Hey friends! Happy Friday. I saw Tiger’s Jaw and Heart Attack Man at Trees in Dallas last night. Highly recommend checking out either band live if you ever have the chance!
I bet you’re tired of Twitter news, so let’s take a break from that mayhem and get back to talking about audio and podcasting things.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR THE WEEK
🎧 The Changeup: Dan Misener, Co-Founder of Bumper 🎧
Bumper is a podcast growth agency that helps organizations reach their business goals through the power of audio.
Dan is one of the sharpest minds in audio. We talk about the Faustian bargain some audio companies took to garner scale, what it means to focus on engagement versus download numbers, where he thinks the industry is headed, and how critical podcast strategy will be to it.
You know who understands podcasting? Dan. Dan understands podcasting. You should listen to Dan.
📝 Bumper blog: Apple is quietly tagging podcast episodes by topic 📝
Speaking of Dan and Bumper, they published a blog post this week detailing how Apple is now tagging podcast episodes with episode topics.
What do Apple’s topics mean for podcasters?
It seems Apple is extracting topics from automated transcripts, and using those topics to help power its podcast search features. If true, I see several important implications for podcasters.
Podcast SEO goes well beyond the textual elements in you show’s RSS feed
For some podcasts, it’s possible to see what Apple thinks your show is about
Like Apple’s transcript search, there’s no way for creators to directly control what Apple’s topic analysis thinks an episode is about. Whereas podcasters can directly manipulate metadata like title and description text through their RSS feeds, there doesn’t seem to be any way to edit, revise, or correct the topics Apple assigns to their episodes.
Combined with Apple’s podcast category data, episode topics could be used to identify editorial trends over time. Think Google Trends, but for podcasts.
Apple’s podcast topic identification could enable new and exciting discovery features, and help listeners find relevant episodes in an increasingly crowded landscape
Interesting stuff. Wondering if Spotify is doing something similar.
🎥 YouTube shares a 67 page PDF guide to podcasting on YouTube 🎥
There’s only one problem: No one reads anymore.
Still, props to their team for providing such thorough documentation.
🎧 Trapital Podcast: What Spotify and YouTube’s Billions Playlists Tell Us About Streaming 🎧
Spotify still is the music industry’s leading source of revenue, but YouTube wants that title. If you read any posts from YouTube’s Global Head of Music Lyor Cohen, the message is loud and clear. Since both companies generate most of that revenue from their biggest hits, their “billions” lists are great indicators of what success looks like on each platform.
Spotify’s billion streams playlist and YouTube’s billions views club have plenty of overlap among their 300+ songs. Some songs are hits on any platform, but the differences are a rearview look at their strategies so far.
On the episode, Tati and I talked even more about Spotify vs YouTube and what to expect. I also talked to Billboard’s Glenn Peoples about his new Global Music Index and the state of music stocks overall.
Great conversation. Check out some of the topics covered:
[3:03 ] Immediate takeaways from each Billions Club playlists
[5:15 ] How “meme traffic” impacted both platforms
[9:37 ] Passive consumption vs. active consumption
[12:11 ] International differences between Spotify and YouTube
[16:36 ] How Spotify and YouTube enable fragmentation of fandom
[26:14 ] Short-form videos eventual effect on YouTube streaming
[27:55 ] YouTube vs. Spotify competition intensifying
[38:33 ] What % of the Global Music index Spotify takes up
[39:23 ] Why music industry stocks fell further than the overall market
[50:22 ] What goes into calculating Average Revenue Per User for Spotify
[55:23 ] Spotify’s podcast strategy & acquisitions
[59:18 ] How much of Trapital’s audience comes from Spotify
That’s it for this week’s edition. See you next week, same time?