance to save a fewmarginal dollars, you're
torching your reputation andpossibly their contempt case.

(18:52):
Crazy Cook has to go.
Yes, and he would not be theonly person asking for Tim Cook
to retire.
Tim Cook to retire John Gruber.
As I think we mentioned lastweek, john Gruber wrote a very

(19:12):
negative post, essentiallyintimating not saying it out
loud, but essentially intimatingthat maybe now's the time for
Tim to say thank you very much,it's been fun and to go and to
give the bat over to PhilSchiller, who appears to be the
only one at Apple that actuallylooked at this and thought that

(19:33):
the right and said what theright thing to do was.
So, yeah, it's difficult timesfor Tim Cook and, to be fair,
difficult times for Apple as awhole.
They seem to be missing allkinds of things right now.
So it's, yeah, it's very hardfor them.
Well, to make matters worse,there's now a class action

(19:54):
lawsuit been brought by PureSweat Basketball, but many other
developers have joined thatclass action.
They've said that, basically,pure Sweat would have been able
to sell subscriptions to appsdirectly to its customers had
Apple adhered to the rulingoriginally.
Oh, okay, Right, yes, that makessense.
So it's basically you know, youowe us Apple because we should

(20:18):
have earned more money than wedid.
Yeah, Well, that's going to beinteresting.
Watch this space in terms ofthat, oh it gets worse, james,
the US Congress has now broughtforward a new bill that will
force Apple to allow third-partyapp stores.
It's called the App StoreFreedom Act and that was

(20:40):
introduced this Tuesday, and itrequires large app store
operators like Apple to letusers install third-party app
stores, but also to make themthe default app store.
It's a copy of the Europeanruling, but the US are now doing
this to Apple.
So 1-800-TRUMP, I think is anumber you're looking for.

(21:01):
Tim Trump, I think is a numberyou're looking for Tim.
Yes, I'm sure that Tim issitting, you know, in his
palatial palace and going.
I thought I spent $1 millionfor that man, Not quite sure why
he sounds like that.
No, I don't think he's asophomore.

(21:24):
I think I am.
So, yes, yeah.
So I think Apple, you know, ifthey should follow what Phil
Schiller was saying, they shouldcut their losses here.
They should allow third-partyapps like podcast apps would be
great if they can be the defaultpodcast app they should add to
home screen.
Change that, they, you know.
I think there's so many thingsthey could do to be the good guy

(21:44):
and get people back on board.
Embrace podcasting 2.0 fully.
Become that champion againstspotify.
Enable apple pay to use micropayments, not not bitcoin sats,
but smaller denominations offiat currency.
There are so many things theycould do and they're failing to
do all of them, I'm afraid.
Now you say that Tim Cook isn'ta Southerner.

(22:07):
He was born in Mobile inAlabama.
Well, there you go.
What do I know then?
So maybe that was the rightaccent.
Every American has just cringed.
I mean, we cringe when they do.
Mary Poppins and Dick Van Dyke,oh my God, yes.
All right, ladies and gents.

Comical poem suitable for the occasion,
extemporised and thought upbefore your very eyes.
All right, here we go.

Sam Sethi (22:35):
I mean, all joking aside, it's interesting times
for the big tech companies,because you've got Apple having
all of these problems with.
You know essentially the partof their business which is doing
the best right now, which isApple services, which, by the
way, apple podcast is part of.
You have Google, which is alsounder an awful lot of pressure
right now to sell Google Chromeand to sort of pass that off to

(23:00):
another part of the industrysomehow, to another part of the
industry somehow, and so it'sessentially the big breakup of
the two big companies, the twobig internet companies that are
out there.
It's going to be veryinteresting to see what happens
there, but bad thingspotentially on the horizon for

(23:23):
both Apple and for Google.
Well, it got worse for Googlebecause Phil Schiller in the
court case said that they arelooking at replacing Google
which is one of the requirementsfrom the court case as the
default search engine the 20billion that they get every year
with an AI search.
On the back of that, googleshare price dropped and they

(23:44):
lost $1.5 billion just on thatone statement.
And I would say, by the way, ifyou've ever tried to change the
default search engine that yourphone uses, you actually can't
change it to a search engine ofyour choice.
On the iPhone, it gives you achoice of five.

(24:05):
I think there are rules abouthow that choice of five exists,
but there's something I thinkDuckDuckGo is one of them,
ecosia is another one.
There are a few others, but ifyou want to change it, for
example, to the one that I use,which is a paid search engine
called Cargill, which isbrilliant, which is a paid
search engine called Cargill,which is brilliant, then you
actually can't change yourdefault search.

(24:28):
Weirdly, on Android phones youcan, you have total control, but
on Apple phones you don't.
And who's the search company?
Oh, it's Google, which runsAndroid.
So, yeah, so it's.
I mean any more consumer choicethere is, I think, a good thing

(24:48):
.
If I'd paid 20 billion, Iwouldn't want it to be changed
either.
Now, last bit's a couple of badnews, sadly for Apple.
Last week in London they had a500 million court case against
them.
So Optus, which is in the US,won their court case in London

(25:09):
for their 4G patents.
Apple are having to pay them inone lump sum, $502 million, and
I thought, okay, should Imention that?
But it happens to be thelargest patent damages award in
UK history.
So that was last week as well.
On the back of that, so welldone.
And then Tim came out and saidalso because of Trump's tariffs,

(25:32):
they've got a $900 million costbased on the Trump tariff as
well.
Well done.
Yes, those tariffs are going tobe difficult for Apple.
And of course you've got theadditional tariffs which have
been announced in terms of moviemaking.
Now, why would that beinteresting to Apple?
Well, of course you've gotApple TV+, which Apple also has,

(25:58):
and if, all of a sudden,foreign content foreign to the
US content costs them twice asmuch to purchase, foreign
content, foreign to the UScontent costs them twice as much
to purchase, then that's goingto be an issue too.
I mean, I have to say it wouldbe an excellent schadenfreude to
see Apple being, you know,having issues with patents,

(26:18):
given that I went to Apple in, Ithink, 2005, maybe 2006.
And I went to explain a newpiece of open technology that I
had put together, and they tooklots of notes.
And then one of the people inthe meeting submitted a patent

(26:39):
three months later for the verything that I and a colleague had
worked on.
Later, for the very thing thatI and a colleague had worked on,
and it was a patent for thetechnology that I and a
colleague had actually worked on.
So Apple stole a technologyfrom us.
Now, I mean, that hasn'tstopped that tech from being

(27:01):
used, because I don't think thatApple quite have the balls to
go and chase for patentinfringement.
But gosh, you know that is acompany with some weird ethics
around patents, so I'm delightedto see some of those weird
ethics backfiring on them, sohurrah.
Yes, there is even rumours thatbing are trying to replace

(27:25):
google as the ai enhanced searchengine.
Not seeing that one happeningmyself.
So, moving on, james, that's alittle bit about spotify.
Hopefully no more about spotify.
Um, moving up.
Uh, youtube has some newpricing now.
We've talked about youtubepremium Lite being available in
the US, which I thought was avery aggressive stance from

(27:47):
YouTube $7.99 for podcasts,ad-free and music, which I
thought wow.
Spotify is going to have toreact.
Well, youtube's now come outwith another premium version
meant for two people.
They're testing it in India,france, taiwan and Hong Kong,
but they do expect to put thatinto the US market as well and

(28:10):
they are really going to go formultiple different price points
that are going to target Spotify.
Yes, it's very interesting.
I mean, I do think that YouTubemusic is a big old thing, and I
don't think that people havefully grasped how much of a
competitor it is to Spotify,particularly since, actually,

(28:32):
google doesn't necessarily needto make any profit out of it.
You know either, there has beena thing called Spotify Duo,
which has existed for a long,long time, which is a discounted
plan for two people who livetogether, and so this is their
equivalent of Spotify Duo forpairs of people, and they're

(28:54):
testing it currently.
So, yeah, you know, I mean,it's just another way of getting
some new people signing up thataren't necessarily signing up
already.
We talked about it last weekthat Spotify have increased
their subscription pricing inEurope.
They haven't done it in the USmarket, but I think I've talked

(29:16):
about I don't know how much morethey can increase the price
before people go.
Enough is enough.
Well, deloitte came out with asurvey this week which said that
60% of the respondents in theirsurvey said they would cancel
their favorite streaming serviceif the price, if the price, is
raised by an additional fivedollars per month.

(29:36):
So that's the basic elasticitylevel five more dollars and
people are going to start to sayno, enough's enough yes, and
you know I mean we have added um, I think we added max uh last
week, and so one of the waysthat I made sure that we could
afford max, as well as all ofthe other services that we have,
is I went around some of theother services.

(29:57):
We've got a service calledbinge uh here in australia and I
I worked out that there was alower price that we could get
onto there, which has sort ofoffset the cost of Macs a little
bit, and I'm sure that manyother people will just be going
through and going.
How can I save money?
For example, how can I savemoney on my Spotify family

(30:18):
account?
Well, maybe I'll just useSpotify Duo, because you know
there are only two people whouse it.
So, yeah, I think it'scertainly something that we will
see more of, particularlyassuming that we go into some
form of a global recession,which is probably quite likely,
then that's certainly somethingto bear in mind.

(30:39):
Yeah, my 25-year-old daughter'smoving out this weekend.
Maybe I should go to Spotify,jira, don't think she'll love me
if I did that.
Well, she has to live in thesame, in the same space to get a
part of a Spotify family.
Oh no, they don't Cause my otherone's at university.
No, well, she's at universityand still has my family account.

(31:01):
So well, there you go there yougo Now podcasting.
we always wonder how big it is.
Now We've seen the $2 billionUS ad market being increased, I
think, to $2.4 billion now beingestimated.
Somebody's come up with areally crazy global number,
james.
Why and how?

(31:21):
Yes, and it's an interesting.
So, firstly, it's been puttogether by Hernan Lopez.
Now, hernan was the co-founderof Wondery and so knows a thing
or two about podcasting.
You would think that wascertainly some of the people

(31:42):
who've put this together.
But the point of that $2.4billion number is that $2.4
billion is only for the US andonly for ad revenue, and
podcasting earns money fromother ways as well.
It earns money from consumerrevenue, it earns money from

(32:03):
video.
It earns money from a bunch ofother places, and there are
actually other countries apartfrom the US, which I know may
come as a surprise, but yeah.
So this data looks at theglobal podcast industry and also
includes things like consumerrevenue, so that's things like

(32:23):
Patreon, as well as subscriptionrevenue and all of that and
they have come up with $7.3billion as a grand total of what
the industry is worth, and whenyou dive into it, the US is two
thirds of that, earning $4.7billion.

(32:45):
Now you might be thinking, well,hang on a minute.
The IB said it was 2.4.
Well, yes, they did, but it wasonly 2.4 in terms of ad revenue
, not 2.4 in terms of all of theother stuff in there as well.
So, yeah, it was a really nicefigure to see.
I looked at the numbers and Ithought actually these make
sense to me, and the way thatthey have been explained in the

(33:13):
presentation which you candownload, I thought was really
clear as well.
So it's great to see finallysomething that actually points
out that podcasting is a globalmarket, not just a US market,
and good to see an overall viewof that.
As I'm there talking to you, ofcourse, I've suddenly realised
why Hanan's new company iscalled Owl Co.
Because, of course, wonderyused to have an owl as a mascot.

(33:36):
Oh, OK.
I've just suddenly realised thatthat's very clever.
Well done, Hanan.
That's a clever thing.
Nothing to do with twit-twahoo,then?
Okay, fine.
Now talking about the US marketwhizzing around the world,
President Trump has signed oneof his executive orders.
I don't know if he thinks he'sa king, but he's aimed this at

(33:59):
NPR and PBS.
What's he doing, James?
Yes, he is trying to eliminatefederal funding for NPR and for
PBS.
What's he doing, James?
Yes, he is trying to eliminatefederal funding for NPR and for
PBS.
Now, public funding for radioand TV costs the American
taxpayer $1.60 a year, so it'snot an awful lot.
So he's not saving himself anawful lot by doing that, but

(34:22):
he's clearly trying to defund asmuch as he possibly can.
Anything that he doesn't fullyunderstand he's trying to defund
, and that's quite a lot ofthings.
So, yes, we've obviously seen atalk about defunding the CBC
here in Canada.
We've talked about defundingthe BBC as well in the UK, which

(34:48):
are all very interesting ideasbut very bad for everybody.
So let's hope that none of thathappens.
But, yes, the defunding of NPRand PBS is quite a concern, to
be honest.
Yeah, it's often authoritarianright-wing leaders who tend to.

(35:08):
We've seen it in Turkey, russia, north Korea.
So it's a shame that Americaisn't looking to keep its open
free radio, yes, and they havelost a court case around Voice
of America and they're having tostart broadcasting that again
and that might sound as ifthat's a win, but the problem is
that when Voice of America wentoff air a month or so ago, then

(35:34):
all of their frequencies fellsilent and the Chinese and the
Russians have jumped onto thosefrequencies.
So actually VOA can't get backuh in some of the places where
they were, um, because the, thetransmitter operators, have
signed a new contract with uh,either China Radio International
or with uh, sputnik, theRussian folk Um, so, um, yeah,

(35:58):
you know, there's some greatamount of damage.
That's uh, that's uh happenedthere.
So, um, yeah, Staying in the US.
Then Edison Research releasedthe top 50.
Anything new in there, James?
I mean there's a debut, rottenMango, which made its debut in
the top 10.
And, interesting as well, theMel Robbins podcast making the

(36:20):
top 50 for the first time atnumber 15.
Now, every time I see these top50 podcast charts for other
countries, mel Robbins is numberone in there.
The fact that she wasn't in thetop 15, the fact that she
wasn't in the top 50 of theEdison podcast charts, was
curious.
But that is no longer the caseand Mel Robbins is there at

(36:43):
number 15.
So yeah, interesting stuff,rotten Mango.
By the way, you may bewondering what on earth is that.
It's hosted by a formerYouTuber turned podcast host.
There's a phrase you don't hearvery often, stephanie Su, and

(37:04):
it's a true crime podcast, asyou might guess.
But it was very prominentlyfeatured in the YouTube press
release about YouTube's 1billion monthly users.
So that may well be whereRotten Mango has sort of got a
bit more of its push.
Now two companies have announcedtheir financials Asiris XM and
Cumulus.
Strangely or sadly, both aredown.

(37:27):
They are.
Now we don't have very clearnumbers for either, in terms of
podcasting.
I mean, certainly not forSiriusXM.
Podcasting is thrown into thepart of their business which is
called Pandora and off platform,and that was down 2% year on

(37:53):
year.
Now, what may have happenedthere is that, I mean, Pandora
is a declining product Fewer andfewer people are using Pandora
because you know Spotify will dojust as good a job, to be
honest.
And so therefore, it may justbe that Pandora has, you know,
gone down by 10% and podcastingonly went up by 5%, and so
therefore, you know that's howmaths works, so difficult to

(38:14):
know.
But Cumulus Media, which alsoowns Westwood, One which
recently came off the stockmarket because they couldn't
keep their stock market pricehigh enough they say well, they
say two things.
They say that either, podcastrevenue increased by 39% if you

(38:35):
ignore the daily wire, whichthey lost at the end of last
year, but if you include theDaily Wire in the figures, then
their podcast revenue wasactually down by 13%.
So I worry whether or not wewill see a bunch of people
seeing much lower figures as wemove through this year, Because

(38:58):
if you are a large company andyou are being concerned about
tariffs and things like that,then the first thing that you're
going to do is you're going tostop advertising until you've
got some clarity about what'sgoing on.
Perhaps that's one of thethings that may happen.
Interestingly, that might meangood news for the UK, because

(39:20):
Trump is apparently just aboutto announce a big trade deal
with the UK, the first tradedeal of the Trump administration
.
So you know who knows?
Can I just say seeing isbelieving.
Yes nobody has any idea what'sgoing on there.
Yeah, he's got to put his headdown on the pillow and wake up
tomorrow with another idea.
So anyway.

(39:41):
Now in Canada a Canadian podcastlistener.
Now in Canada, the Canadianpodcast listener.
That is a yearly bit ofresearch into Canadian podcast
listeners and that will containsome video stuff when it comes
out later on this year.
They've just announced, whichis good news.
So that's going on here inCanada.

(40:02):
In Germany, wondery isbeginning to sell podcast ads
for other podcasts.
They've done two deals onewhich is a weekly sort of comedy

(40:23):
chat show and a sports show aswell.
So interesting seeing Wondery,you know, diving into the German
market.
It's a very interesting andmature market in Europe.
So interesting to end up seeingthat.
In the UK, james, we heard fromMessenger.
Jake told us that they've donea deal with the London Standard
newspaper.
What have they done?
Yes, so the London Standard usedto be called the Evening

(40:44):
Standard, but now it doesn'treally come out in the evening.
It's a website rather than aprinted paper, apart from one
day a week, and that hasessentially given control over
all of its audio output podcasts, if you like to message heard,
and that is actually somethingthat happens quite a lot in the

(41:05):
US.
So I think so.
The Wall Street Journal workswith Spotify on their daily
podcast.
There are a few other examplesof people working together and
interesting seeing that thatidea has been taken out now into
the UK as well.

(41:28):
I wonder whether this is aprecursor to an acquisition.
I mean maybe, but you know, Imean it may just be that
actually the right people to berunning your podcast strategy is
a podcast company, so it mayjust be that.
But yeah, interesting and goodnews for the folks at Message
Heard Christiane Amanpour, whois, of course, on CNN, or at

(41:52):
least currently on CNN.
We mentioned last week that shehad got a deal with Global, the
big UK commercial radiooperator.
It turns out that she has a newshow coming out.
We don't actually know quitewhen, but the new podcast is
going to be with her formerhusband.
They were married for 20 yearsa former US diplomat called

(42:16):
Jamie Rubin, and I think they'recalling it the X Files,
something like that.
It's very clever.
Ex Files, yes, but yes.
So they're definitely movingfast on that.
So that's a fascinating thingto watch what's going on with
Global there.

(42:36):
The other big radio group isBauer, and they have sold a
stake in their digital audiomarketplace.
James, why?
Yes, bauer have done a typicalBauer thing.
They used to own half of acompany called Octave and the
other half was owned by News UK,by Rupert Murdoch's company,

(43:00):
and they sold that half to NewsUK last month and this month
they said oh, we're going toroll out.
I think it's pronounced Audio Zor Audio Xe Should ask.
Elon Musk.
He'll know, yeah, so they'rerolling that out, and Simon

(43:23):
Kilby, who is their commercialboss, said that it has always
been their long-term strategicplan.
So basically they just hadOctave as a way of earning money
until they could get their acttogether in terms of that.
But Bauer is a fascinatingcompany.
It'd be brilliant now, if wecan, to actually get somebody

(43:47):
from Bauer talking a little bitmore about what they're doing in
this space.
Well, as always, your wish is mycommand.
We managed to talk to our goodfriend Ruth Fitzsimons.
She's the new Director ofDigital for Bauer Island and we
started off by asking her whator who is Bauer?

So I think if you don't know Bauer Media, you
probably actually do know BauerMedia, because they are a very
successful radio and publishinggroup originally from Germany,
and actually this year is our150th year of existence.

Sam Sethi (44:19):
Congratulations.

It's like 150 years.
That's really really impressiveand started off in Germany but
is now across multipleterritories across Europe,
Ireland being one of them, andalso very well known in the UK
as well.
It's a brand that I think ineach territory is slightly
different, but at our core wekind of have different parts of

(44:42):
the business publishing, as Imentioned, but also the likes of
audio, and in the UK, of course, you would know some of our
groups like Absolute and that,but here in Ireland we are
probably the largest commercialaudio publisher.
We reach about 42% of allpeople over the age of 15.
And so we'd be a market leaderhere with the likes of Today FM

(45:06):
or News Talk and Go Loud, whichis our podcast arm, but we also
have a number of local radiostations as well, so it's a
mixture of all things audio.

Sam Sethi (45:17):
So with the title of Director of Digital, what does
that mean?
What do you do?

Well, it's really interesting because I
think Bauer, what does that mean?
What do you do?
It was really interestingbecause I think Bauer, and one
of the things that reallyattracted me to Bauer is there's
a real focus now for us abouttrying to step into this digital
moment.
You know we are, as I said,kind of very much the leading
radio group and you know that issomething that has been built
up over the last 25 years, last25 years.

(45:47):
But you know, the digitallandscape has really changed the
way we all interact with audioand, be that podcast or be that,
you know, kind of social mediaclips or video, there's lots of
different ways that we are kindof, you know, integrating those
kind of audio content into ourlives in different forms.
So, you know, for me personally,I oversee the growth of our Go
Loud podcast network and that isa podcast network that we've
grown out in Ireland.
It's owned and operated andwe're working with fantastic

(46:10):
creators here to grow that out.
But it's also about improvingour radio station's digital
presence and our digitalpresence really in the wider
audio ecosystem with third partypodcasting apps or third party
digital products.
We're also really looking toincrease how our users engage

(46:31):
with us.
So we're rolling out a new GoLoud app, which will be a kind
of central point for all of ourlisteners to get all our great
content in one single app.
But apart from that, it's alsolooking at innovation.
It's looking at everything fromnew technologies so everything
from video and AI to you know,kind of more boring backend

(46:52):
stuff, but stuff that'sincredibly important if we want
to keep our journey goingforward.
So, yeah, it's a fairly longlist, but a very exciting thing
to be a part of and, yeah,absolutely delighted to have
joined.

Sam Sethi (47:06):
Now I mean, when did Bauer get into podcasting?
Now, it may be my perception,but it feels like they were
later into the podcasting spacethan maybe Global or other
competitors in the market.

No, I think it's really interesting and I
think that would seem differentdepending on which territory you
were in, because Bauer operatesin a number of different
territories across Europe, sodifferent territories are at
different stages in theirjourney, for sure, and you know,
our colleagues in differentcountries have slightly
different models in each countryas well.
But here in Ireland, no, it'sbeen underway for kind of some

(47:42):
time, for the last several years, and you know we've built out a
network of owned and operatedshows and actually we're at a
point now in in the Irish modelwhere you know, we're working
with the likes of, let's say, aTalking Bollocks or Hold my
Drink, these shows that we workwith, where not only are we
creating content with them,where it's, you know, we're kind

(48:04):
of helping to facilitate theproduction of that content, but
we're also actually going a stepfurther than that we are
putting on shows with them.
We're kind of live shows andlive events.
We're creating subscriptionpackages around them and really
kind of thinking about how wecreate ecosystems around some of
those podcasts.

(48:24):
So, you know, just this yearalone, we'll put on events
across the country in Ireland,from the iconic Vicar Street to
Cork Opera House to Bordigoshand major festivals like All
Together Now.
So you know, it's interesting.
I think as a group we're all atdifferent stages.
But the nice thing about Boweryis we actually, you know, work

(48:49):
on these things called tribes.
So I join colleagues of minefrom the UK or Denmark or
Slovakia or Finland or Portugaland we are all on tribes,
sharing our knowledge across thegroup.
And personally, I find thatgreat.
It's like being able to tap into people and you're like hey,
did this work?
Did this work?

(49:10):
Are we doing it right?
And as always, you know, wejust don't know until we
actually kind of try some ofthese.
But yeah, we're on our journeyinto creating very much an
ecosystem across the board.
So one part of it is the ownedand operated.
That's a really big part.

(49:31):
The other part that we're kindof leaning into now is also, you
know, we want to be the bestpartner in the country for
podcasters.
We want to be the place that youwant to come to, and I think
Bower is in a really uniqueplace when it comes to that,
because you know, if you are ina radio group, you know, as I
said earlier, we reach 42percent of people over the age

(49:52):
of 16 in Ireland so we canreally amplify the messaging and
provide that for podcasters whowant to come and join us us and
you know there are, whilethere's some people who want to
join our owned and operatedpodcast network, we also are
starting to work with selecttalent.
You know kind of who are workingwith us in collaboration and

(50:13):
you know I think for thosepeople what we're able to do is
bring a really established salesteam and a marketing team as
well as this ability to do thelikes of events and
subscriptions and we know how todo those.
So, yeah, it's a reallyexciting time.
And that Irish team I have tosay I've kind of come on board

(50:33):
and Darren and Owen and the teamhere at Go Loud and Pam and Ed
they've been doing amazing workfor the last few years, so I'm
just so pleased to be a part ofthat team.

Sam Sethi (50:44):
So of that reach that you have, are you talking about
that as radio reach or are youtalking about as digital reach,
as in podcasting and radiocombined?

You know it's interesting, that is the radio
reach.
When we come to the podcastingreach, I think that's the part
that you know in Ireland it'shard to get a number for the,
you know, total listeningconsumed.
We know that 38% of thepopulation is consuming podcasts
and we are very fortunate thatour podcast network extends to
us and also Off the Ball, whichis a very, very successful

(51:18):
podcast network and a radio showas well.
But their podcast offering isreally substantial.
So you know we've a verysubstantial reach across the
entire network.
The part that's also interestingwhen we talk about reaches, you
know, are the talent that wework with also have reach
outside of just listening,outside of just audio.

(51:39):
You know, just on Go Loud, our,you know, kind of talent that
we work with have a combinedsocial media reach of about 2.2
million.
So you know, bear in mind thepopulation of Ireland is just
around 5 million, so it's areally substantial reach.
So it is interesting that, likewe are now, I guess in this new

(52:00):
world, starting to think aboutreach being not just this one
linear thing but kind of likehow we are reaching audiences
across their days across thiskind of multimedia format.

Sam Sethi (52:13):
Yeah, the omni-channel strategy now really
is what we're looking at.
So, with this new app thatyou've got coming out, will you
have a strategy that is appfirst, so Bower app first and
then open second, or will it beopen to everyone first and Bower
is just one of the platforms?
I mean, where is your strategyon that?

Yeah, so for Go Loud we're consolidating nine
of our apps into one single appbecause it's just much easier,
much more effective for us towork in that way and I think
we've already built up inIreland that kind of go-loud
brand, and you know that's wherewe're kind of coming from.
It.
Don't get me wrong.
The app is important to us.
It's, you know, we see it as away to invite people into our

(52:57):
living room in a sense you knowwhat I mean To show them what we
have to be able to let themchoose from within our ecosystem
.
And I think the challenge weall face in this is kind of
first party data and being ableto kind of directly speak to our
listeners and to be able to getthe sense of what they like
directly.
But you know we are in afragmented multimedia landscape

(53:19):
and you know there's no, thereis kind of no denying that.
You know what I mean.
So it's a part of our strategy.
But also we are working closelyand we remain closely working
with, you know, kind ofdifferent distribution points,
so be that Apple or Spotify andwho we work with very closely,
or you know kind of variousdifferent, you know, social

(53:41):
media platforms.
For us.
The key thing here is how do we,how do we bring our brand to
our audiences where they are andhow do we make sure that we are
using our ability forstorytelling to keep people
entertained and engaged?
You know, at our heart willalways be a radio or an audio
company.
That's like very, veryimportant to us and we've got

(54:03):
great storytelling here.
But I don't think we can turnback the clock on some of that.
This is the reality of theworld that we live in.
The key thing is are we makingsure that when we are doing
storytelling in these otherformats or other positions, that
we are kind of maintaining ourbrand integrity?
That's very important to us andthat are we making sure that

(54:24):
our standards are held in thoseand that it is very clear to the
audience who or what they'relistening to.
That's really important to us.

Sam Sethi (54:32):
And within the app itself you can control the
experience.
You can get that first partydata.
You can cross sell to otherplatform content that you have.
So I can see why you want that.
Will you have within that videoas well?
I'm assuming you'll be able totune into live radio, so that'll
be part of it.
Listen to the podcast, but willthere be a video element within

(54:55):
that app as well?

Yeah.
So I think kind of, probably inthe longer term that's
something we'd look at, butright now it's an audio product
for sure, but that doesn't meanwe're not introducing video to
some of the other elements ofour audio experience.
You know, at the moment for youknow, even Go Loud podcast
we're actually, you know,recruiting for a new video
creative as part of that teampodcast.

(55:18):
We're actually, you know,recruiting for a new video
creative as part of that teamand our social media executives
and teams.
They also are creating videobehind the scenes video.
So you know, we have seen videobecoming a part of this
landscape to different degrees.
Right, and I think that is.
We should just all be honestabout that, because you know,
for example, we, we didsomething.

(55:39):
We have some incredible video.
Very recently, we're talkingbollocks.
That's a podcast here in Irelandwhich explores various
different topics.
It's absolutely fantastic.
If you haven't heard it, it'stwo working class guys from
Dublin and they're investigating.
They kind of explore differenttopics in each podcast through a
guest and that might beeverything from you know them

(56:01):
talking to a child psychologistand someone who's a leading
child psychologist to talking tothe next day about someone who
does vetting online and used towork for the police and online
you know kind of sexual abuse orkind of like.
Looking at kind of the dark weband you know what's that world
look like Very funny, verythoughtful, very engaging at
kind of the dark web and youknow what's that world look like
very funny, very thoughtful,very engaging, very kind of.

(56:22):
They're very they don't standon ceremony, so they're very
good at kind of getting to theheart of some of these I think
the title of the podcast says itall really.

Sam Sethi (56:30):
So you know, I know they're very, very funny.

They're very good at what they do.
But we recently had a sold outgig for them in vicar Street and
you know the video element ofthat was a big part for the
audience as well.
They loved seeing the videoclips that went up online and
they love seeing the moreprofessional video that is
talking about the launch oftheir you know, kind of ticket

(56:55):
sales for the next venue, whichis even bigger, and so in Bord's
Gosh, which is even bigger, andso in in boards gosh, which is
one of the biggest theaters inIreland.
So it's, it's definitely a partof the landscape.
I think we all know that theissues with video at the moment
is the monetization elementaround it.
I don't think anyone's quitecorrect that and you know

(57:16):
there's different options in themarket but there's no currency
as of yet.
I think we are really in atrialing period and I know from
various different podcastnetworks and different
organizations that everyone'ssort of trying things out.
But you know we've seen in thelast year move towards 360
campaigns where we have seen amixture between the podcast, the

(57:39):
social media, video, liveevents becoming very popular.
But I think we're still in atime of experimentation where
we're seeing, you know, howeffective is it, what does it
look like, what are the costs?
And you know that's not a badthing.
It's not a bad thing for us tobe in a period where we're
adding kind of you know,experiences and products for

(58:00):
want of a better word to theoffering, and for us to be kind
of you know, innovating andtrialing something.
But I think in the industry asa whole, people are interested
in video.
It's definitely a part of theexpectation from a listener
perspective.
That doesn't mean that everyshow should be videoed I don't

(58:24):
think we're, you know but itdoes mean that is an expectation
of something that we need tooffer alongside again, just
going back to the heart of it,which is great audio content.

Sam Sethi (58:29):
Yeah.
So, if I'm right from whatyou're telling me, one of the
other things I think Bauerbrings to the market is the
amplification capability forpodcasts.
So if you took on a podcastwithin it, you've just bought a
clear channel, you've obviouslygot radio, you've got the live
element and you've got the reach.
So is that one of the thingsthat you talk to podcasters

(58:51):
about?
Because I think we're beginningto see clearly now that
networks of podcasting have beensuccessful and now I think the
radio companies are beginning towake up to the fact that they
too can be successful in thatsame way.
So is that your sellout topodcasters?
To come onto your platform?
We can help you amplify andreach.

Yeah, it's a massive part of our ability and
I would say our you know kind ofunique ability.
In many ways, you know, we areable to reach audiences at scale
and that is, I think, one ofthe biggest challenges for
podcasters when they'relaunching now.
It's a very crowded market.
It's very difficult to get cutthrough.
I would say there's two thingsthat we're able to offer

(59:34):
podcasters who want to work withus, and the kind of reason and
success for our podcast networkhas probably been built on those
two things.
So one, like you say, is theamplification.
You know, in Ireland our radiogroup as a group has massive
reach and it has massive reachacross national stations like
Today FM or News Talk that'sgreat but also local stations do

(59:58):
you know what I mean?
Or local networks.
So if we look at something likeRed FM in Cork, or if we look
at, you know, kind of Spin, orwe look at, you know, kind of
Beat in the Southeast, these arekind of connecting with local
audiences and really kind oflike speaking one-on-one with
those audiences.
And so you know, if you are apart of our network, you know,
and we're launching your show,as we did with Keith Barry

(01:00:20):
during the week we are seeingthat our hosts are on the
breakfast show or they're on thedrive time show, and you know
we're making sure that we'regetting them that visibility.
Or when we do a partnership andwe take a full stage at a major
music festival or kind of artsfestival, like All Together Now,
which is down in Waterford,we're actually taking over a

(01:00:41):
stage and we're going to puttalent on that stage.
So you know we're helpingfacilitate you, but that's not.
You know, marketing is really,really important, but the other
side is we are also investing interms of producers and
executive producers for the show, as well as studio space, and
that is massively helpfulbecause even if someone is a

(01:01:01):
fantastic podcaster reallyreally amazing talent, having
that support of you know kind ofexperienced, seasoned audio
producers who've, you know,worked with some of the legends
of radio, whether that is, youknow, kind of knowing that there
is a legal department that youcan check with, or whether

(01:01:22):
that's knowing that there is,you know, a fantastic IT
department that will make surethat your podcast is pushed out
everywhere and getting themeasurement across the board, or
whether that's someone who's,you know, already doing the
thinking about and has theresources to do the thinking
about how is AI going to impactall of this?
That's what big radio groupslike Bauer bring is that they

(01:01:45):
have the kind of the heft andthe kind of heritage that you
know they can bring that in theknowledge base of kind of the
historical knowledge base, ofkind of coming from that.
They can bring that in theknowledge base of kind of the
historical knowledge base ofkind of coming from that.
And you know you put thatproduction and the marketing

(01:02:09):
together and then you bring therevenue side and I think that's
the one thing that you know.
Podcast networks it's tough,right.
Do you know what I mean forpodcast networks?
Because they can end upsometimes if you're a single
podcaster with the podcastnetwork you're just one of many
or one of 22 000 podcasters andunless you're in the top x
percentage, it can be very hard.
The thing for us in our networkis because we're quite

(01:02:31):
selective who we work with.
You know they're massivelyimportant to us and our sales
teams are representing inIreland the biggest commercials.
You know kind of team, acommercial group.
We have great contacts withdifferent agencies and direct
clients and it creates a haloeffect.
Do you know what I mean For thepodcasters who join.

(01:02:52):
So, you know, we kind of areable to position them or get in
into conversations that weprobably wouldn't be able to get
them.
We're getting intoconversations that we probably
wouldn't be able to get to if wewere an independent.
You know, it'd be much, muchmore difficult.
So I would say those are thekind of pillars that really the
success of this team has beenbuilt on.
Yeah, so that's kind of wherewe're at and how.

Sam Sethi (01:03:12):
how does somebody then get into bauer?
I mean, do you have talentshows?
Do you?
Do you have talent scouts?
I mean, somebody's got apodcast right and they're under
the radar right now, but they'rereally, really good.
Or is it just purely left tothe celebrity again to own the
space, because that's going tobe an easy sell into the market?

Ruth Fitzsimons (01:03:34):
No, certainly in Ireland, not all of our
podcasters have just been bigcelebrities.
In fact, some of our podcasterswere very small when we first
started working with them, butwe could see the talent.
Do you know what I mean?
So you know, some of ourpodcasters have actually gone on
to kind of end up having theirown TV station or kind of like
TV program, or they've gone onto do other things outside of

(01:03:55):
this kind of podcast landscapeor some of them have gone on to
grow their influencer base.
I think one of the things thatwe saw was that you know they we
are always on the scout and onthe lookout and that is part of
what our team is looking for.
We also worked with kind ofvarious agencies before in the
past who would bring us kind ofnew talent.
One of the things that I thinkin particular, go Loud in

(01:04:17):
Ireland has really beenfantastic and the team have been
fantastic at is they've beengood at looking out for younger
podcasters and bringing them ona journey.
So it's really interesting.
We have one podcast called Holdmy Drink and that very much
started as kind of a podcastabout two girls who you know

(01:04:38):
kind of their trials andtribulations in the dating world
and just being young women likein their twenties in Ireland
and kind of what that experienceis.
And it's been really interestingto see that their audience has
matured up alongside them.
So they're settled now, they'rebuying houses and you know
their audience has remainedreally loyal for them.
But it has changed and theythemselves and their kind of

(01:05:00):
other work they become kind ofmuch bigger influences off the
back of the podcast and that'skind of been symbiotic the
relationship between those two.
But you know what we found isby tapping into those youth
audiences you also are in aposition to that youth talent to
kind of grow with them.
And that's also the thing is,when you're part of a wider
group you can take those chances, something that you probably

(01:05:23):
couldn't do in a smaller podcastnetwork because you know for
sellable reasons, forprofitability, we could only
work with the biggest talent.
So we're fortunate that we'vebeen able to work with big
talent and also with kind ofsome smaller talent that we've
been able to grow over a periodof years.

Sam Sethi (01:05:41):
I mean, look, it sounds like you've got the whole
Omnichannel sorted.
So, yeah, I'm looking forwardto the app.
We'll have a look when thatcomes out.
Now, ruth, one of the otherthings that you've done.
You've been in the industry anumber of years now, so you've
seen the changes in the industryfrom where you've come.
We've got the big Londonpodcast show coming up in a

(01:06:04):
couple of weeks time.
You've been advising andhelping with that as well, which
is great.
When you talk to Jason Carter,the organiser there, and you
look at the changing landscape,what are the sort of things that
you're saying to Jason abouthow the show should frame and
what's changed over the timethat you've seen?

Yeah, so really , I look, I'm very, very
privileged and very grateful tobe on the advisory board of the
London Podcast Show and you knowit's a massively changing
landscape.
You know I first came intopodcasts because I had been
working in an independentproduction company in based in
London.
I was based in London for for17 years and, you know, worked

(01:06:44):
for an independent radio groupcalled a production company
called UBC, which was smooth opsand and unique, and I'm sure
there's some people who are oldenough to remember that we made
the BBC Five Lives Olympicpodcast show and this was a
series that was specificallycommissioned around in the run

(01:07:05):
up to the Olympics.
And you know what was sofascinating was at the time and
I'm sure no one will mind mesaying who worked on this it was
a complete add on as a kind ofwe'll just tick this box for
initiative, right, like nopodcast for a thing then.
It was just like it's aprobably good thing for us to do
.
Everything was about facebook.

(01:07:26):
That was the kind of like.
Social media was the kind ofbuzzword at that time, certainly
was not focus, sort of a let'sjust give it a whirl and do it.
And what was so interesting wasas we got closer and closer to
the Olympics.
And then during the Olympics wewere like getting back these
reports from Apple and we werelike we're number one in like a

(01:07:47):
lot of countries.
This has got a lot more legsthan we thought and there's a
lot more people listening thanwe thought.
And I think that was my firstintroduction to this world where
you know the audience had movedbefore the established groups
and I think that happens a lot,right, you know what I mean.
It can often take a longerperiod of time for more

(01:08:08):
mainstream media companies tofollow those audiences and so
they had moved.
And then I ended up moving intowhat Audioboom, and so I
ultimately became the SVP ofoperations for Audioboom across
kind of content, so everythingfrom content acquisition and
original content and then webuilt out a sales team.

(01:08:29):
The questions we were havingback then were much more kind of
basic.
You know what is podcasting?
You know?

Sam Sethi (01:08:41):
We're still having that conversation today.

If you ask James, we're having that
conversation today anyway.
Well, I think I think now it'sit's seen as its own channel and
I think the testament goingback to the podcast show the
fact that 30%, around 30% of thepeople who attended last year
came from agency land, reallyspeaks to the fact that from an
agency buying perspective, froma revenue perspective, it's seen

(01:09:03):
as a channel.
It's seen as a channel to betaken seriously and something
that you know reaches audiencesand is effective at delivering
that message.
And that's because that's wherethe audience has gone.
It's been really, reallyconsistent.
So I think now the questionsthat we have are, you know, much
more complicated in some ways.

(01:09:23):
So you know, I think now whenwe look at kind of some of the
big issues, it's much more likewhat do we do in a fragmented if
we thought it was, the mediaworld was fragmented back then.
Now it's very much a fragmentedmedia world.
Like you know, it's what we'reseeing now is podcast as a
content engine that drives kindof a sort of ecosystem, and so

(01:09:47):
what we've seen recently, justto put it in perspective, is we
launched a subscription servicefor one of our podcasts and we
can see that the subscriptionservice is responsible for about
25 to 30% of ticket sales.
So it's an ecosystem.
Once someone is in an ecosystem, they're in that ecosystem.
But you know how we monetizethat ecosystem, how we monetize

(01:10:10):
video, that is.
There's still questions aboutthat.
There's still questions about,you know, the 360 campaigns,
questions about you know the 360campaigns.
I think there is kind ofthere's still you know another
point, which is, you know,outside of the US, you know,
where are we seeing investment?
Where are we seeing growth?
The US is still the kind ofpowerhouse when it comes to some

(01:10:32):
of that and you know, I thinkyou know, where do we see that
growth?
Ai, ai is a fascinating one.
You know, where are we seeingthat kind of growth in AI?
Here at Bauer, we are.
You know it's been reallyfascinating to see the kind of
growth in AI internally.
And you know someone moreclever than I said recently AI

(01:10:54):
isn't going to take your job,but someone who knows how to use
AI is going to take your job.

Sam Sethi (01:10:58):
And.

I think that's very true and we're
experimenting with it in lots ofdifferent ways and you know it
is speeding up parts of our job.
But there's also other parts ofit.
Like how do we make sure thefact checking is correct?
How do we make sure that we youknow AI doesn't Hallucinate

(01:11:21):
correct?
How do we make sure that we youknow ai doesn't elucidate
quality?
Yeah, like you know what we,what we do around those and you
know we're very clear that youknow ai products would not reach
users without some kind of likehuman intervention in between
those things.
For us at the moment, a lot ofwhat we're doing in ireland is
you're using it as kind of athought starter in different
processes, be those titling orscripts or whatever it might be.

(01:11:42):
Like, how can we, how can we door how can we lift some of
those very manual jobs and justkind of move those forward to
free up producers to reallyfocus on the creativity and
really focus on doing kind ofinnovative work and storytelling
.
But it's fascinating, it'sdefinitely a really fascinating
part of the kind of globalpicture.

Sam Sethi (01:12:05):
Yeah, I call AI assisted intelligence, and
that's them.
Yeah, I think it's great for meand it sits next to me to help
me.
It's not replacing me, but bythe fact that I can use the tool
it won't replace me, but forthose people who don't use it,
maybe it will.
What's interesting is, jameswas talking about down in Sydney
a radio station.

(01:12:25):
Down there was using AI voicesfor the hosts, but what they
weren't doing was telling theaudience that the AI was or the
host was an AI and it's quiteinteresting.
I mean, I think you know there'sa company called One Million
Ads and they obviously can usemulti-voices.

(01:12:46):
There's lots of companies likeDescript and Wondercraft and
Eleven Labs who use AI for voicefor advertising.
You know, no longer do you haveto get a voiceover artist in,
you might want to just get ascript, get a voice artist, an
AI voice artist and throw it outthe front door.
Mamma Mia down in Australia gotall of their I think, 12 or 13

(01:13:09):
podcasters and they blended avoice, a female voice, that they
thought was unique enough to bestill individual, but it was
actually of all the other voiceswithin the company.
So they then use that as theadvertising voice that they put
out there.
So it's quite interesting whatyou can do.
I think we I always call it thecreepy line, where we we push

(01:13:32):
the boundary and everyone goes,oh no, what AI?
Oh no that sounds far too creepy.
No, pullback, pullback, pull,pull back, and then we, and then
six months later we're all overthat creepy line and we're on
to the next creepy line,whatever that may be.
So I do see ai being a veryinteresting push on the edge and
then everyone goes oh, is thatokay?

(01:13:52):
I think that feels fine.
Okay, keep pushing.
You know, I mean again withwith some of the things I'm
seeing.
We're looking at sprout, oursponsors using it for chapter
creating chapters, cover art,creating scripts, you know, show
notes.

So there's so much that can be done to take
the labor out some of thesethings that, like you know, I
think're right like a lot oflabor or just discoverability
for listeners.
Like?
So there's some things that youknow it will.
Just, it's really funny becauseat the moment it really reminds
me of when people started usingExcel, almost like, or kind of

(01:14:31):
like you know, powerpointpresentations where you do I
don't know if you do that Like,do you know what I mean?
And there's some things youknow.
There's some things that you'rejust like oh, thank goodness I
don't have to spend an hour onthis and I can just spend 10
minutes on it.
But those points about kind oflike blended voices or that's
when we do need to put on ourthinking hats about you know

(01:14:53):
kind of what is important to usand you know what's our brand
integrity and what's our brandvoice and you know I think a big
part of what we have and what'svery special in the audio space
is the connections that peoplehave with the host, that is, and
the content.
You know what I mean.
I'm not saying those things cannever exist and they couldn't

(01:15:15):
be done creatively, but I thinkwhat we just need to be careful
is is that we hold in the center, that we're here to entertain
and engage, but that uniquely inaudio you are, it's it's almost
like a personal relationshipwith someone, right, do you know
what I mean?
And people take that reallyseriously, you know they.

(01:15:35):
They take their relationshipwith their, their podcast host
or their radio host very, veryseriously.
So that's the part that we needto kind of be careful not to
throw the baby out with thebathwater, I think yeah,
somebody introduced me to theword.

Sam Sethi (01:15:49):
parasocial is a word I'd never heard of, and
parasocial describes therelationship the audience has
with the host.
It's a one-way relationship, sothe host's putting out facts oh
yes, I live here, or my wifedid this, or my children go here
, my dog's name's called X.
So the listener has so muchinformation and has that strong

(01:16:12):
depth of relationship becausethey feel like they know the
host, because they have thatmuch information, whereas the
host knows very little, ifanything, about the fan.
And so that parasocialrelationship is what podcasting
is and even radio to some extent.

That's so interesting.
I've never heard that onebefore.
That's a really good quote.
I'm totally stealing that frommyself.
If you hear that at the podcastshow, I will say Sam is
responsible for this.

Sam Sethi (01:16:38):
Thank you very much.
Now, at the podcast show, whatis Bauer going to be doing there
?
Let's end up there.

Well.
So for us this year, you know,we're probably just for
transparency.
We won't be putting on amassive show this year.
It'll probably be next yearreally, before we do that.
And that's partially because,as I said, as a group we're sort
of on a journey and differentcountries are at different
stages.
We'll certainly be there andI'm sure you'll see more from us
in years to come, but you knowI'll be there, as will a large

(01:17:06):
number of my colleagues.
What I'm looking forward to inthis podcast show, I think the
thing that I love about the showis it has become a marker on
everyone's calendar and it's,you know, for me it's an
absolute pleasure because I getto meet colleagues from all over
Europe.
I get to meet people I workedwith from all over the world.
I used to work for, you know,kind of Podfront, which was a

(01:17:28):
joint venture between Stitcherand Wondery.
So you get all the US folksover.
You get like the folk fromAudioboom or, you know, sports
Social Podcast Network, or likein Germany and France, where I
worked as well.
So you know, it's definitelyone of, I think, kind of like if
you want to find out what's ontrend or you want to be a part
of those debates.
It's a fantastic.
You know you get all the bigpodcast companies, so whether

(01:17:52):
that's spotify or you know kindof spotify or amazon or you know
kind of any of the kind ofpodcast platforms, they're all
there as well.
The bbc it's very much for methe place to go and kind of hear
what's going on and be a partof those debates as well and to
enjoy a drink or two if thatmight happen?

(01:18:15):
if that might happen if thatmight happen I think the
interesting one for me is Iheart media are going to be
there this year and netflix butthat's a good example, you see,
of a radio group who steppedinto that podcasting space, two
radio groups who stepped intothe podcasting space, you know,
very successfully and I think,yeah, they're going to be a
really interesting combotogether.

(01:18:35):
I think you know there's what.
What I find interesting at thepodcast show has also been, you
know, the content side.
But also it's been great tohear from like last year we
heard from TikTok and I foundthat some of that really
interesting.
And we also heard from brandsand I found that some of that
really interesting and we alsoheard from brands and I think

(01:18:55):
that's also been reallyinteresting.
You know, it's been interestingto hear from them what has
worked and what hasn't worked.
You know what I mean and whatthey're.
Sometimes I feel like in thepodcasting space we can talk a
lot to one another.
It's also interesting to hearwhat they're saying to us.
This is what we need from you,this is what we want from you,
this is what we want from you.
So that was super interesting.
But to me the best thing aboutit is just the networking.

(01:19:16):
It's just.
You know it's great to kind ofhear and kind of chat to your
colleagues and see what they'redoing and you know.
You know whether that's youlearning more about subscription
and subscription models, whichI think we're all trying to
figure out, or listening aboutvideo and video monetization, or
whether we're trying to kind offigure out how we use AI and
incorporate those tools, orwe're thinking about editorial

(01:19:37):
things.
You know what I mean, how wecover, you know, trump's America
or our own kind of democracies.
You know those are all kind ofreally important.
It's important for us to havesomewhere to debate those things
if we're to kind of keepinnovating.

Sam Sethi (01:19:51):
Ruth Fitzsimons, Director of Digital at Bower
Island.
Thank you so much and I lookforward to a little bit of
networking and drinking with youat the London Podcast Show.

Done, booked in .

Sam Sethi (01:20:03):
The excellent Ruth Fitzsimons.
She's not been at Bowerparticularly long either, and so
it must be a tremendous amountof change for her.
I think she's also just movedhouse as well.
Can you imagine moving job,moving house at the same time
and you know, and diving in withboth feet?
So excellent.
She will be at the podcast showin London, I understand.

(01:20:23):
Yes, she will, and I think forsomebody like you who's in the
radio world as well, james, Ithink it was interesting that
what Bauer are looking to do isto create a multi-channel
strategy.
So they bought the remainder ofClear Channel recently.
So they've got thousands ofoutdoor billboards, they've got

(01:20:44):
radio stations, they've gottheir podcasting, they're
bringing out a new app and again, what Ruth was saying was you
know, they can be kingmakers topodcasts.
They can bring them into theplatform and convert those into
a wide, large audience reach.
So I think that's their modelbringing very good new talent in

(01:21:05):
and then making them intosuccesses through the
multi-channel capability thatthey've got.
And the big difference betweenBauer and Global, of course, is
that Bauer is way more globalthan Global.
Didn't Global try to go and do adeal in the US?
I don't know where that went toyes, global do own a good
percentage of iHeart and, if younotice, the title sponsor of

(01:21:29):
the podcast show is Global andiHeart and of course, global
sells iHeart shows.
In fact, I got feedback on thisvery show from somebody at
Global who heard me saying Iwonder why iHeart is taking part

(01:21:49):
in the podcast show.
The reason, of course, whyiHeart is taking part in the
podcast show, the reason, ofcourse, why iHeart is taking
part in the podcast show and I'mhappy to make this clear is
that Global represent iHeartshows in the UK and, similarly,
global shows are represented byiHeart in the US.
So they're two companies thathave worked together for a long,

(01:22:10):
long time and hurrah for them.
That's what I say People Newson the Pod News Weekly Review.

Announcer (01:22:13):
Two companies that have worked together for a long,
long time, and hurrah for them.
That's what I say.
People News on the Pod NewsWeekly Review.

Sam Sethi (01:22:18):
Yes, there are two things going on which is
interesting.
Firstly, chris Corcoran, whowas the founding partner and
former chief content officer atCadence 13.
He has launched his ownmultimedia podcast content
studio.
It's called In the ArenaStudios.
Interestingly, he's signed alot of big talent, which is

(01:22:40):
interesting.
He's talking very much aroundfranchise brands and all of that
, so that's all nice, so that'sgood and interesting.
If you're watching what's goingon at Libsyn, of course Libsyn
had a new CEO not so long back,brendan Monaghan from X of

(01:23:01):
Panoply, I think.
That went on to be rebranded asMegaphone.
Have I got that right or didthey go on and be rebranded as
something else?
Anyway, brendan knows a thingor two about podcasting and it
may be a complete coincidence orit may not be, but the chief

(01:23:24):
technical officer of Libsyn, aman who's been there for years
and years and years, gregBarretts, has quite suddenly, it
seems, left the company.
He's been with Libsyn since2012.
And so it was clearly theperson responsible for Libsyn 5

(01:23:44):
and some of the work there.
So you kind of have to askyourself does that mean that
some of the very large amountsof tech debt in that company are
going to change if they've gota different CTO on board.
But interesting to watch.
I thought Libsyn had said thatthey want to become an ad

(01:24:06):
company, not a platform company,a little while back.
I think that they are.
I think that they would like tobe known as ad company first,
um, but um, then to also be, um,still a hosting company.
Because I asked that questionto them, uh, last year.
I said why are you botheringstill being a podcast host If

(01:24:29):
you, you know your, your obviousstrategy is now to to sell
advertising in shows.
If that's your strategy, whydon't you just sell your podcast
hosting?
And the answer from the personthat I spoke to then and it
wasn't Brendan, it was prior toBrendan joining was we make lots
of profit on our hosting, soselling advertising is a much

(01:24:54):
less profitable opportunity.
There's lots of money in it,which is why they do it, but the
profit margins are much, muchsmaller than if you have a look
at what they earn from hosting.
So you can well understand thatactually it benefits them from
having two slightly separate,you know, slices of the cake, so

(01:25:14):
to speak.
Moving on then, james awards andevents.
What's going on?
Well, awards and events.
Lots of exciting awards andevents.
We'll leave the big one tilllast in this, but there are the
Independent Podcast Awards andthe Independent Podcast Forum,
which is happening in early Junein London.

(01:25:36):
Interestingly, I noticed thatit's only open to podcasters in
the UK, which was something thatI wasn't fully aware of.
So that's going on.
There is a new Women PodcastingAwards, another one.
This one is the Women whoPodcast Awards, which are run by
a magazine which is calledWomen who Podcast, which I've

(01:25:57):
never heard of before, but it'sup to issue number 17,.
Would you believe?
It's a really good read.
Actually so nice to end upseeing that Spotify is running a
podcast awards in Mexico.
The winners will be announcedon June.
The 4th Pod Summit, yyc, whichis in Calgary in Alberta in
Canada, has announced anexcellent featured speaker.

(01:26:20):
Who's that excellent featuredspeaker?
Not me, sam, not me.
Must be the only other personwho qualifies you.
It is Hooray, so the event's inmid-Septptember.
Looking forward to going tocalgary.
It's not a place that I've beento before.
Um and um, I was told bysomebody who comes from edmonton

(01:26:40):
that calgary is actually quitenice, but please don't say that.
Uh, that she said so.
So there, there you go.
Anyway, can I just say I've beeninvited, all expenses paid, to
go and present in spain, in, inmadrid, in, in september, first
ever one that I've been invitedto have you.
That's nice, isn't?
it.
You must have been busy.

(01:27:00):
That's the only reason that'snice, isn't it?
I've been invented, I've beeninvited to go and speak in
lisbon, I believe, on septemberthe 30th.
Okay, yeah, see, okay, yeah,see you over there somewhere.
So, yes, so, who knows?
Anyway, so that's all good, andthe Golden Globes will
introduce the best podcastcategory in 2026, apparently,

(01:27:24):
six nominees will be chosen from25 popular podcasts that have
impacted listeners.
Another award for Conan O'Brienthere.
And.
Joe Rogan and Alex Cooper, andand yeah, yes, exactly the
winners are yeah, the winnersare the Golden Lobes podcast
awards were given out this weekin the UK.

(01:27:44):
That's for comedy podcasts,which is nice, the big honour.
The Big Ears award for thefunniest podcast went to this
Paranormal Life, which is nice,the Big Honour.
The Big Ears Award for thefunniest podcast went to this
Paranormal Life, which is anindependently produced show that
dives into the strangestsupernatural stories with
irreverent wit.
And the Loeb's Legend Awardwent to Frank Skinner for

(01:28:07):
services for funny audio, who isvery good.
So, yes, that's a lovely thing.
Finally, of course, there's theLondon Podcast Show.
Well, that's exciting, isn't it?
The first thing that we shouldsay if you're coming from
anywhere outside of the UK orIreland, you need an electronic
travel authorization.

(01:28:27):
If you're going to come in,it's just 16 quid.
Buy it directly from the UKgovernment, don't go anywhere
else, but you need one of those.
It's like what the Americans doto us, so you can do that.
But you ended up catching upwith Jason Carter from the
podcast show and you startedasking him what are the dates?

Jason Carter (01:28:50):
It's the 21st and 22nd of May in Islington in
London.

Sam Sethi (01:28:54):
And it's bigger and better.
You're now going to exceed10,000 people through the door.

It's our fourth year coming up.
We're really overwhelmed withwhere we are with it.
It kind of feels this year thatwe've really moved into this
position.
I think, given it's had itsfourth year, that people know
it's here to stay and peoplehave experienced their word of
mouth globally about the show isclearly evident.
So, numbers wise, last year wewere way ahead of the previous

(01:29:22):
year in terms of delegateattendees and this year we've
surpassed that again.
So we kind of really are oncourse for a fantastic show, not
just with the delegates and theattendees, but also with the
partners and the attendees, butalso with the partners and
exhibitors that are coming tothe show.
So, yeah, we're bracingourselves.

Sam Sethi (01:29:39):
So give us some highlights.
You've got two new sponsors forthe year.
Who are they?

Well, our headline sponsors this year are Global
and iHeart so delighted to havethose guys on board.
Both of them actually have beenin partnership with the show in
previous years.
Global have been with us fromthe start, so this is their
fourth year with us, and iheartwere involved last year.
They sponsored our officialparty that we hosted at the
standard in kings cross, whichthey're doing again this year,
and then they're both coming intogether as partners, as

(01:30:06):
headline partners, really sortof sending the message that
there's power in partnershipsand that's how they're knitting
themselves together.
In terms of our officialpartners, we've got a lot of
kind of retention in terms ofthe key people who you'd imagine
you've seen before.
So the likes of bbc sounds andaudio boom and spotify and
amazon, etc.
But lots of new people comingin as well.

(01:30:27):
Youtube are back after a yearoff, netflix are in.
Bbc studios have come indelighted that gold hanger are
in.
Bbc Studios have come inDelighted that Goldhanger are in
.
So, yeah, we're seeing year onyear, people returning in terms
of those big partners, butactually great to see more
international partners foldingin too.
We're in a good space and withall of them, I think what's
really important to say is thatthey're coming to the show.

(01:30:48):
They're not just exhibiting orhaving an activation.
They're either hostingreceptions to meet people and
get business done or helpdifferent sectors of the
industry whether it's newpodcast creators or having a
more higher-end businessconversation that they might
want to have but there's morereceptions.
We've actually, with theprogramme, slightly reduced the

(01:31:09):
number of sessions that we havein show and this is from
feedback from everyone in theindustry.
It's actually too much going onhas been a bit of an issue with
previous years, so we'veslightly reduced and actually,
with so many visitors comingfrom all around the world I mean
we've got visitors at themoment from 40 different
countries attending the eventthis year and, of course, when

(01:31:29):
they're in town for a couple ofdays, you know a big part of it
is not just the sessions buttalking to each other.
So we've created many more kindof hosted receptions at the
show during the day and in theevening too yeah, tell me about
some of those.

Sam Sethi (01:31:44):
I mean, there's the official party, there are other
receptions, so give me a feelfor what's going on well, as you
say, we've got the officialparty at the Standard.

We're quite forensic with the show as much
as we can to kind of feed theappetite to meet the needs of
different types of audience.
So it is important for us tofeed the appetite of independent
podcast creators as much as aCEO from wherever coming in and
trying to forge a new deal orpartnership.
And so we've got differenttypes of receptions.

(01:32:14):
So there's a wonderful pubacross the road on upper street
in islington and you knowislington well, sam, but many
people won't listen to this, butit's a beautiful part of north
london, very boutique, andthere's a lovely english pub
there that we've got a bigcreator social, so creators can
come together every evening onthe wednesday and the thursday
social, so creators can cometogether every evening on the
wednesday and the thursday.

(01:32:35):
We've got a rooftop receptionbeing hosted by a partner that I
can't announce just yet but itwill be announced this week but
that's taking place just offpentonville road, lovely setting
.
We've got executive networkingdinner in a restaurant called
frederick's, also just acrossthe road from the venue, which
is going to be great.
You'll'll see this year thatPave have come into the show for

(01:32:55):
the first time.
They're another new addition tothe show.
So as you come to the mainentrance there's going to be a
London bus parked outside, fullybranded with Pave, and they'll
be hosting some receptions andget-togethers there.
We've also got, as we've had onprevious years, we've got a
series of pod house receptionsand previous years we've got a
series of pod house receptionsand that's kind of the

(01:33:16):
opportunity for individualpartners at the show to take a
space in the venue for an hour,an hour and a half, and they can
target delegates that they wantto meet, to present to or have
a networking get together.
So we've got about a dozen ofthose happening and some of the
people that are hosting thoseare npr, voxtopica, treefork
media, spotify, financial times,the radio academy, wondershare.

(01:33:38):
So we've got some of thosethings happening in venue.
Yeah, so, just generally, whatwe're trying to do is create
opportunities to pause.
I mean I don't know about you,but certainly when I go to
conferences I don't go to eightsessions in a row.
You need to pause for air andwe are creating these moments
for pauses for air.
I mean we also have some of oursponsors of some of our suites

(01:34:01):
are hosting reception.
So dolby, for example, will behosting reception, bbc studios
will be as well, and netflix somany.
As we evolve as a show, we'recontinuously talking to the
industry to hear what they wantand then shape it around that
intel, really.

Sam Sethi (01:34:21):
Netflix is an interesting name to throw out
there, Jason.
I mean not known for theirpodcasting particularly.
What are Netflix doing at theevent, then?
Is that going to be a bigreveal from them that they're
getting into podcasting?

Well, do you know what?
At the the moment, they want abranded presence at the show and
they want the ability to meetpeople, not necessarily at a
particularly grand scale, butthey just feel it's important
that they have a flag in thesand and be in the space.
What they do, you'll have tosee when you come to the show.
Really, rather than take itfrom me, okay, now some of these

(01:34:52):
speakers.

Sam Sethi (01:34:53):
You've got quite a few celebrity speakers.
I mean gary lineker from goalhangers going to be there.
What are goal hangers going tobe doing at the event?

well, they've got a combination of things and,
like I said earlier, in terms ofpartners at the show, we don't
really look at having partnersas a badging exercise.
We really want proactiveactivities that are happening
that benefit them but also makesure that there's giving value
back to all the delegates thatattend.
So there are different types ofinvolvement with goldhanger.

(01:35:22):
They're hosting three sessions,they've got a suite and for
those again not familiar withthe show, we've got this
fantastic victorian venue whichused to be a royal mail sorting
office.
It looks stunning.
When we get people travelingfrom outside the uk they always
think it looks like the harrypotter train station and they it
does.
People need to picture it.

(01:35:43):
So it's a beautiful openmezzanine floor with lots of
things going on there, fromcreative villages and brand
stages etc.
But circling and overlookingthe show floor is about 20
suites.
They're almost like boxes thatyou might see at a concert or
whatever, and goldhanger have asuite there alongside.

(01:36:03):
Actually, there's quite a fewsignificant partners that are
hosting in their own suitesoverlooking the show floor.
So goldhanger are doing that aswell as a number of different
sessions, and the other suitesthat are partnered are with
global, with iheart, with bbcstudios, with amazon, art 19,
sony triton, digital.

(01:36:24):
So when you walk into this show,you're just hit by the world of
podcasting yeah, very visibly,as you know.
But people come with differentagendas.
Some are here to meet brandsand agencies and host the
reception and target particulardelegates that are at the show.
Others may be brand new,independent starting out
creators.

(01:36:44):
It's their first foray into thebusiness and they want to just
get tips and advice.
Or some might be independentpodcast creators that are well
on their way but wanting to kindof finesse and look at the
springboard to develop theirbusinesses.
I mean, one other thing I shouldsay is we've got a couple of
new features this year in theshow.
The first one is we have aninternational gallery and that's

(01:37:04):
going to actually be on theshow floor and during the day
we're going to have reflections,if you like, from different
individuals from around theworld, around their particular
territory.
So we've got people speakingfrom latin america, we've got
some from north africa, someonefrom australia, a couple of
parts of europe, so we've gotthis new space there.

(01:37:25):
So, again, another networkingspace as well as an area where
we can get some insights.
We've got an indie businessstage and some of the feedback
we had last year is that youknow there are lots of people
starting out here and wanting todevelop a business and so we've
got a program run with audio ukon our indie business stage.
Yeah and again the kind ofchallenge and for us success is

(01:37:49):
being able to deliver to allthose different parts of the
podcast community in one show.
We're not always going to getit right, we're not always going
to cater for everyone, butwe're doing our best.

Sam Sethi (01:37:59):
So lots really going on so you mentioned everyone in
the world.
He mentioned every brand.
He mentioned every country.
One person he didn't mentionwas apple.
Where are apple in all this?

oh god, no comment there.
We'll have to see what happens.

Sam Sethi (01:38:17):
The show hasn't happened, right, that's all yes
all right, that's okay now, look, let's find out a little bit
about jason carter himself.
You have been in the eventindustry for a number of years
quite a few.
You were at the b industry fora number of years, quite a few.
You were at the BBC for a longwhile.
You were organising all theiroutdoor events and their new

(01:38:38):
artists, and you're at Amazon.
Tell me a little bit aboutJason.
How did you get into this worldof eventing?

Yeah, I'm showing my age now.
I worked as a music promoterfirst off.
There's a big company part ofLive Nation in the UK called
Festival Republic that run manyof the major festivals and I
worked for that company.
It was formerly called the MeanFiddler.
So I was a music promoter.
And then I moved from there toBBC Radio 1.
And after a couple of years Ireached the position of head of

(01:39:06):
events at Radio 1.
So all the major set pieceshows on that network.
I led a team that deliveredthem and I was also the
commissioner for all thecoverage that we would do at
third party events.
I was there a long time.
I was there 20 years.
So by the time I left eightyears ago I was head of events
for all the popular radionetworks.

(01:39:28):
So Radio 1, radio 2, 6 Music,bbc One Extra and the Asian
Network.

Sam Sethi (01:39:34):
You might know a friend of mine, James Sterling.

I do know James Sterling very well, very well.
I sat next to him for about sixyears.

Sam Sethi (01:39:41):
Yeah, james is a very good friend of mine and we're
fellow Liverpool fans.
So, yes, we know each othervery well.
Yes, james is a good guy.

Again, we worked together and so, really just by
the time'm leaving, I wascommissioner for all the
coverage at UK and internationalconcerts on the BBC.
So, whether or not, if Radio Onewas covering Glastonbury
Festival in the UK or South bySouthwest in Austin, texas, I
was the commissioner for thelive shows from those those

(01:40:09):
particular events.
And then I produced our largesorts of flagship events in the
BBC, so everything fromclassical concerts in Hyde Park
with the BBC proms, through toputting on concerts with I don't
know, elton John and RodStewart.
And so I was fortunate to workacross every genre you can
imagine, from working withMadonna and putting on a radio

(01:40:32):
on Big Weekend through to Jay-Z,rihanna, and then the other hat
that I wore was I created aplatform called BBC Introducing
and launched that, which hasbeen very successful, for those
that won't know it, indiscovering some major UK talent
, from Florence and the Machineto the 1975 to Ed Sheeran.
So, as you can tell, most of myhistory is in music, but I

(01:40:54):
think what's key is aboutlaunching new events.
Same principle whatever you'redoing, whatever sector you're
working in.
But of course I worked in music, but I worked in radio and
broadcast connected to it andthat's how I kind of segued in
from there to working and comingup with the delivery of the
podcast show.

Sam Sethi (01:41:16):
So it would have been a natural evolution for you to
take your background, yourknowledge, your skills of music
and start a music eventsomewhere.
That would have been a naturalevolution.
So who or what prompted you tosuddenly go?
Oh, podcasting, that seems likean interesting market space.
I'm going to go and do that.

Well, there was a couple of things really After I
left the BBC eight years ago.
I had a very short stint atAmazon, and Amazon at the time
were launching a big ticketingoperation I don't know if you
recall and they also had a planto move into the sort of
promoter space and deliver bigset piece events.
And so they managed to persuademe to leave the BBC after 20

(01:41:56):
years and I moved there and forvarious reasons I guess the
ambitions there didn't quite fitwhere I was going, so I decided
to jump back out.
But it was a very short periodof time there.
And then I started up my ownbusiness, which is Get On Media,
which still runs today, and oneof the first thing I produced
was an event called BBCIntroducing Live, which took

(01:42:18):
place at Tobacco Dock and it wasall for new emerging talent in
the music industry.
It was very successful.
We had 18,000 people attendingover three days.
It ran for two or three years.
Lots of live broadcasts on theBBC.
And then Covid hit and it waskind of game over for that and
it was hard to resurrect itafter the break with COVID.
But during that period I wasworking with some of the major

(01:42:41):
partners that I have now on thepodcast show from BBC Sounds and
Spotify, who at that time, hadbeen saying that it really feels
like the time is right for alarge scale industry gathering
of the podcast community andthis is back in 2019, and we've
all seen the rise of podcastssince that point and so I

(01:43:03):
launched the notion of thisevent, and then I had a whole
period during lockdown where Igot a lot of face time with many
of the partners that I'vementioned key partners in the
show to sort of convince themthat we could deliver something
of real scale to bring the wholeinternational community
together.
And then, yeah, so my headsuddenly is under the bonnet of

(01:43:26):
podcasting, which actually forme, was a real breath of fresh
air.
After 25 years purely in musicand not getting any younger, the
idea of doing somethingdifferent was really refreshing.

Sam Sethi (01:43:37):
So that's how I ended up, and this now occupies, as
you can imagine, pretty muchmost of my time so, looking at
the event itself, moving forward, not trying to bring 2025 to a
close because it's not evenstarted but where does the event
go?
The space itself is buzzing.
When you get there, it's prettyrammed.

(01:43:57):
You've talked about all theareas that you're using.
How can you expand it?
Do you want to expand it?
Is it going to be capped atthis level and that's it?
We're happy, we're going tojust do this now, or is it going
to be?
No, we need to grow again andthat's in our planning it.

It's a good question, sam.
There's a couple of thingsreally that we need to consider.
First of all, one of thesuccesses of this event as it is
today is its location, is thevenue.
What we don't want to be is aconference event that is in a
traditional big hotel or atraditional conference venue.

(01:44:35):
We want character, whatever wedo.
Maybe that's partly connectedto my previous back branding
festivals and music.
So we want to keep it in areally distinctive venue, and
the business design center isthat, although it doesn't sound
it by name, but when you see itit is.
But we are getting to a point ofoutgrowing it in terms of space
for partners, but also visitorsas well, and we're being very

(01:44:57):
careful this year.
I mean, the delegates passesare literally through the roof,
but we want to make sure that wecap it at the right point so
that it's a great experience forthose that are there.
So we're still tussling thisone, but we feel like we will
remain at the venue that we'rein, but there is potential to
pick off some satellite venuesaround the area.

(01:45:17):
We've looked at some venues andwe've all seen conferences and
how they can develop and evolvein multiple sites.
So in an ideal world withLondon, it's stay where it is.
The heartbeat is the venue thatwe're in now, but with some
periphery venues as we grow,hopefully.

Sam Sethi (01:45:34):
Would you ever extend it beyond the two days?

Yes, that's something else we are
considering as well.
What's really important withthe development of any event?
Certainly, from my kind ofexperiences, they do need time
to breathe.
Where you get to in year sixyou would never plan in year two
, and we're constantly evolvingand shaping and listening to
people like you and the widerindustry.
So, whether it's let's not doso many sessions, let's do more
networking, so we're sort ofcutting our cloth at the moment

(01:46:02):
as we develop.
But two more years time, sixyears into the show, what would
be a vision that I might have isthat we're at two or three
other venues around the areaopen up the program for the
evening.
We've got an event in the UK, inBrighton, for music called the
Great Escape.
I'd love it to evolve into thescale of something like the
Great Escape what that is formusic.

(01:46:22):
I'd love us to be sort ofdelivering similarly for the
podcasting community.
We have great engagementglobally.
I mean, one of the things forme over the last few weeks
that's really pleased me isseeing so much on social media
about people from all around theworld booking flights and
planning to come to London forthe show.

(01:46:43):
That really pleases us.
As a team, we do get asked alot can we bring the same format
to other territories?
That's been thrown around forquite some time.
It would be good to get thereat some point, but we just need
to keep our eye on making surethe event that we're doing in
London is delivering foreveryone, whether you're a
delegate or a partner at themoment.

Sam Sethi (01:47:06):
Now a lot of people have been asking me look, I
can't come to the event.
I can't fly, I'm in Australiaor I'm somewhere else in the
world.
I believe that they can watchsome of the event online, or is
that after the event?
I can't remember now.

Yeah, there isn't anything on the show days.
There's actually just audiocontent.
There's highlights of content.
Last year a number of stageswere available for people to see
post-show on demand, and sowe're making highlights
available after the show.
So if people can just go tothepodcastshowlondoncom and
you'll get all the info on that,it will be up.
We're kind of concentrating atthe moment on in-show, but

(01:47:45):
straight after the show moreinformation on that will become
available.

Sam Sethi (01:47:48):
And if anyone still hasn't got a ticket and they
want to get a ticket, would theygo to the website?
Can they get it on the day?
What's the scoop?

You can get it on the day, whether or not they'll
still be available on the day.
Like I said, we've had hugedemand.
Tickets are still available forthe show the silver.
For the show the silver ticketsthe kind of lowest tier in
terms of accessibility, thatone's already sold out.
But we've still got platinumand gold tickets available and
actually we still have, eventhough I say that the whole kind
of event is to the rafters.

(01:48:16):
As you can probably tell, thereare opportunities for any
organizations that might stillwant to have a branded presence
or do something small at theevent more than just attending
as a delegate.
There's still opportunitiesthere too.
So just go to the website,really, and you can get that
information.

Sam Sethi (01:48:32):
Jason, thank you so much.
Thanks for putting on anamazing event.
I can't wait to come to it.
It's my favourite event.
It is absolutely.
My voice will be gone by theend of the two days.

It's for certain.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Sam.
The Tech Stuff on the Pod NewsWeekly Review.

Sam Sethi (01:48:47):
Yes, it's the stuff you'll find every Monday in the
Pod News newsletter, and here'swhere Sam talks technology.
What's going on, Sam Well?
our sponsors and friends atBuzzsprout are beta testing a
more accurate transcriptionservice.
They've been doing this for acouple of weeks now.
It's free for all users whileit's in beta, and so before, I

(01:49:08):
think, they used Rev, which wasthe transcription service they
had, and now they're going totake it in-house.
According to Buzzcast, yes, yes,oh, that makes a ton of sense.
Are we already getting that inthe Pod News Weekly, or do we
have to sign in to use the beta?

(01:49:29):
I wonder.
No, we are.
In the last episode we wereusing the new beta.
Oh were we?
Oh, there you go.
I wonder I haven't checked ifit's any more accurate, whether
my name's spelt any funnier ordifferent.
But there you go.
Yes, One of the things that,unfortunately, I don't have the
time to do is to go and correctall of that.

(01:49:49):
No, Because it gets both of ournames wrong, as most transcript
tools do, to be fair.
But yes, it'll be interestingto see whether or not that gets
it a little bit better, whetheror not that gets a little bit
better.
But the transcript isparticularly useful because, of

(01:50:19):
course, Buzzsprout, our sponsor,also offers things like
automated titles and socialmedia posts and blogs and
everything else, and so thetranscript is where all of that
comes from.
That.
So, yeah, so it's a superuseful tool.
I do notice that Sam Sethi wascorrect.
James Cridland was correct inour transcript last week,
Although when I said I'm JamesCridland, it wrote down I'm

(01:50:42):
James Criddon, so you know, butit was close.
So there we are and I couldalso I could always have you
know gone in and actuallycorrected that, which I probably
should have done.
Better than saying you wereJames.
Bond, there we go.
Yes, fountain, the popularpodcast app, tell me all about
it as the advisor.
What's been happening?

(01:51:04):
Well, they've released version1.2.
1.2 is interesting in that it'sfirstly got a bit more design
work on the library pages, onthe content pages, it's got a
rebuilt audio engine so itsounds a little bit better, the
audio playback is a bit morerobust.
But the thing which is quiteinteresting is they have now

(01:51:25):
built in, for a small amount ofsats, they've now built in a way
to get summaries for shows.
So if you're sitting there andyou're wondering, ok, should I
be listening to this next oneand a half hour long show with
Lex Friedman, what will Iactually learn Then?
You can actually pay a verysmall amount of sats, a very
small amount of money, and get asummary generated for you

(01:51:47):
automatically, which is quite anice tool, I think.
Yeah, it's part of their AI workthat they've been working on.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, so yeah.
So lots of stuff from Fountainto come, but certainly, looking
at that, it's nice to see, youknow, a little bit more new
features in there.
They've been, you know,rebuilding stuff behind the hood

(01:52:11):
anyway, but nice to see a bunchof new features there.
Now Podheroes.
It's a company I've not comeacross, but they say they're the
world's first podcast expertmarketplace.
What's this?
So this is a way of you going.
Oh, you know, I'm making apodcast.
I could really do with somebodythat really understands how

(01:52:35):
video works.
Where can I find a consultantto help me with podcast video?
Well, you'll go to Podheroesand you can find people such as
that.
And you can find people such asthat.
They've got some pretty goodpeople working there.
So Lama, who is the CEO sheused to be the former VP at

(01:52:58):
Podio, who, of course, wefeatured on this very show a
couple of weeks ago.
Also, there is a man calledVuck V-U-K See how that turns
out in the transcription and heis the co-founder of Podster,

(01:53:19):
which is a big Middle Easternpodcast company, and Podix,
which is a guest service.
So, yeah, they've got theunderstanding there of how all
of this works.
So, yeah, it was good to seethat.
Yeah, we interviewed GautamRajanand a couple of weeks back
and he was talking about MicMatch, which was a guesting

(01:53:42):
platform.
That he's built and wementioned that he was going to
extend that capability to builda very similar product to
Podhero.
So well done to Podhero, firstout the door.
But you know, I think othersare going to be copying that
platform very soon.
Yes, indeed, what I thought wasinteresting with that is that it
shows people's costs and youknow you can get somebody that

(01:54:06):
will help you with you know your, your podcast for $90 an hour
or somebody else, um, you canget them for $900 an hour.
There's a real sort ofdifferent uh, amount of of, uh,
of uh costing there.
So I I just thought, yeah, Iwonder if you're going to get 10
, times better advice from the900 person.
Um, always interesting to endup seeing.

(01:54:30):
but uh, yeah, so that was um, sothat was certainly good now
headliner um, have integratedtheir podcast promo product with
a number of attributionservices like co-host, a gel and
ai.
What's this, james?
yeah, it's um, they say it's tobring tracking and transparency
to podcast advertising, but theyhave always had a tool called

(01:54:58):
Podcast Promo, which allows youto do a fair amount of
advertising for shows, and sothey've integrated with a bunch
of these attribution servicesthere, which makes a bunch of
sense.
And Podscribe have alsoannounced something which is
interesting.
They've announced a few newfeatures, including something
called Spotify video modelling,so it will work out how many
plays your video gets withinSpotify, except it won't really,

(01:55:22):
because all of this data isactually just based on how your
ads do in your audio RSS feed,and then working on some
modeling for shows of that typeof genre, and you know, et
cetera, et cetera.
So, you know, I'm always sortof hesitant to call them just

(01:55:45):
guesses, but in this particularcase I think it pretty well is
just a guess.
What's going on there?
I was going to read thissentence out and then realise
that none of that sentence madesense to me.
Because I didn't understand it?
Because it's based onperformance in the ad of the RSS
audio and it's a Spotify videoview, which is a play, and I'm

(01:56:06):
like I have no idea how you'redoing this, Exactly exactly.
Now what are Substack doing?
Sam Well.
I mentioned a couple of weeksback.
We've obviously been doing thisshow for a number of years
together.
James and we don't really focustoo heavily on platforms like
Substack or Patreon or Memberfulbecause, although they're very
good at putting exclusivecontent, they've been very

(01:56:30):
singular in what they do and wehaven't really included them in
the podcast players market.
But I think we need to look atthem much closer because the
Substack platforms Zateo, one ofmy favorite podcasts, and
publishing, one of my favoritepodcasts and publisher networks.
They heavily lean on substackfor newsletters, for um

(01:56:52):
podcasting, but live and they'regoing very heavily on live and
they're not.
They didn't go into youtube,surprisingly, and I didn't
understand that why they've goneinto substack and then they uh
copy it over into youtube, andsubstack have announced that
they're going to now launchaudio-only live streams, so
they've got video live streams.
But these audio-only livestreams means you can turn the

(01:57:14):
camera off and still be live andif you want, it says here you
can turn the camera back onhalfway through as well.
So I think it's just a featureto turn the camera off.
But what I find interesting isthat there are more and more
people moving over to substackto do paid uh live services and
that open live streaming is whatwe really want in podcasting.

(01:57:36):
We've been trying to get intopodcasting 2.0, but it looks
like patreon is going to go downthe same road and others, so
yeah, very interesting yeah it.
It's always worth keeping an eyeon what Substack is doing.
I mean, they are doing somereally interesting things with
newsletters and with you know,and increasingly with podcasts

(01:57:59):
as well.
So, yeah, quite a fascinatingthing.
Yeah, I think it's the paidsubscribers.
That was the original driver,wasn't it for them?
So create a newsletter, drivesubscriptions through paid
subscribers.
But now, by adding the audioand video live capabilities and
still having that subscriberelement, I think they've really

(01:58:21):
cracked something reallyinteresting.
No, indeed, now, in theinterview that I did with Jason,
one of the things he mentioned,james, was that Netflix is
going to be at the Londonpodcast show, and my little ears
pricked up quite big becauseI'm like, oh hello, we talked
about them possibly doingsomething with podcasting, more

(01:58:42):
to fill the air and keep youinside the app than really going
big, but they wouldn't come tothe London podcast show unless
they were planning on doingsomething more.
What's your guess?
Yes, and I think you're right towonder what Netflix are doing.
They were at Podcast MovementEvolutions as well, but they

(01:59:02):
were literally just sponsoringthe coffee, so I don't remember
anybody you know speaking verymuch about podcasting or any of
that.
I kind of come back to the factthat Netflix would like more
content, would certainly likesome cheap content and video

(01:59:26):
podcasts are that.
So perhaps it's just a case ofseeing what they can do in terms
of attracting some of thebigger names to the Netflix
platform as free bits of contentthat they get, and perhaps it's
just as simple as that, but Idon't know you.
I mean it's, it's.

(01:59:47):
It is interesting trying toguess what netflix might be
doing there, or maybe they'remeeting with podx.
I tell you, pave, podx andnetflix in one room.
That's it.
I'm going to the bookies, I'min.
But the other thing they'vereleased this week is um, which
I think is really interesting,goes back to what we said about
Apple and Safari.
They've released theirgenerative, ai-powered search

(02:00:10):
tool.
Now I've been talking about anew interface for TrueFans that
we're working on, which has gotan agentic AI.
I'm a massive believer that thisis going to be the way that we
integrate with apps in thefuture and it won't be long.
So the example they give asnetflix is you can now have a
conversational um chat with theai and say I want something

(02:00:33):
funny and upbeat to watch rightnow.
And again, as I said withpodcasting and when tom webster
said he wanted a big button, Ithink um, a conversational ai
interface where you say, look,I'm looking for a podcast, you
know something to do with thenews, or maybe I'm based here in
Paris today.
Tell me something about theLouvre.

(02:00:53):
And again, I think AI-basedinterfaces, where it's
voice-driven, I think are goingto be the future.
I think this new Netflix iOSapp, where they've integrated,
is going to be a wonderfulexample of how that's going to
be used.
Yeah, and I think that whatNetflix has the world of
podcasting doesn't is Netflixhas an astonishing amount of

(02:01:14):
data on every single piece ofcontent in its platform, so
Netflix has access, of course,to the transcripts of everything
, but Netflix have alsocategorized that content into
lots of different sub genres,and so they have so much
information on each individualpiece of content, whereas, you

(02:01:38):
know, you have a look at JoeRogan, and Joe Rogan has one
line, which is a description,and that's it, and so I think
the difficulty that the openpodcasting world has is that we
have nowhere near the amount ofdata on each of the episodes and
each of the podcasts availablein open podcasting, and so

(02:01:59):
there's going to be someinteresting sort of glue in
terms of how we fix that as wego forward.
But yeah, I mean mean certainlyseeing more ways of finding new
shows is really interestingyeah, the other thing they've
included is a tiktok style videofeed.
So again for short form video,and they've completely redone

(02:02:21):
the ui.
The last time it was done was2013, so completely, completely
done the UI for the homepage aswell.
So big updates there fromNetflix.
And I would also say that youknow there are a lot of
companies making some changes toUIs recently, and there's a TV

(02:02:57):
company in Australia calledFetch.
There's a TV company inAustralia called Fetch and
they've just made a few quitebig changes to how those set-top
boxes are perhaps quite a lotolder and quite a lot less
familiar with how these sorts ofthings work.
For them to relearn how thesesystems work after somebody has

(02:03:19):
said, oh, we'll change the UX upa bit.
I think we just need to becareful in terms of doing that.
Now there was a company whichhas I'm trying to remember who
the company was but there is acompany which has released a
super simple version of theirapp this week for seniors, for

(02:03:42):
people that you know find all ofthis additional tech quite
difficult.
I'm desperately trying toremember who that company was,
because it was a big old company, but they'd essentially just
made a super simple version oftheir app.
It was Uber.

Oh, right it was.

Sam Sethi (02:04:01):
Uber.
Yeah, because Uber actually hasa lot of seniors who want to
use Uber, but they find thecurrent iteration of the app
just super confusing.
So they've launched a very sortof light, easy way for people
that aren't too familiar withmobile phones or anything else,

(02:04:21):
just to get them an Uber, whichI think is a brilliant idea yeah
, my, my sister-in-law bought ummy wife's mother a brand new
super duper smart lg tv and shecan't work it now.
We get a phone call every nightnow asking us how to get back to
itv.
Just that's all.
She wants one button and shejust gets lost in all the menus

(02:04:43):
and all the other buttons it'sreally, really hard.
I had to buy my mother-in-law webought just a simple,
straightforward remote controlwhich didn't have all of the
buttons on it, just so that shewouldn't find herself in the
Android TV home system when allshe wanted to do was just to

(02:05:04):
find Channel 7.
Yeah, you're absolutely right,and I do think that there's a
whole missing opportunity hereof just simple, straightforward
interfaces.
It's interesting seeing howsome of the new phones that are
coming out now and Adam and Davewere talking about this on

(02:05:25):
their show last week the LightPhone, which has been
deliberately built to have avery paired back interface which
only allows you to do a fewthings on that phone,
specifically to keep things easyand simple.
And in fact, if you go into theone of the phone stores in

(02:05:46):
Australia, some of the phonesthat are actually selling really
well are those Nokia.
You know 8250s or whatever theyare.
You know the old big phones witha physical keyboard and easy to
use.
You know tools that have gotyou know SMS on them, and that's
about it easy to use.

(02:06:07):
You know tools that have gotyou know SMS on them, and that's
about it, and those are sellingreally well for people that
just can't be dealing with allof this.
You know touch screen and youknow Apple is supposed to be
completely changing how iOSworks at the end of next year,
and you know all of thecomplication that's going to
give.
So, yeah, definitely somethingto have to think about.
And you know all of thecomplication that's going to

(02:06:32):
give.
So, yeah, definitely somethingto have to think about Now.
Your tag the location tag isnow official, james.
It's now in the podcasting 2.0spec.
Congratulations, Hooray, yes,I'm very excited by this.
I think that there's a ton ofexciting things that we can do
with this new podcast locationtag.
The main thing to remember isthat it's not just a lat lon
point.
It's also an OpenStreetMapplace ID, and if we start using

(02:06:55):
those OpenStreetMap place IDswhen we are putting locations in
, then that allows us to do somereally rich things in the
future about you know, I'm inParis.
Play me podcasts about theLouvre, as one of your examples
that you gave earlier on.
Yes, absolutely, it will dothat sort of thing.

(02:07:16):
It could also do play mepodcasts about tourist
attractions that I might want togo and see, and it can go and
find all of the touristattractions in in Paris or
within two miles from where youare currently.
Um, you can do all of that kindof stuff.
So I'm I'm very excited by whatthe podcast location tag can

(02:07:37):
actually do.
Um, so, uh, yeah, it's um, it'sa good thing.
You'll find a specification,you'll find an implementation
guide, you'll find an exampletag generator.
They're all on the podcastindex GitHub, not yet on the
podcasting2.org website.
That needs a kick by Daniel,who is rewriting a little bit of

(02:08:02):
it to make it much easier toupdate, but that will be done
relatively soon, I understand.
Now Dave Jones, the other halfof the Adam Curry Dave Jones
show lovely man that he is.
He pointed out that Cash Appnow has turned on a lightning so

(02:08:22):
you can receive money, not paymoney, but your Lightning
address will be James at CashAppor Sam at CashApp.
So again, he got very excitedabout the fact that it now works
and that we have CashApp aspart of the wallets available
for the Lightning Network.
Yes, I think this is a big deal.
Cashapp is massive in the US.

(02:08:44):
It's available in two countriesthough, just the US and the UK,
but it's got millions of usersin the US Cash App, and so the
idea that you can theoreticallynow link your podcasting 2.0 app
with streaming payments to yourCash App is really exciting, I

(02:09:05):
think, to your cash app isreally exciting, I think,
because that should allow peopleto both earn money as
podcasters but also to spendmoney into podcasters.
That should be pretty good news, so let's hope that it works
the way that we think it's goingto work.

(02:09:27):
Yeah, I mean I think the NostaWallet Connect and badly named
that it is is a connector formultiple wallets, so it'll be
interesting to see if that'sadded to those, because then it
makes it very easy to add cashout to any of the podcast 2.0
apps.
Yes, they've done a prettyinteresting thing there, and

(02:09:48):
that goes alongside Strike witha K, which also accepts
Lightning Receive in that way,and so I guess one of the
questions that I would ask ishow many podcast apps are still
out there that are only sendingto nodes rather than Lightning
Receive addresses, and whenshould I be moving away from a

(02:10:11):
node and moving into just payinginto my Strike account?
And I don't know what theanswer is Well?
I think the answer is.
From my perspective, we stillsupport the node at TrueFans.
You should be getting paymentsfrom this podcast when we get
them.
And, uh, again, we have justadded support for ellen address

(02:10:33):
as well, but we don't, as truefans, support strike with a k or
cash app yet.
Um, but fountain does.
I'm not quite sure where some ofthe other podcast 2.0 apps are
podcast guru and podverse, etcso if I've got, if I've got
strike with a k in my, uh, in mysplits, um, and then somebody

(02:10:58):
listens to the show on true fans, yeah, I'll get paid, right you
?
will, yes, we, yes, we honor outum everything.
So that would be an address andwe would make that payment
wherever the splits were and thepercentage.
We wouldn't allow you right nowto use your strike wallet as a
user.
So, when you're on board, yeah,yeah, yeah, no that makes sense

(02:11:19):
.
That makes sense.
So I wonder.
I wonder, from a streamingpayments point of view, is this
now the time for podcasters, forcreators, to now just be using
Lightning addresses?
Can we actually use that nowwith all of the big podcast apps

(02:11:41):
, or are there still somepodcast apps out there which
will only pay out to nodeaddresses rather than lightning
receive?
Not that I'm aware of.
I mean, if you've got KeySendor you've got LN URLP support,
which I think most apps do now,and you can support the LN

(02:12:05):
address, which is just a listingof what the payment's out, so
it could be paypal in there aswell, but, by the way, um, or
any other.
But yeah, I mean, I think they,I think we're in a good place.
So if you put in your rss feed,in the value tag, your
lightning address, then I thinkall apps should now be paying
out directly over the lightningnetwork to that, based on the
value splits within the valuetag.

(02:12:30):
Of course, the only downsidewith that is we don't
necessarily get to see theinformation about what somebody
has actually boosted, so wedon't necessarily get to see the
message in there, and so maybethat might be the reason why we
don't want to end up doing that.
Well, I think the problem wehave is that we are being forced
to come away from key send toln address because the the

(02:12:54):
market seems to be standardizingon that, or ln urlp as part of
it, and bolt 12.
God, I hate it as much aseverybody else when I have to
talk about it because I don'tfully understand it sometimes.
Um, but that seems to be thearrow of direction.
I think we are doing our bestto try and follow along.

(02:13:14):
I think when you use fountain,which uses the noster wallet
connect, which gives you accessto multiple wallet choices,
strike being one, I, I assumeOscar's going to be pretty quick
to get cash out.
Next, I would if I was him, andso, yeah, I think that's one

(02:13:35):
way, which is you.
So Oscar and I differ in oneaspect only.
So money out.
We both agree.
We will honour what's in thevalue tag over a lightning
payment.
The difference is, I want toonboard people who are
non-technical to understand thisso I don't I do not want to
offer multiple wallet choices.
When you first come across thisthing called a wallet and sats

(02:13:59):
whereas oscar has made a muchmore technical decision where
you do kyc, you get your strikewallet out and any other wallet,
bring it to Fountain and thenthat is your wallet and it's a
universal wallet.
So that's where we differ.
Yeah, no, it's certainlyinteresting.
I do notice going through mystrike payments, that I can see,

(02:14:21):
for example, little.
I can see the messages ifthey've been sent in fountain.
Um, so this payment sayswonderful episode from podcast
movement evolutions, perfectcure for FOMO.
Um, and it says from fountain,whereas there's another whole
set of streaming payments whichjust says pay and then my name

(02:14:42):
on it.
So, um, clearly there'ssomething, there's something
interesting going on there, butperhaps it's time to ramp those
up and to calm down on thecomplicated Node stuff.
But anyway, there we are.
Now talking of payments.
One last area Stripe with a Phad their big global
announcement this week and, wow,did they hit the zeitgeist at

(02:15:05):
the right time.
So apple had the law case thatwe talked about earlier where
they had to allow third-partyexternal links.
Well, one of the bigannouncements is stripe has now
built into the api the abilityto link out from an ios or
android app to make purchases,and I'm so pleased because when
we push our native apps, whichwe're about to do we can now use

(02:15:30):
that, because we built theStripe API into the backend of
TrueFans.
So I'm very, very excited.

Announcer (02:15:36):
Boostergram, boostergram, boostergram.
Super comments, zaps, fan mail,fan mail, super chats and email
Our favorite time of the weekit's the Pod News Weekly Review
Inbox.

Sam Sethi (02:15:53):
So many different ways to get in touch with us.
There's fan mail by using thelink in our show notes, super
comments on True Fans, boostseverywhere else or, of course,
email weekly at podnewsnet.
We're sharing any money thatyou want to send us to.
We got some fan mail throughthe link in our show notes,
didn't we?
Jim James, one of the powersupporters, has written Apple AI
rotten to the core.
Siri just calls chat GBT.

(02:16:15):
Yes, we, we suspect that theirAI announcement at the last WWDC
was a little bit of smoke andmirrors and we'll see what they
do at this WWDC.
I have said long and hard andthink other people are now
agreeing, that Tim has missedevery major technology curve.
I don't think we'll see foldingphones until 2027.

(02:16:36):
And I'm not even going to trustfor once their demos this year.
I think I'm going to have toget my hands on it myself before
I trust whatever they announceas an.
AI demo.
It's time to go, tim Time to go,and a bunch of boosts as well,
which only I can see this week.
So, seth 1,060 sats.

(02:16:56):
I'm intrigued by Netflix andpodcasting Another place to get
your show out to the masses, ifyou're popular enough and doing
video.
Yes, agreed, bruce.
A row of ducks.
The ugly quacking duck, ofcourse Bruce is Mike.
Match Sounds really interesting.
Thanks for the episode 73s 73sto you too.

(02:17:18):
What else have we got?
Silas VT 5,827 sats from TrueFans.
Sam, do you have a specialkeyboard for LinkedIn DMs with
only a thumbs up button?
If so, where do I get it?
I need one too.
No, I don't believe so no ideawhat's going on there.
I think he was asking mequestions and I think I just

(02:17:40):
responded with thumbs up ratherthan a more detailed response
Silas on Linux 1234 sats three,four sats from Fountain, the
number one provider ofdisagreement over the slowest.
He's calling himself the numberone provider of disagreement
over the slowest method ofcommunication ever.
Sometimes I have to thinkrather hard.

(02:18:01):
Why did I write that over aweek ago?
Yes, because you may rememberthat this time last week he was
saying I don't know somethingelse about video and whether
video could work in RSS andstuff like that.
But anyway, yes, this is theslowest method of communication
ever because it's essentiallyyou send a message in and then

(02:18:22):
we mention it the following weekand then, yes, it's very
entertaining.
And then you reply the followingweek.
And then, yes, it's veryentertaining.
And then you reply thefollowing week after yes, yes,
Sai sends 2,780 sats.
Thank you, sai.
Volume tracking in metrics tounderstand listening hotspots,
which I mentioned last week.
What about chapter jumping andhow could that affect percentage

(02:18:42):
complete metrics?
I sometimes jump over somechapters to skip to something
more interesting or if I'm timepoor.
So can this be tracked andmeasured for audience trends?
And the answer is yes,absolutely it can, but by the
podcast players, not by podcasthosts, of course, who have no
idea if you're using chapters oranything else.
But yes, absolutely they can dothat.

(02:19:05):
Neil Velio enjoyed the fact thatwe left an edit in last week
talking about John Spurlock.
Yes, he sends a message sayingha ha ha, love the funny edit
introducing Spurlock.
Great fun, as awkward as aMartin Brundle celebrity

(02:19:28):
gridwalk at a US-based GrandPrix.
Leave more of these in.
He says Okay, and another rowof ducks from Bruce, the ugly
quacking duck.
Thanks for the news, keeppodcasting.
Seven threes.
Thank you, bruce.
That's kind of you.
If you would like to send usmessages, then please do.
We share any money that we makethis way and at some point we

(02:19:54):
will sort out some way ofdrinking all of that money back.
So thank you for that.
And we are still on 18, theexcellent 18 subscribers to Pod
News Weekly.
You can become the 19th atweeklypodnewsnet with your
credit card.
Thank you to Cameron Moll andto Marshall Brown, matt Medeiros

(02:20:16):
and Mike Hamilton, dave Jacksonand Rachel Corbett I'm
partnering you all up this weekSi Jobling and David Marzell
lucky you, jim James and RockyThomas, neil Velio and Mazzalene
Smith, claywick Brown, johnMcDermott, james Burt, david
John Clark aka the late bloomeractor Brian Entsminger and Star

(02:20:38):
Tempest.
Very much appreciate you beingpart of that.
So very grateful indeed.
So, sam, what's happened foryou this week?
Um, something that's beenresonating in my head that you
said actually on a podcast um,advertising is a tax on the poor
and the rich can pay to hideads, and it just keeps going

(02:20:59):
around in my head because Ithink we Did.
I say that, that that soundsbrilliant.
I I should write that down.
You did down you did.
Yes, um, I can't remember whichshow you were on the list.
You know when you were floodingthe market last week where, yes
, 15 shows with mr cridland onit.
Yes, yes, one of those, yes yes,flood the zone.

(02:21:19):
Flood the zone.
It worked.
Yeah, no, it was just.
It's just been resonating in myhead.
I don't know why, but it wasand I was.
Um, basically, I can see howmore and more content is going
behind paywalls, like patreonand memberful and and supporting
cast and how spotify are usingum payments from subscriptions

(02:21:44):
rather than advertising togenerate revenue.
Yeah, I don't know.
I just feel that there's a trendthat was the one, the one
question that I don't think thatmaya prohovnik was expecting.
When I said you know, um, whenI said you know that you can pay
to get rid of the advert, ofthe advertising, or you, you can
obviously listen to advertising.
Tell me, maya, why wouldadvertisers only want people

(02:22:07):
that can't afford to pay to getrid of it?
And there was this sort of beatpause, and then she went oh,
that's a really interesting wayof thinking about it and I
thought, yeah, because it's aquestion I've always wanted to
ask, and it must be the same forYouTube Premium, it'll be the
same for Spotify, it'll be thesame for all manner of people.

(02:22:29):
But I like my phraseadvertising is a tax on the poor
.
I don't remember saying it, butit's a wonderful phrase.
I'm going to use that more.
What else have you been doing?
You've been listening to apodcast.
Yeah, tech Dirt.
They had a really goodinterview with the CEO of
Flipboard, mike, on the rise ofthe open social web.
He's got a new browser calledSurf and I thought it was a

(02:22:52):
really interesting interviewagain about federation and stuff
and where he thinks it's going.
So again, if that floats yourboat, I would recommend that
Very good.
Anything exciting in True.
Fans.
Well, we're slowing down on theeverything exciting in uh, true
fans.
Well, we're slowing down on thenumber of features everyone
will be glad to hear becausehooray yes yes, everyone is

(02:23:13):
going.
Phew, stop, um, because we areabout to push out the native
apps.
So we are just spending all ofour living breathing time on
that um which I'm very excitedabout um I've just worked out
what a great t-shirt would befor you.
Go on, then you should see thesize of my change log.
Hey, not too late for the Londonpodcast show Gosh run away

(02:23:41):
Anyway, yes, yes, we added someprivacy controls.
I realized that one of thethings we do is we allow users
to see what's in your library,what's in your history, what
activity you did, um, who you'refollowing as a friend.
And then I thought, well,everyone can see that as well
and that's not very good forprivacy.
So now you can go into youruser settings and you can hide

(02:24:05):
that from any other ones publiceyes and make it all private and
just for you, or make one tabso you might say I'm very happy
for you to see what's in mylibrary, but I don't want you to
see what my activity is or whomy friends are so you can pick
and choose.
Yes, yeah, that makes a bunch ofsense.
A bunch of sense.
And have you added a randomplay count?

(02:24:27):
No, well, it was generated.
Yes, we have James.
Yes, a random play count.
Yes, we've had that before.
Our good friends at Spotify,yes.
But I realise that on the backof that, we can add two other
metrics that I've wanted to dofor a while.
So, average listen time forusers.
So, let's say somebody who's afan of this show, we look at all

(02:24:51):
the shows that they've listenedto and then we can calculate
how long they listened, becausewe have that data and then we
can say against them in thecreator's dashboard Neil Velio,
for example, listens to 45minutes on average of all the
podcasts that we do, right, yeah.
So I thought that was quite anice little metric to roll that

(02:25:12):
out.
And we've also looked at thenumber of plays and we now put a
label against it which sayswhich is your most popular
episode, so based on the numberof plays.
Very good, very good.
Excellent Little features, butnothing big coming soon until we
get the native apps out.
So, james, what's?
happened for you.
Well, I'm in Toronto in Canadaright now, which is an

(02:25:36):
interesting place to be.
It's a big music conferencewhich also has a radio
conference, and inside the radioconference there's tracks, of
course, on podcasting, as youmight guess.
So other podcast people who arehere include the internet's
Arielle Nissenblatt, so she ishere talking about all kinds of

(02:26:02):
things, also Helen Zaltzmanthings, also Helen Zaltzman.
There's podcast royalty if everthere was.
She was here it was great tocatch up with her yesterday and
a bunch of other folk talkingabout podcasting and things.
I've been mostly talking aboutradio and rather enjoying it and

(02:26:22):
being very rude about thegovernment regulator here, who
then came up to me afterwardsand had a nice chat.
So that's always fun Did he buyyou a beer.
No, not quite, I don't think itwas quite buying a beer, stage,
but yes, but that was a nicething.
So, yes, so I was doing that,looking forward to going home

(02:26:45):
tomorrow, which I'll be goinghome via Hong Kong, and I think
I've got six or eight hours inHong Kong so I think I might be
able to get out of the airportand go and see a little bit of
Hong Kong.
It's an amazing place.
Yes, so Kowloon, if not HongKong Island Amazing place.
So it'd be nice to go, butwe'll see if I feel up to it on

(02:27:11):
that day.
But yeah, so that's been reallygood fun, so I've been enjoying
doing that.
I should also say hello to theBBC's, sam Bonham, who came up
to me the other day and said howmuch he enjoys listening to the
Pod News Weekly Review.

(02:27:31):
Oh thank you, which is very nice, and there are in fact, quite a
lot of people who listen tothis very show, and occasionally
you find out who listens.
So that's a lovely thing.
So hurrah for that, for that.
And the only other thing Iwould say is, if you have a

(02:27:51):
Google device that you listen tothe Pod News Daily on, maybe
you have a routine, or maybe youare asking the Pod News Daily
for you know, you're asking yoursmart speaker to play the Pod
News Daily, or whatever it mightbe then you will have notice a
change.
Uh, on that.
I will leave it at that,because I don't necessarily want
to give too many um, uh, toomuch PR to what I've, to what

(02:28:17):
I've done, um, but you will findsomething very interesting it
were you to give that a go.
So, uh, thank you very much forthat.
Mystic Cridland, yes, I know.
So thank you very much for thatMystic Cridland.
Yes, I know there's a thing that, yes, I've never worked with a

(02:28:38):
tech company that is more ineptthan Google Utterly
extraordinary.
Anyway, more on that, probablywhen I decide to cover it as an
actual story again, but let'sleave it at that for now and
that's it for this week.
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Jason Carter, Ruth Fitzsimons, and Spotify - what are they "play"ing at?

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Jason Carter, Ruth Fitzsimons, and Spotify - what are they "play"ing at?