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Podcasting pundents and journalists are busy
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releasing speculations ahead of announcements from Apple Podcasts,
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Spotify, and even Facebook.
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But are those opinion pieces helping or hurting podcasts?
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Hello, and welcome to another Podcast Pontifications with me, Evo Terra.
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What should your reaction be to these upcoming changes from Apple
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Podcasts, Spotify, and, very late to the audio party, Facebook?
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May I suggest that you have no reaction?
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As much fun as it is for me and others to speculate ahead of these
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announcements, I'm really concerned that they're doing little beyond increasing
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anxiety and stress amongst, well, you.
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Now, that's an unfortunate side effect.
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And honestly I hate the fact that my breathless enthusiasm, which I
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get into quite a lot here, might negatively impact your mental health.
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I don't like that.
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Now, here's the reality though.
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So I'm going to strip it all away for feeling anxious and worried about that.
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Look, whatever these moves made by the big guys that are coming out today,
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tomorrow, whenever, whatever they are, there probably isn't anything at all
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for you to do immediately to better position yourself, to take care of them.
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There isn't.
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I'm sorry.
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Well, I'm not sorry.
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I'm happy.
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I'm really happy that there's not anything you have to do to take
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care of these things immediately.
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That's just not how they work.
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It's rumored and likely going to happen we've seen it in the
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beta versions of these things.
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For example, that Apple is going to be adding a frequency tag and displaying
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that next to your podcast, my podcast, everyone's podcasts, so that when someone
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comes into the Apple Podcasts ecosystem and is looking for shows and looking
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for content they can grab when they get to the podcast, they'll have a little
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frequency tag, probably daily, weekly.
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Great.
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And that's easy enough to do.
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Simple math can determine, looking at the feed, how often episodes are released.
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What label do we put on there?
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But is it that easy?
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I mean, what's happening to seasonal podcasts like mine?
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First off, mine's four days a week.
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Is that a tag, four days a week?
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Or is it a daily or almost daily?
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What happens when I go on break, which I'm going to do the month of June and,
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for this year, that first bit of July because of travel, I'm taking off.
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So what happens then?
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What about shows that are truly serialized, not just seasons,
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but serialized and done?
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What's the release frequency of a podcast that was complete in twelve
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episodes and they're all released?
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You don't know, we don't know, no one knows.
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And here's the thing, you don't care either.
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This will be a determined thing.
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It is not a tag you can go into your hosting company and set.
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Remember when Apple, it was a big stink, what, two years ago now?
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About hosts and guests, this new display section Apple Podcasts would have for
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certain shows that would show the host and the guest and pictures of them.
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Huge amounts of hand-ringing around that.
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I might've been part of that.
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We have no control over that.
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There's no tagging for that.
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That's something that Apple decides to do and then gets in touch with you, the
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podcaster, if they want you to do that.
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Nothing we can do.
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Remember how bad our episode details looked inside of Spotify when Spotify
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first started adding podcasts to them?
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I mean, what were you going to do?
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There was one giant block of text.
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It didn't rip it, didn't respect any URLs you placed in, didn't do bullet points,
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it just looked like garbage on Spotify.
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Everyone was freaking out about it, but again, what are you going to do?
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Hack together a totally different RSS feed and send that to Spotify?
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Please.
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Would have been a bad idea because now they've fixed that.
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Again, without any real effort from your part.
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Plenty of other podcasters are going, hang on.
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That got them to make a move.
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Facebook is speculated to announce some sort of a new discovery and
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distribution service we're told, and that's in conjunction with Spotify.
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Interesting.
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Will this finally fix podcasting's discoverability problem?
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Well, I'm not convinced podcasting has a discoverability problem, so I don't
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think it was ever broken to be fixed.
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So likely not.
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It's probably going to be much more like a Clubhouse offering than
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truly podcasting, even though all speculation talks about podcasting.
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But remember, you didn't quit podcasting to start your Clubhouse rooms, did you?
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I didn't think so.
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So whatever Facebook announces today, whatever Apple announces
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tomorrow, don't sweat it.
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Whatever Amazon Music announces after that, cause you know
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they're going to, don't sweat it.
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You keep on keeping on producing the podcast content that you need to produce.
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Sure, make sure your fundamentals are covered.
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Yes, make sure you've claimed your profile on all of those platforms
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and you can log in in the event they need some extra details from you.
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But they probably don't.
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Remember this, some shows in the various podcast directories, Apple, Spotify,
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Amazon Music, some of those shows haven't been touched in over a decade.
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They're still valid shows.
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Haven't added a new episode in over a decade.
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Again, still valid content.
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The owner of that show hasn't gone into their hosting company and
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done anything for over a decade.
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And they're all still available.
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They'll all play in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and everywhere
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else because it's unlikely that any changes these guys make will
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force you to make some drastic change to your show to stay active.
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It hasn't happened yet.
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And if it does, I promise we'll let you know.
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So send this episode to one of your very anxious, podcasting friends and
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tell them it's okay to just relax.
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And if you love the content and the idea that I just told you,
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you can sit back and relax.
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We got this.
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The world's not going to end.
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Please go to buy me a coffee.com/eo, Tara.
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And do that.
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Buy me a virtual coffee.
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All right, relax, chill out.
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Don't kill yourself today.
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Or tomorrow to find ways to listen to these announcements.
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We'll let you know if there's anything major you need to do.
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All right.
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And I shall be back tomorrow with yet another podcast.
