Sam Sethi

[00:00:00]

Introduction and Guest Introduction

Niall: Welcome back to another episode of Smarter Podcasting with me, Niall Mackay, the podcast guy. I’ve been podcasting since 2019. I started my first show about the country that’s now my home, Vietnam, called A Vietnam Podcast, funnily enough. I’ve now worked on over 40 shows through Seven Million Bikes podcasts.

I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting some amazing people in podcasting, and today I’m going to be speaking to one of them. Now this guy here, he is a massive proponent of Podcasting 2. 0. Now I’m embarrassed to say, as a podcaster, I should know what that means, and I do a little bit. I did a little bit and then we had a big conversation last week and now I understand it a little bit more.

So in this episode, we are going to be talking about what is Podcasting 2. 0. My guest today has been involved for, my guest today has been involved for podcasting for over eight years. He’s the co host of the Pod News Weekly Review, which is an amazing newsletter podcast website, all about podcasting that you should check [00:01:00] out if you haven’t already.

And he is the creator of a new application website called TrueFans, which I was introduced to last week, which is all about value for value for podcasters and a new way for podcasters to get paid, which of course is what we all ultimately want. So I am very. So I am very, very excited to talk today to Sam Sethi.

Thank you very much for joining me

today, Sam.

Sam Sethi: Hey Niall, thank you so much for inviting me.

Niall: You are very welcome.

Understanding Podcasting 2.0

Niall: Now, the biggest question I have for you, and I hope lots of podcasters have the same question as well. What the hell is podcasting

0?

Sam Sethi: It’s nothing very special actually. Let’s be, let’s, let’s bring it back down. Right? It’s this, it’s not a unicorn. It’s not a fairy tale. Um, it’s an evolution of podcasting in, in its simplest form. What happened was Adam Curry, the inventor of podcasting said, look, you know, We need a few more bells and whistles, not to the [00:02:00] audio, not to the mics, not to the recording capability, but just to help with some problems we had.

Now, what are the three problems that we primarily have? Discovery, interactivity and monetization. So people say, well, I, there’s no problem with discovery. I keep hearing this. And I go, yeah, there is. If you’ve got a brand new podcast and there’s. Four million podcasts in the pool. How do you find your new podcast?

So is an issue. And one of the things in podcasting 2. 0 is we’ve just added some new features. They’re called tags, but let’s call them features. One of those features is the person tag. So I want to see a picture of Neil. I can hear his voice on the audio, but you know, Apple have a proprietary way of doing it, but we’re not all superstars.

So now with the person tag, this new feature in podcasting 2. 0, I can insert my image into my feed and boom, suddenly I can discover what Niall looks like. [00:03:00] So those simple little things like chapters and transcripts are examples of small little incremental features that are added to your RSS feed that don’t change the audio. but help other people find you or find content within your audio.

Niall: So that sounds simple, but I’ve already got questions in my head that I kind of know the answer to, and I would assume that the listener has the same questions as well. So let’s go back a couple of steps.

The Role of RSS Feeds in Podcasting

Niall: What is an RSS

feed?

Sam Sethi: An RSS feed is something that you don’t really need to understand. It’s the underlying, uh, protocol, underlying data. That is the structure of how your podcast is made. So a host over here, uh, allows you to upload your audio. So after this, you will upload the audio from this podcast to your host. They put that in a tag called the enclosure field. That’s it. End of story. It’s just a [00:04:00] little field that says, this is my audio. Now the rest of the RSS feed has little things like date published, uh, location, maybe it has other elements about other episodes that you’ve produced before. It might have little items about who the podcast is, IE the name and all of that is called metadata, and that’s all compressed together into one file called an RSS Feed. Now the host then publishes that to Apple Spotify Podcast Index, all these directories around the world and apps like mine and others then look at at these directions and go, oh, there’s Neil’s new episode. Boom. Let me grab that now. Let me read all of the bits and pieces in that file. And then as an app, we display that in the actual application.

So we then pull, oh, that’s the name that Neil’s given for this podcast. Great. I’ll take that and I’ll display that there. Oh, there’s the enclosure, right? That’s what we play. Oh, there’s the, oh, [00:05:00] okay. There’s the data. It was published. Let’s add that. So it’s just a basic structured file called RS. Use as a means to transport the data from the host to the application.

Importance of Metadata in Podcasting

Niall: And then what exactly is the metadata and how important is it to things like discoverability? Because there’s so much you read about in podcasting and some things I completely disagree with, some things I don’t believe in, and some things I just think it’s going to take too long for too small of a difference.

So I’m not going to sit there for one hour and Do something that’s going to get me maybe one more listener.

Sam Sethi: metadata is totally irrelevant. If all you want to do is have your audio distributed to another user, right? That’s, that’s it because all you want is to be able to have the name and the title of the episode and the enclosure. That’s your base level. Now, everything else is you helping. [00:06:00] Others try and discover you, uh, and add value to your RSS feed by giving it more rich metadata. Now you don’t have to, but I think as we get more and more people podcasting, you will want more and more metadata so that people can find you faster and quicker. So yeah, it’s worth it, but yes, you’re right. Some of them are, let’s say, oh, you know, adding some feature over here might be, oh no, yeah. No one’s ever going to use that, not for two years.

I’m not even bothered. I’ll wait. And I get that. But some of the things like chapters and transcripts and the person tag, I would do those today.

Niall: Well, that’s interesting. Cause that I just is one example that I don’t do myself and maybe it happens nowadays because it happens more automatically, but I remember in the beginning, like I looked into adding chapters and again, it was just going to take me so long to manually add chapters. And make, as far as I could see, almost zero difference [00:07:00] too.

I mean, what we all want is more people listening to our, our amazing content.

that changed?

AI and Automation in Podcasting

Sam Sethi: It Has thanks to AI. I mean, you know, if you have a drinking game with AI, there you go. You can start drinking now. Um, AI, the host that me and James use for pod news weekly, uh, ads chapters will suggest chapters automatically. So they have a feature called co host. You click a button and it looks at your audio and says, Oh, these seem to be the natural breaks where you would want to put a chapter in.

And so we go, yep. Thank you very much. There’s all the chapters. It suggests five or six titles. So we pick the one that matches the transcript. They add a transcript automatically. And they even have the person tag. That is all done with one click. Suddenly we can then go and put in things like chapter art.

So we can say, right, as I’m talking about this feature, instead of being the cover art of my podcast, now I can have a [00:08:00] different piece of imagery. So if the person is looking at their phone, they will see something related. I can put a link to it, so if they want to click on it and find out more information at that chapter marker point, there you go. So yes, a year ago, even two years ago, it was a manual, laborious process. Today, it’s a one click with most. RSS. com does it, Blueberry does it, Captivate does it. So yeah, it’s not a big thing anymore.

Niall: Well, I edit with Descript and I know you can add chapter markers on there. And I didn’t even realize that those were then translated into the directories. And so I got a message from one of my clients who I was leaving them messages using markers. Not realizing that they were chapter markers. Yeah, exactly.

Right. So they sent me a screenshot of listening on Apple podcast and they’re like These messages you’ve been leaving us are showing up on Apple Podcasts and I was like, Oh my goodness, I did not know that. All right. Okay. Go back, delete. And now we use it for [00:09:00] chapter markers, knowing that they are specifically, I did not realize there was a connect with that.

I, I do think that podcasting, and I guess I would say this because it is my industry. One of the biggest proponents, or not proponents, one of the biggest benefactors of AI, and it’s hard, you don’t even notice it, like, so things like transcripts, and if you’re new to podcasting, and you’re using Descript, or Riverside, or whatever it is, and are automatically transcribing your podcast, and giving you this transcript that’s like 99 percent accurate, if you have a good accent.

If you have my accent, it’s about 50 percent accurate, but um, generally it’s not, even with my accent, it’s about 95 percent accurate. But I remember when I first started 2019, to get a transcript cost a fortune. It was like 50 or more for just one hour of transcription. And so many tools, like you’re mentioning, have absolutely revolutionized

podcasting.

Sam Sethi: Yeah. I mean, I think AI, as you said correctly, is. [00:10:00] populating all the way through podcasting quite easily. I mean, not even, even there are automated voices with using AI. Some people are doing that. Right. But I don’t like that element of it. But with Deedscript, as you mentioned, you know, the automated transcripts, but now they’ve got also language translation as well in beta, right. So now you can take this podcast and translate that into Vietnamese or Indian or Japanese, right? I don’t know what I’d sound like with a Scottish accent, or what you would sound like with a Scottish accent in Japanese. That could be brilliant! But, um, but, but those tools, you, you’re right. They, they were costly and, and very laborious to do still. Um, there are now So many tools out there, there’s Headliner, there’s Eddie, there are, I mean, I can, list goes on, right? And, and as I said, with Buzzsprout, the tool I use for hosting, you know, they have Coatpilot, so,

so I think, look, um, [00:11:00] the post production part of podcasting is always the hardest bit, right?

Challenges and Solutions in Podcast Editing

Sam Sethi: The exciting bit’s this. Get a mic, get a guest, have a chat. Wow. This is fun. And then you’ve got the, Oh God, do I have to edit this thing now? Oh my God, that’s going to take me forever. And then when you’ve edited it, you’ve got that next section, which is now I’ve got to publicize it. Now I’ve got to push it out.

Now I’ve got to create clips. Now I’ve got to create this, that, this. So the tools again, just as you mentioned it, because I also use Descript, they now have an automated tool Option. So you, you click under Lord, the AI tool, and it goes through the whole of your transcript and gives you 20 clips. Okay.

Which one do I want to use? Which five do I want to use? Right. So that now means that AI is, and AI to me, by the way, stands for assisted intelligence, not artificial. And it’s that assisted element that I love rather than artificial, which I really think is a misnomer. [00:12:00] No,

Niall: definitely a hundred percent true. And everything we do. I tell people like AI is incredible, but it needs a human touch still. You know, we’re nowhere near close to, maybe we’ll be there in six months. I don’t know, but we’re nowhere near close to just pressing a button and everything’s done, you know, my teammate clips, but they are very much.

putting a human final touch to it and sending it to me. And I’m saying, you know, change this by that, do this by that. It’s funny you mentioned about the editing part though, because I actually love that part of it. And I do think part of it is because I love the script. Like I’m a massive fanboy of the script.

I had Ariel Nissenblatt on recently and I was like, fanboying just because she worked for the script. Cause I do, I used to use GarageBand and it’s quite long and laborious. It was still fun, but the script just makes it so much more fun to edit. And it’s like the magic of editing as well. I was talking to one of my clients today.

And we were explaining to her that, so what we do for video now is we mute the ums and the ahs instead of deleting them because it’s going to cause like, you know, cuts and [00:13:00] jumps. And she was like, but does that not look weird? And we were actually, no, no, it’s the magic of editing. Because when you actually say um or ah, You, and you mute it, you don’t actually really notice the mouth moving because it’s so small and it’s so quick and she was like, Oh my goodness, that’s amazing.

I was like, this is so, I, I really get excited by editing because you can do so many things that take an audio. I love making someone sound amazing. You know, she was just like, wait, wait, you make me sound really intelligent. And we’re like, well, yeah, I guess so. Yeah, we, we make it sound much, much better, but it does take a long time.

I remember a few years ago I sat down and wrote it down how much, how long it took to make one episode. So we record right for one hour, but I spent about an hour before this setting up all the equipment. We’ve obviously chatted before to set up the interview. Then you’re going to edit it. Then you’re going to publicize it, do all the meta tags.

Like you say, I worked out. It takes about eight to 10 hours to make one podcast episode. And that’s where Seven Million Bikes podcast come in because we then take that [00:14:00] time away from you. You can pay us to do that for you. And you can get that time back to do whatever you want with, but, uh, it is a.

That’s just such a fun thing to do, podcasting, I think, and I do enjoy this part, but I think I even enjoy the editing more, but going back to podcasting 2.

Podcasting 2.0 Features and Interactivity

Niall: 0, so you mentioned about the, we’re talking about the production side, that doesn’t really change at all, even the, the, the interview stage doesn’t really change, it’s that publicizing that changes, and what you mentioned about discoverability, because that’s what everybody wants, everyone wants to be, everyone I talk to, you want, how can I get my podcast to be found more, we all want, Joe Rogan status, and I do have to tell a lot of people, you know, that’s the top 1

are going to get

Sam Sethi: that’s not even the top 1%.

That’s top 0.

Niall: Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. My other favorite is when someone asks to get, like, their podcast to look like the diary of a CEO, and I’m like, you know he spends 50, 000 per episode or something like that, so, do the best we can, but just be aware that we, you’re not paying us 50, [00:15:00] 000 per episode. He has, I think, 8 people on his team per episode, you

know.

yeah,

Sam Sethi: I mean, the, the perception is, is just him rocking up to a mic and just chatting with some mates is, is totally a misnomer. I mean, but good on him

to make feel like that is exactly what he’s doing, but he had, you’re right, he has a team that, that take it with Descript, they clip it out, they put it on TikTok, they put it on video clips, they do everything. And that is a, That is a 20 hour, maybe 30 hour process, right? I mean, just, just so you know, I, I

have a little thing in my head cause I’m quite simple, five P’s and that helps me structure any tool or any part of the podcast process. So pre production, production, post production, promotion, and profitization.

And when you have those five buckets, you go, Oh, that tool fits into this one. That tool does business. Those three things that tool does that one. Okay. I get where you fit in [00:16:00] my process, of course, of producing a podcast.

Niall: So, where does Podcasting 2. 0 fit in, in those P’s,

and how does it change

Sam Sethi: It fits in post production and it fits in promotion and, um, fundamentally in profitization quite a lot as well. So if you now look at. Podcasting 2. 0, there are 27 tags currently, features that you can add to your RSS feed that make it richer. That’s, that’s, that’s what you can do. So we’ve talked a little bit about, you know, the person, transcripts, uh, and, and those. There are other ones like location tag, which tells you you know, where was this produced or where am I talking about? Um, there are other tags that aren’t going to actually appear in the UI, in the, in, in the value for the user. They, they are more for the application to understand. So there’s tags called medium equals podcasting or medium equals audio book. [00:17:00] And why why would you have those? Because what it allows the application to do is say, Oh, this is a, um, Thriller, right? As opposed to a serialized podcast that we have. I don’t want the ending of the book as the latest episode. That would be crazy, right? Cause then, you know, that’s what Spike Milligan used to, he used to read the end of a book before he said, I’d have to read the end of the book in case I died before the end. So he always read the last page first. Um, but you want the last episode as a last serial element of that book to be the end of the episodes. So reverse chronology. So putting medium equals audio book tells the app to change the order. So some of the tags, what I’m trying to say are not going to be end user obvious benefits.

They are application benefits. But the second part we haven’t talked about is interactivity. So interactivity is simply means I want to tell the podcaster who I love and listen to a little bit about what [00:18:00] they said. I want to give them a message. I want to send them a bit of a clip or something like that.

So interactivity is comments in English, right? How do you do that? You can’t do it in Spotify. You can’t do it in Apple. But now with podcasting 2. 0, there is a. comments section. There is a like heart section, right? So I like this heart tip. I want to leave a comment. Brilliant. Tell Neil, yeah, I love that section.

That was perfect. Neil then gets it. Oh, now I’m not talking just to a microphone and one person. I actually have an audience that is talking back to me. So those parts are really important. I think that we start to see those added.

Niall: So, you’re talking about liking, hearting, commenting, and that, I’ve just started getting into YouTube, obviously we’re recording this on video right now, it’s gonna go on YouTube.

I’m loving that aspect of YouTube. That people can like, comment on it. On my other channel, A Vietnam Podcast, it’s starting to gain a [00:19:00] lot of traction on YouTube. And I am absolutely loving seeing those comments about it. A couple of the clients we work with, they’re on YouTube and we make their videos and we can see the interaction on there.

I think that’s something that podcasting has been needing for a long time. Like you’d be able to read the transcript as you’re, as you’re listening. Essentially, if even if you have it on

mute, I guess.

Sam Sethi: I think what you’re seeing is all these features being added, but there is a distinction now. So what YouTube have are comments that only work in YouTube. What Spotify have are comments that only live in Spotify. Polls that live only in Spotify. In fact, their transcript is only available in a format That is for Spotify, and the same is true of YouTube. The one that Apple produced is actually a podcasting 2. 0 standard transcript.

The Challenge of Proprietary Standards

Sam Sethi: So they have followed the 2. 0 spec and added a transcript field in the RSS that follows the 2. 0 spec, but [00:20:00] Spotify and YouTube have closed proprietary standards that aren’t transferable into other applications. So. This is the big challenge.

Now, many people here may remember the browser wars. I mean, if you’re old enough like me, um, and it’s Microsoft. Thank

you very for aging me. But in the early days of the internet, you had browser wars Netscape versus Microsoft, and then it became Google Chrome versus Microsoft IE. And And the closed Microsoft standards way, way, way ahead of everyone else because they could just build it and push it, build and push very quickly.

Didn’t have to get consensus agreement from the industry. Whereas the open standards groups, the HTML4, HTML5, CSS1 had to work with a larger group of people. to get consensus and then build that in. So it always goes slower, but eventually like the tortoise in the hair, it catches [00:21:00] up and that’s what we’re seeing Spotify, YouTube are going ahead with proprietary standards.

They’re going faster, quicker, and everyone’s going, Ooh, look, you can do it over there.

Cross-App Comments: The Future of Podcasting

Sam Sethi: The ultimate goal of podcasting 2. 0 with comments is something called cross app comments. So the idea is that comments will live in one of the 18 different small, podcasting 2. 0 apps, but they can be read by the other apps.

So let’s say your favorite app is, I don’t know, Fountain or Podverse or whatever. My favorite app is TrueFans. I leave a comment on your episode. Now, if you don’t use TrueFans, then that’s just stuck in TrueFans, right? And conversely, Fountain. But actually where we’re heading to is that those comments will Move across between both apps. And so you’ll see comments, both within TrueFans and Fountain, irrelevant to which app you actually started playing with.

Niall: That is a big difference. I mean, so I didn’t fully [00:22:00] understand that because I fully understand what you’re saying. Like you leave a comment on Spotify or YouTube or Apple. You can’t do it. You’re going to see it there. So that is a big problem with podcasting that I see because it’s so fragmented and it is very much dependent on where you listen.

So now I’m starting to understand what is Podcasting 2. 0. I also want to add a thought I just had. I think with that, with the name Podcasting 2. 0, even for me in the beginning, I felt like it was something brand new. There’s not really like a clear line, like there’s Podcasting 1. 0. It’s just a kind of non presentation.

Nomenclature, is that the right name? For like, some new standards that have been added. So I think that, for me anyway, that helps me understand it more. Because to think of it as like something wholly brand new and different is like really crazy. To just go, it’s just some new stuff that we’ve labelled.

Podcasting 2. 0. That really helps, but that to me would be unbelievable if we could have something that works across all apps. And so if you, cause even right now you leave reviews, you leave a review on [00:23:00] Spotify, it’s totally different to leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. So that’s, that’s really exciting.

Monetization in Podcasting 2.0

Niall: So moving on from that. The most important thing, what every podcaster says, I get it all the time. How can I monetize? And I mostly work with, trying to work with businesses and I tell them to sell their own services and products because it is quite unlikely you’re going to be the next Joe Rogan and be able to sell sponsorship and to sell sponsorship, you’ve got to be getting so many downloads, whereas you don’t need so many to sell your product to your niche.

But what’s going to change with Podcasting

2. 0 with that?

Sam Sethi: making money, as you said, correctly, generally the, the head of the long tail is where the money is for advertising. You know, you have to have a thousand CPM, you know, thousand users for a CPM. Right. And everyone’s worried about their downloads. Oh, I’ve got to have 10, 000 downloads. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Fine. the the Joe Rogans, the, the, the smartless of the world call me daddy. They will always get advertisers because advertiser PR companies are very, [00:24:00] to be honest, they’re pretty thick actually. They just look in the top 10. Apple. Who’s in the top 10. Right. Oh, put some money at them. Right. Um, so that’s. That’s never going to be most of us in the long tail where we’ve got a smaller audience, but it’s a very niche audience. And that’s, what’s lovely about podcasting. It is very niche. I mean, the advertiser who produces a wool knitting needle would love to find the podcast of a person talking about knitting, but they can’t find them.

So they just never advertise. So there is always going to be advertisers for you because 50 people listening to that podcast about knitting is a very targeted audience for that knitting needle company. Those are so hard to do that most people don’t. So we have host read ads, we have dynamic ad insertion, and that’s what we call traditional advertising, 1.

0 advertising. So let me take one step back to go two steps forward.

The Evolution of Micropayments

Sam Sethi: In the early days of the web, [00:25:00] um, there was no, Micropayment system for the web. Um, why we, why would we need a micropayments? We have, you know, credit cards, we have PayPal, we have Stripe. Well, the problem is those services take three or 4% or more.

Apple takes 30%, right? So the problem is, if you wanted to make a small micropayment to this podcast, and I wanted to give you Neil 50 p or a pound right, or a $1, I couldn’t because half of that, or a third of that has gone already. And then. probably a little bit more of that will go for other feeds. So you’re not getting the full value that I want to give you. So in 1. 0 Netscape, which I used to work for, didn’t produce a micropayment system. So Facebook came up and others with hearts, likes, and thumbs up as a sentiment back to the creator of the blog post of the video, say, I really like what you did. And then everyone chased follows and everyone chased hearts and likes, Scoop those all up and go to your bank [00:26:00] manager and say, great, I’ve got a million likes.

Can I have a loan, please? And he’ll go, not a chance, sir. Go away. Right? So the problem you’ve got is that they had no real value, but they were the only thing available. So micropayment systems were the big missing part of the web. Forget podcasting, just the web. So, They came about a few years ago. I won’t go into technical details, but it’s basically the ability to take a Bitcoin and strip that down to 100 millionths of a Bitcoin is a one sat.

It’s a, it’s a currency value of one sat. What’s one sat worth? Point zero, zero, zero, one of a dollar, right? It’s nothing of nothing. And that’s the idea. It should be nothing of nothing because you can. you know, give someone a thousand sats or ten thousand sats and ten thousand sats is like a dollar. So you’re not really giving a massive amount, although the number sounds very big. So we have now created a micropayment system. [00:27:00] Okay, so now we’ve got to make it easy for people to understand how to use the micropayment system. And we’ve got to give the technology that enables it to get work. So, What’s been developed is a peer to peer wallet system. So you will have a wallet and I will have a wallet and I’m listening to your podcast and I want to take money out of my wallet and give it directly to your wallet. And I don’t want it to go through a third party, PayPal or Stripe or a bank account. It’s a peer to peer direct. And that works today. The problem we have is twofold. One is terminology. So back in the day when you weren’t born, as it seems, um, uh, when the web was born.

Niall: No, I think we’re not that far off in age, to be honest. I do vaguely remember that I had AOL dial up. Like, you know, I

Sam Sethi: okay. Okay. I don’t feel so bad now. Um, In the early days of the web, I was working for Netscape in product marketing, and I used to have to tell people it’s called HTTP. [00:28:00] It’s a URL. It’s a browser. It’s called a web, right? And people look at me go, I have no idea what you’re talking about, Sam. It’s rubbish. Now, fast forward to today, when I tell you, you need a wallet, they’re called micropayments, and it’s a peer to peer system. And you look at me go, I have no idea what you’re talking about. go away. It’s learning that terminology is one thing for the mass market to understand how they can make those payments.

Instead of hearts, likes, and thumbs up, I can give you a micro payment, which has more value. So that’s the first thing, and that’s just happening slowly. The second part is we have to make it easy for people to understand what wallet, how to top up their wallet, how to actually understand. What one sat equals. Again, it’s a learning term, but it actually works. Um, last weekend in Nashville, we hosted a live concert in Nashville where all the podcasting 2. 0 apps actually [00:29:00] broadcast the live show and people who were watching on those apps actually giving micro payments to the artists. They raised 4 million sats, which is just under 3, 000. from people remotely around the world, watching through podcasting, Tudor apps, sending money from their wallets to the artists wallets. And it all worked. And that’s,

that’s where we are today. Is it mainstream? No. Is it, is it going to be something that my, my father in law understands yet? No, but they will.

So all I’d say is for monetization, it’s a new form of monetization. And for people in the long tail, this is really important. That person with the 50 users who listens to their wool podcast can then ask those 50 people who are real fans, will you give me some value? Will you give me some micro payments? Cause I can’t get advertising cause I can’t get host red ads cause I [00:30:00] can’t get sponsorship. But you tune in every week to listen to me. You are my true fans. Please give me something. And generally they will if they know how, and it’s easy.

Niall: It’s really, really exciting. So we talked last week and you explained it in detail to me and, uh, I can definitely see it being the future of podcasting and it’s just a really, really exciting time. So go check out

truefans. fm. Um, you can find all your, all your main podcasts are on there, including mine, a Vietnam podcast, and this one, Smarter Podcasting.

And if you want to give me some sats, you can do it. You can try it out for the first time. So please give it to me. But it’s, it’s a really, really interesting time, I think, for podcasting. The best thing about your analogies there in your stories is, uh, earlier this year, we were making a knitting podcast.

No, Joe. The example that I actually normally give, I don’t know why I do this, but I give the example of Hammers. So if you have a Hammers podcast, be somebody who’s interested [00:31:00] in Hammers and going to want to buy your Hammers. It’s just with podcasting, it can be so niche. If you have 50 people listening about knitting or DIY or Hammers, you have an active audience.

So they’re going to support you because they like what you do. So what else are you seeing coming up in the future of podcasting then? It’s going to be related to Podcasting

Live Podcasting and Music Integration

Niall: 0.

Sam Sethi: I think one of the things that we talk about is, is this thing called a live item tag or live podcasting, which is. uh, akin to radio really. Um, so we are, you know, most podcasters when they first get a mic are a little bit nervous, let’s say some are, some aren’t, but let’s say you are, and you like being able to have a recorded edit so that you can clean up the ums all that. Now, my background is in radio, Adam Curry’s background in radio, James Criddle’s background in radio. So we’re used to doing live if we have to, and that allows us to maybe, yeah, have a few ums and errs, but we’re fairly fluent in what we want to do. So live [00:32:00] item tag is an extra podcasting TDO tag, which allows us to basically then broadcast live.

And literally Adam does a show every Friday night. So that’s one thing live. The other thing is the ability to add music to your podcast. Now this has been a long wanted feature, right? No, we’re not adding ACDC. No, you can’t put Madonna or Guns N Roses or Taylor Swift in your podcast.

So Adam Currie, ex MTV jock, wanted, has always wanted with podcasting to include a music capability. In effect, what he wants to do is recreate his radio show. So independent music artists are realizing that Spotify is not really paying them.

Again, we worry about ads having 1, 000 people before we get 000 downloads. Artists are having to get to 100, 000 plays before they get any pay, right? So they’re not getting paid. So they worked out that actually RSS is [00:33:00] another way of distributing their music. You know, the album art becomes their, sorry, the cover art becomes our album art.

The episodes are actually their tracks on an album. with value for value, the micropayment system, they can then actually ask people to pay them for their music. And they’re making more money through that than they are through Spotify or Apple or Amazon. So that’s a trend that’s happening. The last part of that though, is we’re seeing Adam with a show called Booster Grand Ball, for example, these are called music casts, as opposed to podcasts. He’s able to chat away on his show and then play a music track, chat away, play music, what we call traditional radio, right? But the technology allows you to stream money to Adam’s show, but with you, the listener, not even having to know how it works underneath the hood. It’s called wallet switching. What happens is the money then goes from Adam’s wallet to the artist’s wallet, back [00:34:00] to Adam’s wallet, back to the artist’s wallet. And so the artist gets paid by the Adam’s audience. And Adam gets paid directly by his audience. But in the background, under underneath the hood, there’s some clever technology. So these are the things that are happening. We are seeing, uh, something called the alternative enclosure, which allows for you, for example, to include this video and audio in the same feed. There’s lots coming. I mean, we are only just scratching the surface. It’s brilliant.

Niall: Exciting. Um, I didn’t realize about the live feature. So that means if you did a live podcast, it would go out across all the apps that you’re hosted on immediately. I love that. I think I did hear about that recently because it was a bit of a joke because I definitely heard somebody say,

is that

Sam Sethi: is

Niall: radio?

Sam Sethi: Yeah, well it but it’s radio that’s not having to be delivered

over a proprietary DAB or am fm. Master System is delivered over the web and that’s the difference.

Niall: I do have such deep respect [00:35:00] for radio broadcasters because I really enjoy being edited afterwards. Whoever’s listening to this. Right now you won’t understand. We actually haven’t, there will be a little bit cut from this. We haven’t really, I know we won’t need to cut too much from it, but I love having that backup that I can stop and restart or anything like my ums and my ahs if I make them, which I think I’m not too bad at them, but I definitely know I make them, can be edited out.

So I have so much respect for radio I listen to radio still that they can just go and deliver A segment or a show live, which is so much pressure, but I do enjoy doing some live stuff as well. So I would, I would definitely use the live tag once it becomes available.

TrueFans: A New Era for Content Creators

Niall: So last question, true fans.

I’ve checked it out. It’s amazing. Is the name based on OnlyFans? I

Sam Sethi: on a brilliant. blog post by a guy called Kevin [00:36:00] Kelly. Now Kevin Kelly was the guy 10 or 15 years ago, maybe even two decades ago, who wrote a thousand true fans, which is what, uh, is the seminal blog post. So what he said was when everyone was chasing a million likes and a million follows and everything, he said, no, no, no, no, no, no. Stop. What you want is a thousand true fans to pay you 10 a month. You have a hundred thousand pound real business to stop going after the mass focus on the niche and focus on the people who support you and that will get you a real business. So the original name of True Fans was called Pod Fans and that was fine.

And I thought, yeah, well, pod fans, that’s great. You know, fans of podcasting. And Adam Curry had a show where he was going, Oh, there’s podcast guru. There’s pod fans, pod this, pod that, pod that, pod that, pod that, pod that, pod that, and I went, Oh my God, we’re just in a bucket of pods, right? [00:37:00] And we are not differentiated because to the non trained user who can’t, you know, who’s new to it, they’ll just see pod something and they can’t remember us. So when I saw. the, that problem. And I remembered my love of Kevin Kelly’s thing, 1000 true fans. We renamed ourselves to true fans, not only fans. Um, but what’s interesting, I mean, last week, James and I talked about, uh, Patrion, which is another way of making money, right? And Patrion has made. Uh, I think, you know, they’ve announced they’ve made 350 million.

It’s a massive number, which I was like, seriously, how are they doing that? It goes back to what you said, Niall, right at the beginning. They’re offering services like, uh, merchant stores and subscriptions and exclusive events and ticketing. So when you look at TrueFans, we are not a podcasting app. We support podcasts, music, courses, [00:38:00] films, audio books.

So that’s. All delivered by RSS, but they are different genres of content. We also now have added events, ticketing, merchant stores, a blog. So we like to think of ourselves much more a super app than a podcast app, because what we’re trying to do is take elements of Patreon, take elements of Spotify, elements of YouTube, because we do video as well. and smash it all together, but use open standards to deliver it. And that’s why we differ from everyone else.

Niall: love it.

Conclusion and Future of Podcasting

Niall: I’m really, really excited for the future of podcasting. Like I say, it’s changed so much since I started because of AI and then new, new technology like this coming in. It’s just going to get more and more exciting. So Sam, thank you Thank you so much. Pleasure to talk to you again. Thank you so much for tuning into this podcast.

You held it here. If you’re a super fan, if you love this, then please leave a review. That’s the best thing you can do. Share it with [00:39:00] someone else. give me a message, send me a comment. It’s going to be on YouTube. It’s going to be on all the directories.

Leave me a review and it is on TrueFans as well. So go on to truefans. fm. FindSmarter Podcasting. You can send me one sat, which is like 0. 000001 of a dollar. But even if you send me that, I will be over the moon and so, so happy and send me a message. If you have a podcast yourself and you want a podcast audit, we do regular podcast audits as well, where I will listen to your podcast and give you a full audit.

On the audio quality, not on the content. The content is what you do. I’ll tell you if I think it sounds good and where I think it can sound better. So Sam, thank you so, so much for coming on Smarter Podcasting. Thank you for tuning in. Have a great day. Cheers.

Sam Sethi: Thanks, Niall.