James Cridland: Where We're At

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound of podcast. The show about podcast and broadcast starts now. James

Matt Cundill  0:12  
critland is back on the show. Over the years, he's accumulated many titles, some are obvious and some self anointed. He's a radio futurologist, host of shows like pod news, which arrives on your phone or smart speaker in audio form and in your inbox as a newsletter. He's also co host of the pod news weekly review, along with Sam Sethi, we're going to touch on both radio and podcasting in this episode, which is only fitting, because we talk about both on the show often, no matter where you're listening on the planet. Right now, James is going to be coming to a hemisphere near you. It could be at Podcast Movement or Radio Days North America, or it might be Radio Days Asia, or the podcast show in London. This is a good time of year to bring James on, as we can look back a little bit on 2024 and ahead to 2025 and now James Cridland joins me from Brisbane, Australia. It's good to speak to you again, and this will be a little bit of looking back and as well looking forward into the future. But I'm seeing a lot of people look back at 2024 and what they're calling a podcast election in the United States. And was it really a podcast election?

James Cridland  1:23  
I mean, yes, there's a question. I mean, I think there was certainly an awful lot of people talking to podcasters. Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris did a lot of that. There's a recent article from Bloomberg, which is showing that actually the people who Donald Trump spoke to. They're all working together, you know, they all interview the same people. They're all, you know, invited, in various ways, to the Trump inauguration. So clearly, you know, there are things going on there. That means that podcasts have been incredibly important to the new administration. Yeah, absolutely. But

Matt Cundill  1:58  
you don't think that there was podcasts that necessarily decided any outcomes. It's

James Cridland  2:03  
difficult to know, isn't it. Do you get information from the newspaper about who your favorite candidate is? Do you get information from that you know, four minute, four second you might get in the middle of a news bulletin, or is actually a two and a half hour long. Joe Rogan at Stravaganza, you know, a good plan in terms of actually getting to really know what a candidate is like. I think there's something to be said for long form content. And you know, it's interesting. I'm talking to you from Australia, and it's interesting to see Anthony Albanese, the current prime minister, has already started with the next federal election stuff, and is already subjecting himself to hour long interviews on some of the shows here. So clearly that makes a big difference. I think.

Matt Cundill  2:50  
So the last time I spoke to you, we talked about metrics and really how to count your podcast in terms of, you know, success rate. And we usually finish the episode and we feel really, really good about ourselves and how to do this counting. And here we are a few years later, and it's getting harder, because there's listens, but there's also plays, and there's streams, and each apple Spotify and YouTube measure it a different way. There's also IAB certified downloads. I feel like we're going backwards here. Yeah,

James Cridland  3:19  
sometimes it's not that easy. It's not helped by the fact that Apple, Spotify and YouTube, which are the big three in terms of podcast consumption, don't use the standards that everybody else is using, the IAB podcast measurement guidelines. So from that point of view, it's you look at the numbers coming out of these various platforms, and you have to do some entertaining maths on them to make them actually work, and to make them, you know, to for you to understand what's actually going on. And I don't think that that's particularly helpful. I think consistency is always a good thing across an industry, and I think it's particularly apple. I think it's particularly irritating that they're not following the same guidelines as everybody else. But that said, downloads aren't that useful anyway. And actually, from a point of view of something which is more useful, that's really how many people are consuming your show. But more than that, what are they consuming? What are they skipping? When do they drop out? That's the important data in terms of how these things work, I think. And we're getting more and more of that data, albeit from all of the different platforms. So I think that that's useful as well as, of course, all of the tools that advertisers now have in terms of attribution, in terms of measurement and all of that. You know, all of these tools are flawed in some way, but being able to put all of those together really helps you, I think, understand how well your show is doing, but also what sort of effect it's having, both on your audience, but also on your on your advertisers as well, which is an important thing too.

Matt Cundill  4:50  
So I find it a little bit complicated to explain to podcasters or clients of mine, who I make podcasts for, what the metrics mean and is 10. 1000, you know, views on YouTube. Where does that land against 10,000 downloads? And I try to explain, Well, it's kind of like rubles versus American dollars, but, you know, I haven't really done anybody any help here, you know, by saying something like that. But if it's, if it's complicated, to explain it to the podcaster at the client advertising level, is this making it harder to sell podcasting to advertisers.

James Cridland  5:24  
Yeah, it's interesting. I was talking to somebody from audio boom recently, the CEO of audio boom, and I was saying, you know, do advertisers understand podcasts yet? Expecting the answer to be yes, of course, they do change. Don't be so silly. And the answer was not that, and the answer was definitely not that, and I think it's still something that we need to explain to people. I think still, you know, particularly, I think you can have a look at some parts of the podcasting industry, and particularly parts like the direct response advertising, they, by and large, understand how podcasting works. It's the branded podcasting, where people are still not quite there, and I still think we need to explain, and part of that is making sure that we have really consistent words for everything. Don't think it's particularly helpful, but a host read ad, which is what I would call it, and what many people would call it is called by a cast, a sponsorship. To me, that's not the same thing, although it is the same thing if you're talking to ACast. So it's just those sorts of things. I wish that we could just, you know, focus a little bit of our language and just make sure that everything is as easy to understand as we can. Make it so that when we are talking to advertisers, they understand what it is that they're

Matt Cundill  6:38  
actually getting. We are on video. This is the first time we've done an episode on video.

James Cridland  6:43  
Yes, I was in the car last time, I think hidden away,

Matt Cundill  6:47  
that's right. And you sounded very, very good. But here we sit 18 months now with you know the you have to have video for your podcast, who says, and I felt like there was a rush to it and, and I don't think there is, I don't think you necessarily need to have video for your podcast and it helps, but there's been such such talk about it that everybody feels the need to do it, and it's likely at their own expense to the audio side.

James Cridland  7:12  
Yeah. I mean, I think I have a real sort of mixed relationship with video in terms of podcasts, because, you know you and I come from the radio world. You and I come from a world where when someone was listening to your voice on their favorite radio station, they would have an idea of what that person was. And I'm being as polite as I can, Matt, but they may not have had your face in mind when they were listening to your voice. You know in the same way you know, for me too. So I think that power of the mind, that theater of the mind, is a very important thing, and what really confuses me is seeing podcasters, seeing people who are making audio all of a sudden leaping into video and leaping away from the very thing that makes podcasting and audio as a whole special, which is that you can consume audio while your eyes are busy doing other things. That's the unique selling point that we have that no other media has, is that idea of entertainment for your ears while your eyes are busy and all of a sudden, what we're doing with our pivot to video is that we are, if we're not careful, throwing all of that away and being yet another producer of cheap looking television. And there's nothing wrong with cheap looking television. I'll watch enough of it. But you know, when you've got such a unique selling point as audio, does it? Does questions my mind why we are changing and why we are throwing that advantage that we have away just so that we can be on YouTube and in Spotify and video as well.

Matt Cundill  8:52  
So you were there, and I think you were interviewing somebody from Google who was sort of announcing the departure of the Google podcast app, which is a very good app, very helpful. They didn't spend any time to improve it. But, you know, leaps and bounds, YouTube is now going to be bringing in and welcoming podcasters. And then I'm like, well, that's not an mp three file or a WAV file, that's a video. And I kind of feel like it was sold to us as it was going to be a big thing and important to us, and it's not helpful, really, as much as we were led to believe.

James Cridland  9:26  
Yeah, I think you're right to a point there. I mean, I think clearly what people are using YouTube for is a discovery medium, so they're using it to find stuff, and YouTube is very good at doing that, much better in many ways, than most of the podcast apps. Although Apple podcasts, I have to say, is still a pretty good app in terms of that, and in terms of, is YouTube a good discovery app? The answer is yes, absolutely. You know, it's very good for that sort of thing. And certainly the conversation appears to be whether that's data from Signal Hill insights or from other places we've. People are using YouTube to find shows that they like, and then probably going on to a podcast app and actually getting them as a podcast. Now, if that's happening, then that's great. The other thing that I would say about video is also, well, there are sort of two other things. One other thing is, it makes it easier for people like you and me to do a video, because we just rock up in our scruffy T shirts, and away we go, or nice looking shirt, you know, and away we go. And we don't have to worry about makeup, necessarily. We don't have to worry about, you know, smartening up. That is not the same. If you are a woman podcaster, that is absolutely not the same. You will spend time getting camera ready. So all of a sudden, we've thrown another hurdle in front of getting more women involved in this space. You know, that's a real issue. And the final thing that I'd say about video is that video lends itself to some formats really well. Two people talking absolutely great. You can make a video out of that. It's super easy. What most people do is they just use the same audio and the same video, and away they go. And that's absolutely fine. But if you want to turn something that is more interesting and more engaging, something like serial something like radio lab, something like this American life, into video, then what you're doing there is you're making a documentary and you're making something that lives on the Discovery Channel, not something that lives on a YouTube channel. So all of a sudden, what we're basically saying with this rush to video is that we are basically saying a podcast is two people interviewing, where you can probably see the microphone in shot, and that's about as far as it goes. And that, to me, is a real shame, because it means, you know, audio, fiction, investigative journalism, documentary type, content, all of that virtually impossible to turn into a video format in any degree of, you know, of excitement, and that, again, is a real shame.

Matt Cundill  11:54  
Yeah, I might also suggest that with YouTube, the comments, as much as we love to get feedback and comments, a lot of the comments aren't all that nice, which also keeps women away from doing video in the Youtube sense. Yeah, you

James Cridland  12:05  
make a good point. And I was listening to your show a couple of weeks ago when you were talking about taking texts from the audience and just blindly reading those out and the vitriol that comes from some of those texts. And I think, yeah, absolutely the case. We need to be very much more careful in terms of how audiences communicate, but also, you know what we actually allow through because there are a lot of interesting people out there,

Matt Cundill  12:30  
and something else that's happened in the last year that is, I guess, related to what YouTube has done, and that Spotify has also taken A step into video, which is an even bigger ask than what YouTube was really asking us to do, which was just to move stuff over. They're asking us to upload video into an audio platform that people, that our listeners only really associate with audio. It seems odd. It seems like also a lot of extra work for people. And there's, again, this is the other thing. When you move to video, you are giving something up. We are now going to give away possibly dynamic audio insertion. If you have that for your show, you're going to be giving away some download metrics as well. And you're going to be really changing the nature of your show. And a lot of people have maybe 10 20% of their audience in Spotify. And even more, if you're over in Europe, it could be as high as 50% so is this worth it for a podcaster? I think it's

James Cridland  13:26  
certainly worth it for some. But is it worth it for every single podcaster? No. Do you have to do video when you launch? No. Does it make sense for you to get the first 10,000 hours or the first 100 episodes, or the first 20 episodes down so you actually know what you're doing in audio first before you add the complication to video. Yes, absolutely. I mean, it was interesting. I was at the big launch from Spotify in LA at the end of last year, a launch that they didn't skimp on in terms of how they actually ended up doing it. Lots and lots of big YouTube people you know, were there with their very white teeth and their beautifully manicured hair. And they were there, you know, enjoying what Spotify was basically doing, which was, you know, we would like you to move to our platform, because we think that we can pay you a bit more money. As of now, nobody has been sent a check by Spotify, so we don't actually know how much money it is actually making, you know, which is one thing, but you could have a look at it and go, you know, Spotify is branching out to be a service which allows you to have music, including music videos, in quite a few countries, including here in Australia. So there's video in there already, and now they've got podcasts. Now they've got audio books. They just launched courses, and I noticed that my app no longer says podcasts. It says podcasts and courses, which is an interesting amalgam. So clearly, you know, Spotify is throwing a lot of things against the wall to see what works. And you could argue, look, it's probably nice and cheap. Cheap for them to produce something which plays a video, and probably easier for them to sell the video advertising around it, rather than audio advertising around it. Because again, coming back to what the advertisers understand, advertisers understand what a video ad is much more so than an audio ad. So perhaps it's just being driven by just more profit on the bottom line for Spotify, but it does sort of worry me about some of the pivots that we saw from Facebook, 567, years ago, when they jumped into video, told all of the large organizations, the large broadcasters and news organizations, that they wanted video, we all staffed up in terms of the amount of video that we were creating, and then six months later, Facebook went, Yeah, actually, nah, and got rid of it all. And so lots and lots and lots of job cuts and lots of wasted money. And it worries me that we are potentially seeing a bit of that right now.

Matt Cundill  15:55  
So I will say something nice about Spotify, and I hope they're listening and keeping a scorecard and a check mark, because I do have a lot of really nice things to say about to say about them, and that they do give you a choice between audio and video. It's really up to you to do it. I didn't feel like got that from Google. They said we're going to shut this app down, and you're going to have to move over to YouTube in order to do it. I mean, Spotify is is trying lots of things, and they they feel friendly to the creators. Now Spotify for creators, there's some great data inside there for creators, whether it's demographic information for people who are listening, you can't really get that on any other app. You get a little bit of consumption on Apple and as well, a few other stats that I'm not sure are completely useful, but you do get some listen time on both. So with that said, how do you grade Spotify for creators. I mean,

James Cridland  16:43  
it was very interesting at that big announcement, the amount of times that the word podcast was said because it wasn't said that much. There was one session that you could go to, which is called What even is a podcast anyway, which I thought was interesting. I didn't, I didn't go to it because I thought it would annoy me too much. But I thought it was interesting, because what they are very clearly courting is YouTube influencers and YouTubers in that conversation. It wasn't really something for the podcast community. It's also really difficult to hit the numbers that Spotify want to hit. It's, I mean, easily, 10 times harder than YouTube as an example, which I think may lead to exclusives almost by default, because you want the Spotify numbers in order to qualify for Spotify as money. And so therefore you might actually pull your your podcast off, you know, other services like Apple podcasts and, you know, and radio player and all these other places. So yeah, so I think, you know, from that point of view, it was an interesting sort of collision of two worlds of the YouTube influencers who clearly, there's clear benefit in them being available in another platform, and then you've got, well, what does that mean to podcasts? Because, as you say, Yes, Spotify is giving you the choice of audio only or audio and video. But actually, once you put, once you upload video to the Spotify platform, it gets rid of all of the audio for you. So if you mix this show in a different way to video, then tough. You know your your audio listeners are going to hear the videos audio track, and that means no more Dai. It means no more clever targeting you might want to do in your show, and so on and so forth. So it's difficult from that point of view. As I say, it's great for some shows and some shows, it'll work fantastically well. But what worries me is that new podcasters, podcasters who are getting into this world right now, the question used to be, what microphone should I get? Now the question is, what camera should I get and what's the best ring light?

Matt Cundill  18:45  
I sense podcasters are missing an opportunity, one that you're doing really, really well, and I'll highlight this, and that's you do a podcast or multiple podcasts, but you also are a publisher. You publish a newsletter every day and one on the weekend with the podcast Business Journal, so it's publishing an audio and you supplement with a little bit of video, just for fun. So if I look at your numbers, and you've made them public, you've got 32,917 people registered for the newsletter, and you've got 68,396 unique downloads for pod news. That's some pretty nice numbers overall. And you know, we talk about one hand washing the other, it's publishing and podcasting go together much better than audio, podcasting and video. Yeah, maybe for many, for many. I mean, listen, if you're famous and from Hollywood and you're smart, no, you're gonna do video and you're going to do well,

James Cridland  19:43  
yeah, it's different, yeah, of course. No, I mean, I think, I mean, certainly, the reason why I do a daily podcast version of the printed newsletter, the reason why I do that is, firstly, I went to Podcast Movement, I think it was in Philadelphia, and I went there and. And everybody was asking me what my podcast was, and I said, Oh, I don't do a podcast. I just write about them. And this was not correct answer, it turns out. So I realized that actually, since I read out my newsletter once I've finished writing it, because when you read something loud, you spot more mistakes than you otherwise would do, I thought, well, since I'm reading it out, I'll make it into a show anyway. And also, to be honest, it's the thing that I quite enjoy doing. I've done the hard work of writing it, then I get to perform it for a little bit, and I get to occasionally muck about with, you know, music based that I shouldn't probably be using and, you know, all under the Fair Use rules and all of that, just just to have a little bit of fun, you know. And so I enjoy doing that. But, yeah, I mean, I do think that there is something about taking content in one medium, and that could be a newsletter, and producing content for a different medium from that. And in the same way, getting the most out of your content, and this goes for radio companies as well. Getting the most out of your content is a really important thing. We forget that. You know, I don't know what the number is in Canada, off the top of my head, but in the UK, I think a typical radio listener listens to about 18 hours of radio a week. Now that's a nice number, but it does mean that there are many more hours where they're not listening. And so therefore we have this thing as radio broadcasters, that we must only broadcast something once, because, you know, that's what radio is. And actually, that's the silliest thing that we've ever chosen to do, because there are so many people who are not listening when we broadcast something once, and something that might be amazing, we only broadcast that once, and so making sure that we re run great content, get the most out of that great content, both on the air in terms of live and linear, but also in terms of on demand. And podcasting is super important. And then, you know, turning that into a blog post, if it works as a blog post, and turning that into a newsletter, and getting the most out of the content that you actually have you mentioned the podcast Business Journal. The podcast Business Journal is a specific newsletter just for people who are interested in the business side of podcasting in North America, actually, to be fair, in the US, it comes out every week, and literally all that is, is it the news from the pod news newsletter filtered down, just so that it's the business news and an interview that we've done in the pod news weekly review, which is our long form show, turns into text. That's all that product is. But it's reformatting the content that I've already spent time and energy putting together and making a new thing out of that, and it seems to be working really well. I'm

Matt Cundill  22:40  
gonna mention this because it was part of today's pod news, but it's come up a few times, and you just sort of touched on it, and that's repurposing radio content, so it appears more times in the day. So it was KQED, which is going to be using spooler, which is something I think Andy Bowers mentioned to me a number of years ago, which rule take the news and update the news as it goes, and make sure that it lands properly online or on the air. Hopefully, I summarize that properly, is that where radio is going and should go? I mean, I certainly

James Cridland  23:13  
think if you're looking at a news bulletin, a news bulletin is a collection of different stories, and you take those stories and you every hour you get rid of a bit like building something in Lego bricks, isn't it? Every hour you take one of those bricks out, you put a couple of other stories in there. You probably move the order around a little bit. That's what a typical Muse bulletin is. And spooler essentially allows you to do that for a podcast. So you can take, instead of having to re, record a full podcast every single time you just re, record that new story, stick it in there, and you can move around the order and everything else, and spooler remixes that entire show for you on the fly, which is why there have been a number of different people using these tools to produce something which works quite nicely. Should radio stations be doing more of that? I think probably. I think that radio stations and podcasters should be thinking, instead of this show being two hours long, or this show being, you know, 30 minutes long, is this show a set of bricks? A set of Lego bricks? Here was a particular interview that we did with such and such. Here was this bit. Here was this bit. Take all of those Lego bricks out, and what else can we do with this? Can we rerun a brilliant interview that we did in the breakfast show, in the afternoon drive show, for example, if you're a radio station, can we take something that the breakfast show does as a feature and rerun that in the evenings, and put a bit more local content in the evenings instead of it being syndicated from 400 miles away. Are there things that we could be doing with the content that we have, if we're just a little bit clever about it, you know, to put those into different areas, and I think the difference. Is when podcasting started, it was the reverse way round of doing that. We would give an intern a blunt razor blade, and we would say, here's the recording of three hours of show, please. Could you make a 30 minute best of and upload it? And you'd be editing down a live show? I think now probably we should be thinking about, here are lots of really nicely produced bits that we can use on demand in some ways. We can use in other formats, but we can also use as part of a live show as well.

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Matt Cundill  26:04  
I'd like to congratulate you and welcome you to the club of live and local is rubbish.

James Cridland  26:10  
Oh, I'm not quite, I'm not quite saying that, but I'm saying it's certainly not the answer, yes, yeah.

Matt Cundill  26:16  
Well, you know, I mean, Pat holiday was the one. And, you know, long time program director here in Canada and as well, and on the air, by the way, at the Big Eight in Detroit. But you know, he convinced me many years ago that live and local really needs to be you should really be looking at relevant more than anything when it comes to your radio show. I'm not sure how that live and local became such the great American mantra for radio stations.

James Cridland  26:41  
Yeah, and it's part of the answer, absolutely, but it's only a small part of the answer. So I talk about real and relevant, because if live and local, you can have two words beginning with an L, so you can have two words beginning with an R. So real and relevant, I think works real human beings talking about relevant things to the audience. And relevant things are, let's be fair, are sometimes local things. You know, why is the freeway broken this morning? Is clearly a relevant thing. Another relevant thing is, you know, Tiktok going away to a particular audience. That's not local, but it's definitely relevant stuff. It's definitely stuff that I would like to hear. And so I think very much real and relevant is part of that future. But it struck me because I'm doing a lot of talks on what the future of radio is this year, one in Athens coming up, and I think Radio Days North America, which is in Toronto in May, early May time, I'll be there on a panel talking about radio currently. The panel is called Radio 2040, which is going to be interesting seeing what radio will be like in, you know, 15 years time, which will be an interesting conversation. But, you know, so I'm talking about the future of radio a lot, and I've realized that actually it's not just real and relevant, although that is part of what radio is. What a lot of radio has lost is the benefit of radio. And just the same as I talked about unique selling point of a podcast, something for your ears when your eyes are busy, radios, unique selling point is a human connection, human beings with a shared experience. And that shared experience might be our local area, that shared experience might be the music that we're into, that it might be any manner of things, but that human connection and that shared experience is to be blunt, the future of radio, and it's where radio is going wrong, because you look at the amount of radio stations who have just sort of phoned it in and for vast sways of the day, it's just an automated play out system playing 10 great songs in a row with some snarky and amusing pieces of voice talent, you know, in the middle of them, and that's about as far as you go. That's not a human connection, nor is it a shared experience. It's just something keeping the needles moving. And I think if we lose sight of that human connection and shared experience, then we lose sight of what the future of our industry, in terms of radio, actually, is

Matt Cundill  29:04  
so I get those feelings too from social media, because that's the way x has turned into it doesn't feel like I'm sharing with anyone. I think my audience is largely gone from there. I don't know if anyone's really getting, you know, this is a late night podcast. Listen, there's no interaction. I don't feel like it once, once there the way that I do now that I've moved over to blue sky, and you said shared experience. And I think we also touched a little bit about community building and this being the future of you know, shared experiences and community building are really the future to any podcast or any show success?

James Cridland  29:42  
Yeah, I think so absolutely. I mean, so firstly, Matt, I would say you should not be on Twitter, and you should keep your account there, but either make it dormant or certainly not continue doing anything that isn't just completely automated.

Matt Cundill  29:56  
It's a cesspit. Should I stop paying the man? Yeah.

James Cridland  29:59  
Oh, if you're paying them, and, my goodness, you should stop paying Yes, absolutely.

Matt Cundill  30:05  
What if I live in a part of Canada where I need Starlink? What do I do now? Well,

James Cridland  30:10  
there you go, in your Tesla swastika, driving around. Yeah, absolutely. But anyway, parking that piece of politics aside, yeah. I mean, you know, look, some of the biggest shows that I remember as a radio listener years and years and years ago, you felt part of a club. You felt part of a community. And, you know, I remember the the evening show of this little radio station, Stoke on Trent in the UK that I would listen to was guy called Colin cook that would do this show, and he was brilliant. This was back in the days when radio stations were simulcast on both FM and also on AM. And his little catch phrase was, it's CC Colin cook in the am and the FM in the PM, which I really liked, and also completely pointless. But anyway, one of the things that he did is everyone who contacted that show. It was an evening show. Normally, young people tuning into that particular show, everybody had a silly name, and your name was Madonna's handbag or, you know, Curiosity killed the cats beret or something ridiculous, such as that. And you kept that name all the way through, and it was kind of like a little club thing of, you know, this is my silly name on this, on this show, and everybody, as a result, felt as if they were part of this just little community, you know, what's your, what's your handle on that particular show, when they were contacting, you know, and calling in, and it was a wonderful thing, but only because of that community, only because of that thing. And similarly, when I was working with Jeff Lloyd, is an excellent broadcaster. Should be back on the radio in the UK. He did a show on absolute radio in the evening, and it was a great show. One of the things that we let him do on the podcast version of that the podcast version was a telescoped version of the show, but he had, I think, half an hour after the show had finished, to record an intro for it, and he would record it on a particular cart number in the system, and if that cart number existed, it would automatically get added, and that was his way of communicating to the people that were listening to him as a podcast and replying to emails and stuff like that. And again, you felt very much as if you're part of that community, very much part of that group. I'm a big fan of the jack FM brand, but that's what Jack has lost, a sarcastic voice over and some great you know, music, even if they only play what they want, that's absolutely fine, but that's lost all of the human connection and the shared experience, and I think that's one of the reasons why radio is doing a little bit differently these days than perhaps it was, you know, 1520, years ago. Yeah, one of the things on

Matt Cundill  32:47  
x I like to do was to tag the guest or people that we had spoken about, and you can't tag them anymore because they're gone. So I can see that my audience has disappeared, and there's going to be no retweets out of that. There'll be, sorry, repos, but

James Cridland  33:01  
it's weird, isn't it, because that was a club that we were all in, was the Twitter club, and, yeah, that we built. And, you know, someone has come and taken that away from us, and that's one of the reasons why people feel so angry about the whole thing, because, you know, that was our thing, and it wasn't really up to you to mess around with. You know, there used to be a chat room on on the Virgin radio player. So when you were listening to the live station, we put a chat room in there for six months. And we'd naively assumed that it would be people talking about, oh, this is a great song, or, you know, funny joke, or whatever it might have been. But actually it turned into our own community of people talking about things that were important to them and not actually, frankly, important to the radio station. So there was an awful lot of interesting conversation there, and they were furious when eventually we had to get rid of it, because it was something that they had built. They organized a meet up in the square outside the radio station. They didn't even talk to the radio station, but they just organized a meet up in the square outside the radio station, and loads of people came. And in the end, we realized that this was going on, and actually opened up our doors and said, Come in and have a look round, you know. But that whole community thing, you know, is something that I think we we just need to be careful of if we rely more on segues and music blocks and, you know, even AI talent, because it's something that we are going to lose. And the reason why a lot of people were tuning in anyway

Matt Cundill  34:27  
build a case for anyone to join blue sky,

James Cridland  34:32  
I think blue sky is a good equivalent of what Twitter, perhaps was, if enough people who you want to be in front of are there. And by the way, if you are on blue sky, you should do the slightly complicated technical thing of owning your own name, rather than just using a blue sky one, because, you know, it looks better easier to read out on the air or on a podcast and all of that. So blue sky is interesting in that very clearly, all. Of my ex Twitter contacts in the UK have shifted onto blue sky. That's very clear that that has happened. That's not happened in Australia. So the people that were using Twitter in Australia are not quite sure where they are, because I don't use Twitter anymore, but they certainly haven't moved on to blue sky. And a lot of this is that community aspect. It's that shared experience aspect. And if none of your friends are on blue sky, then I can talk to you about why blue sky is a decent system until the cows come home, because it's not going to help, because nobody who you know is there. You know. I don't know how it's doing in Canada. I don't know whether you know your tribe is using it, but the thing that concerns me about Blue Sky is that it's probably more of the same in terms of, you know, yes, it's an open protocol, but not really, and it still has to go through a central place somewhere, and at some point, the venture capitalists who've put some money in will want to get some money out. And how they're going to do that we don't really know is the answer. So there's blue sky. There's many other ways. You know. The only other thing I would say is that in a world where, particularly North America are very divided, what we seem to be landing on is social media and social networks for people, depending on your political belief, and you've got X for the right leaning folk, you've potentially got blue sky, therefore for the left leaning folk. And I'm not sure that that's a particularly helpful thing, either.

Matt Cundill  36:28  
So speaking of communities, Podcast Movement, I've always looked at it as a community. There are other events out there, but I see changes. You mentioned Radio Days North America being one from the radio side. We see, we see less and less radio driven conferences, many have disappeared over the years, but in terms of podcasting, what is the event landscape like right now? It feels when I use Podcast Movement as an example, big room. We went to DC last time, but Disney was off in another area, and Spotify was often another area, and there's, you know, less creators. There's two of them. One of them is evolutions, the other one's in the summer. How do we choose our events? Now it's also podfest, which has just taken place, so there's lots of choice out there. And then the London pod show, if you want to speak to that as well, yeah. And I

James Cridland  37:18  
would say, by the way, I really enjoy the radio industry events that I go to, because it's always nice feeling one of the youngest people in the room in terms of the podcast events. I think you've got, I mean, in the US, you've very much got two different types of events you've got, in terms of the very big ones, you've got podfest, which is very much there for the podcaster. That still has a job, that still has a full time job, is podcasting in their spare time, wants to do a really good job of that, and wants to feel part of a community. Again, it comes back to the community thing of other people who are doing much the same sort of thing, and podfest really excels in the family feel that it has, it uses that word an awful lot, and the community and everything else. It's annoying that it happens in Orlando, which is a long way for me, and also annoying that it happens in January, which is the month that I do not wish to fly. Thank you very much. But nevertheless, you know, it's a great event, and I'm sure that I'll be there next year. I think what you see with the main Podcast Movement right now is you see that being a mix of business, a business conference and a conference for creators, but serious creators, creators who have potentially given up their day job to focus on the podcasting world or in the process of doing that. I mean, I've certainly communicated that I think Podcast Movement would work better if it was Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, with Thursday, Friday being a little bit more focused on the business side, Saturday, Sunday, allowing more people who are side hustlers to be able to come in. But I think that's sort of roughly where we are podcast show London, I have to say, if you are going to one podcast conference this year, and you're comfortable with leaving North America, then the podcast show London is the one to go to. It is an incredibly vibrant experience, everything in one large space. And it's just, it's a very uplifting, you know thing in much the same way as as I think, you know, the radio industry has lots of conferences where you leave feeling even more depressed about the state of the industry than you were when you went in. Podcasting in some places seems to be a bit like that. Whereas the podcast show in London seems to be an incredibly positive place to end up going. And obviously, you know, it's in London, which is a wonderful city. I was born there, so I'm allowed to end up saying that it's in London where people you know speak English up to a point, and so therefore it's very easy to get around. It's a great experience anyway. But to me, that's been the shining light of the podcast events over the last couple of years.

Matt Cundill  39:59  
So you're saying go,

James Cridland  40:03  
Yes, I'm saying definitely go for that. I mean, I would also go to Podcast Movement, because I think you will see a lot of people who don't make that journey. But I certainly think the podcast show in London, there's a there's money off in the pod news newsletter as well. There's a code which I own nothing from. But, you know, if you want to go over to that, then I think that that's a great it's just a great sort of injection of enthusiasm for the industry. And it's a bit different as well. Talking to parts of the industry from Europe, parts of the industry from other parts of the world, rather than just the North American usuals, you know, is useful as well. I think,

Matt Cundill  40:42  
who is going to be the first non American elected to the podcast Hall of Fame? I

James Cridland  40:47  
don't know, but it's a frustration to me, as someone who has seen so many people you know, involved in the podcast industry, outside of the US, not being recognized. You know, if there's something that I try and do with the pod news newsletter, it's to point out that there are another 159 countries out there, or whatever the official figure is, because that's that's really important. But, I mean, I would hope next year that we will see at one person that isn't from the US being highlighted. I think there are some, you know, really good people who are based all over the place, who deserve recognition, here in Australia, in the UK, and in other places as well. You know, it'd be nice to see them.

Matt Cundill  41:32  
Yeah, at the same time, I'd also like to see the podcast Academy have some seats, maybe for some international maybe a spot for Canada and a few other parts of the world, the podcast academies

James Cridland  41:42  
has had a few non US folks involved. I think as well, we're seeing that. The same goes for the podcast Hall of Fame. I think how term from hub Hopper in India is now part of that. So I think, you know, we are beginning to see that. I think, you know, diversity comes in many forms, and one of those diversities is the type of people who are involved, and boy or girl, but also what country you're from. And I think it's a little bit short sighted to try and say that the only people you know that actually exist in this industry are from the US and mainly look like you or me. I think a more diverse industry would be a hugely important thing.

Matt Cundill  42:26  
Well, some things do come true. For instance, Apple podcasts on an Android Yes, kind of Yeah, which kind of finally happened right after years of predicting it. It's kind of sort of come to fruition. Is that something that's going to cause me to go get an Android or maybe perhaps leave my toy phone behind. So

James Cridland  42:47  
what Apple has done with Apple podcasts is they have realized, ironically, they have realized that if they sell podcast subscriptions in Android, then they have to pay 30% to Google, and so Apple, ironically, have thought to themselves, no, we're not doing that. And so the way that they've got around that is that the apple podcasts app isn't really an app, it's a it's a website, but the website works fantastically if you install it as an app on your Android phone, and it does most of what you would expect from a decent podcast app, not everything, but most of what you would expect is it going to change the world. Well, the data shows six months after launch that it's not really but I think it is a very helpful move in at least people understanding the type of curation that goes into the apple podcasts app. You know, the fact that it isn't just the American stuff that you always see. You know, in Canada, you will get stuff from CBC, you'll get stuff from Canadaland, you'll get stuff from curious cast. You'll get stuff from all over the place. In Australia, we see other things being highlighted to us because they've got a very good curation team. So I think it's very helpful for podcasters in terms of

Matt Cundill  43:58  
that. So your partner on the pod news, weekly review, Sam Sethi, he fights the good fight when it comes to podcasting 2.0 and you know, bold predictions, it's on the uptake. It's happening. And then there are setbacks, and I'm not quite sure, because I feel like I'm learning all the time. And then there's changes. And now I feel like lost in class, like I'm the guy who didn't show up for class on podcasting 2.0 I'm getting less fairground tokens than I used to. I'm not exactly sure why, but I think there were some changes that involved Alby and my Albi hub, and I felt like I was starting something, and I'm not so with regards to because I did touch on two things here. One was podcasting 2.0 and the other one of the fairground tokens that we can receive through that which value are we moving forward here? You know

James Cridland  44:43  
what's what's crazy is, as soon as you start talking about that, I now know that it's just you and me talking. Nobody will hear this bit. So it's absolutely fine.

Matt Cundill  44:50  
That's why it's at the end of the show.

James Cridland  44:55  
You've done this before. I feel very similar to you, actually, in terms. Of everything felt very exciting with podcasting, to point out, with the new podcast names, lots of additional features, everything felt very exciting about 18 months or so ago. And to me, it seems as if the new ideas have stagnated a bit, but also people have become less interested in it for some reason, possibly because of the uptake of some of those things hasn't necessarily been where we would have liked it to have been. And I think that's a bit of a shame. I also think that with any open source idea that needs people to buy in, the first thing that you need is you need a point person. You need a cheerleader to stand there and do the hard yards of explaining to people over and over again why it's a good idea to do this, why you should put a location tag, or why you should be working on comments, or why you should be doing X, Y and Z, all of that kind of stuff. And I think actually that what we don't have is we don't have that cheerleader Adam curry is not that cheerleader. Dave Jones is not that cheerleader. They're busy doing other things. And so actually, there's no one there, you know, really preaching about what the new podcast namespace could do, and what all of those new features could actually help you do. And so I think from that point of view, we've essentially seen the thing sort of begin to die, and I think that's a great shame. There are lots of amazing things that we've done with that. And I think, you know, getting transcripts into Apple podcasts and Pocket Casts and various other places antenna pod is brilliant and is amazing, and that's a really good thing that we have achieved. But, you know, we should be doing the same with the location tag and with credits and with comments in particular, you know, is, I think, you know, the real missing opportunity, any of those things, I think would be really good if we can actually get those out there. I agree with you. I think it feels a bit different now than it did. Yeah,

Matt Cundill  46:56  
I'm all for live. I would do this show live if the LIVE TAG, we're in the app so that people could just listen to us record this. I think that would be fun. Yeah, no,

James Cridland  47:05  
I think, I think live is great. And I think, you know, the idea of being able to, I mean, it obviously works for radio as well, but the idea of, you know, pointing out, oh, they're recording the show, and you can, you know, eavesdrop in, that's amazing. I also think, actually, that comments is the big thing. The reason why people stop podcasting, and you know this more than most, is that they will put a show out there. The only thing that they've got really to tell them whether or not they're doing any good is what we started talking about at the beginning of this show, which was the numbers. And numbers are one thing, but they're not really. They don't really help you understand the human beings at the other end. So if there was a really easy way to see what other people were saying about this particular podcast in whatever app, and to be able to comment as well in a way that works whatever app you're using, that, to me, is the thing that will stop pod fade, because all of a sudden people will go, Okay, wow, you know, okay, I might only have 120 people listening to this show, but they are amazing people, and I want to serve them. I want and I want to really benefit what they do. And I can see that from the comments. And I think it's just a real shame that that cross app comments for whatever reason, hasn't necessarily worked, and, you know, I've proposed an easier way to achieve that. And I think people are now fatigued at attempt number four, so they're going to stop, you know, with any of that. And I completely understand that, but I think

Matt Cundill  48:35  
that's a real shame. Now all things being great in 2025 we'll hear you in Toronto talking about radio in 2040 and perhaps catch up with some beverages in at the London pod show.

James Cridland  48:46  
Yes, well, I would look forward to that. And of course, evolutions in Chicago, which isn't too far for your audience to go, so that would be a good thing too. And Dallas, don't forget Dallas. And don't forget Dallas. Yes, how could we possibly forget

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  49:01  
wear a hard hat? The sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan serminsky, edited by Taylor MacLean, social media by Aiden glassy, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com