Ripped From The Podcast Headlines - Spotify cloning, Google Podcasts, and more!

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Welcome to The Circle Sessions featuring The Circle of Experts. The Circle of Experts are Yasmine Robles from Robles Designs, Tonnisha English- Amamoo of TJE Communications, and Don The Idea Guy. I'm Brett Johnson from Circle 270 Media Podcast Consultants. Each week, one of The Circle of Experts joins me to talk about the critical aspects of growing your podcast. We'll focus on marketing, social media, monetization, and website design, and the implementation of all of these. This week, Don is here with the Circle of Experts. He possesses creative powers beyond those of mere mortals. Don, the idea guy, rescues those in need of innovative ideas through his brainstorming sessions. They are at Five Buck Brainstorms. Don, thanks for joining me. We're going to go right into rip from the podcast headlines. I love what we're doing with this.

[: 00:00:49

Yeah, it's been a lot of fun, and there's always something to grow over. There's so much podcast news. We almost have to wait. There are a couple here, the headlines that we flagged that I think we have to cover, even though it came out, the news came out maybe a week or so ago, but I think people are still talking about it, and you and I might have a different take on it. I thought it would be fun to talk about how Spotify is going to clone the podcasters voices. There's a lot of AI use out there to deepfake people's voices. A couple of folks have done some experiments. Seth Godin did an episode with a totally AI voice. Drew Carey did his satellite radio show with an AI voice, much to mix the results, but Spotify is doing it with a reason, and that was they were going to clone the podcasters voices so that they can translate them into other languages. I thought that was a neat take on using their partnership with OpenAI to replicate the voices of the actual hosts in another language. What do you think?

[: 00:01:49

I like that idea a lot. I think as long as everybody knows what's going on from the get go, paperwork is signed that yes, we're going to take your voice and we're going to translate it into other mediums, possibly, but it's specifically that podcast. I think it's a good idea. I think it tracks those that speak other languages, maybe a second language or another language is their main language, that they get to hear the true host of that podcast. They get to hear a Joe Regan, let's say, speak in Spanish. That would be great. I think it only breaks down barriers about what's going on in regards to getting new listeners so they don't hear a different voice, they never really hear what that true host sounds like. I think it's a great idea. It's just that, okay, let's make sure we have... I'm always concerned about, yes, the takeoffs of the, okay, steal my voice. What are you going to do else? What else are you going to do with it? Looking at it that way. I'm assuming the measures are in place of signing the right paperwork. The software is doing the right thing, I guess.

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Time will tell.

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Well, I think the fears areare well founded about what are you going to do with fake voices, especially as we come into an election year. But that barn door is already open. Those cows have already escaped. Here's something that you could actually use it for on a daily basis to translate into another language, using your own voice. I think of it along lines of we've all seen those really badly dubbed foreign films like Netflix. I can't tell you how many Netflix shows I read the description of and I go, Oh, they'll be cool. And then I play it and it's in German. And if there's an English dub to it, it's always bad. It doesn't sound anything like you picture the actor sounding. It sounds like a really bad voice-over. Think about using AI to translate that actor's voice so you could get the same nuance of him delivering it only in your language. You could hear it better. I think that opens up an audience. I know they're doing this specifically for podcasters, and they're going to be able to reach a global audience of not native language speakers for those podcast hosts, but I think you're going to be able to use that same technology to fix the badly dubbed movies.

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This will completely change the little karate movies from the 60s and 70s.

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Do we want to change those, though? Do we really want to, though? I mean, sometimes it's nice to have a good laugh.

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Yeah, I think.

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That's half the fun. It is. Sometimes it is.

[: 00:04:20

You're right, that is half the fun. But I mean, what if you could take all the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and translate those into regular American sounding voice? That would be hilarious.

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Rather than his voice, trying to get through his thick Austrian voice or.

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Australian voice? I come to a rescue. Come with me if you want to live.

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Just need the subtitles on everything. Exactly.

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Or Sylvester Stalone. Imagine his movies if you could understand his mumbling voice.

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Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. No, I think it's a good thing. And I've also heard that the software and the technology has the capabilities of watermarking, audio watermarking. I think we'll be able to tell who, if it's really a fake or not, it's just going to have to do a little bit of research as well as a reputable company is doing this. There's always going to be bad players. Yeah.

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Yes, and you can't prevent that. The tech is already out there for those bad players, but seeing a purposeful use of the technology is encouraging.

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It is, for sure. That's why it was made, yes. I wanted to get into this next story. It's actually a bit misleading as both you and I started looking into this, that I'll read the story. Research shows AMFM radio to be a perfect promotional vehicle for podcasts. We did an episode on that. Of course it is. So Beazley Media Group's recent launch of an all podcast format in four of its markets suggests they already know something proven by research. Amfm radio is highly effective at promoting podcasts, quote from their Chief Insights Officer podcast fans and AMF from radio listeners love audio and they want more of it. And he is saying increasingly radio is becoming a really strong marketing platform for podcasts. Well, you take a listen to what they are doing off of podcastradious. Com, and what they're doing is streaming the full episode of the podcast. Okay, so you tune into one of their radio stations and you're in the midst of a podcast playing. Well, podcasts are created and recorded without what radio calls setting it up again. You need to remind the listeners who's being listened, who's being interviewed, who the guest is, who the host is.

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Podcasts don't do that by design. You don't want to do that doing a podcast. You don't need to because you're intentionally listening to that podcast episode, knowing who the guest is and who the host is. I have a feeling this is going to be an experiment that's going to die on the vine. It's been tried before, as you mentioned. I think that NPR does it great. What they do is they'll do a full story on a topic, whatever it might be, and they mention to hear more about this, tune into this podcast. You're actually hearing enough of it as a story, but if you want to hear more and more detail about it, go to the podcast and the guest they have, the news reporter does a podcast on that episode, on that news story. That's how it works. I don't know what Beazley is thinking. Why would I tune into a streaming radio station and catch a middle of a podcast. I have no clue what it's about. No clue.

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Yeah. It's an article that is a bit misleading. This is from podcastnewsdaily. Com, by the way. The headline was research shows AM/FM radio to be a perfect promotional vehicle for podcasts. I have no argument with that. The only people surprised by that information are people who work in radio opinion. We've been talking about this for years. If people listen to the radio, they enjoy consuming audio, they are likely candidates to listen to podcasts, therefore advertise podcasts on the radio to get new listeners. I think that makes perfect sense. But that article opens up with the information you talked about for Beazley Media Group, where they're saying they launched an all podcast format on radio stations in four of its markets. That's where I think the disconnect is. You're going to a full podcast. It doesn't make sense to me. Why don't you just say we're going to be talk radio and then produce some really good talk radio shows. Because, as you mentioned, totally different strategy for live radio where people are tuning in and tuning out and coming in after commercials and before commercials and flipping dials. Podcasts don't do that. People download a podcast and they tend to listen to it until that one's done.

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They stop it when they get out of the car, they get back in, they pick up right where they left off. To just broadcast 100 % podcast on the radio without any additional extra information and IDs about the content doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And I've seen back in the early days of podcast, I'm going to say maybe five years ago, early days for traditional media to get on the podcast boat, a couple of stations had tried an all podcast format, and they shut them down within six months because of whatever reasons they discovered, but they're just not around anymore. If you go and Google stations flip the all podcast format, you're going to find a bunch of articles from 2019. And if you go and try and listen to those stations now, you're going to find announcements that they flip formats to top 40 or sports or something else because it didn't work for them. Now, if you want to do a show that does the best of podcast clips, like America's Funniest Home videos and the shows that did clips of viral videos, that could probably work. If you've got one host acting as the emcee, as they play and listen to this clip from this podcast out of Colorado about skiing and they play a good clip and then promote, hey, it's a cool podcast.

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If you want to check it out, visit our website and you'll find links to all the podcasts we feature. That's interesting, but I think that's a one hour show on a Saturday morning or something.

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What do you think? Like a podcast DJ. I like that. The greatest hits. I really like that idea. I like that idea that it's setting the table, listen to it and then promote it and then go on, move on. Exactly.

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I have an excellent idea. This is a October. This is October. We're coming up on spooky season. Let us bring back Casey Kason from The Grave. And Casey can host America's top 40 podcast.

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Yeah. We have the technology to clone his voice to do it.

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I'm sure his brain's froze there to laugh some place. Oh, sure. Oh, that's right. You clone his voice. Cloned Casey's voice. There you go.

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Exactly. Now we probably have to go through a lot of lawsuits to get that done. I imagine his daughter really wouldn't want to do that. But no, I- I.

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Bet she'd license his voice in the heartbeat.

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Yeah, probably so. She'd license it. Probably so in that way. Yeah, exactly. No, it's a really good idea like that. It's a special hour show. You know, just, hey, you want to explore, you want to know about... And what would be even better is that hour would be specific to a type of podcast genre. It could be audio drama. It could be an hour about technology podcast, whatever. That way at least you know what you're getting. Or it could be a variety hour. Who knows? But I think that makes sense in regards to utilizing radio. And you're promoting.

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Podcast rather than just airing an hour long. Nobody knows what they're going to get or is it the same show every week? Then why not just do a radio show? Because talk radio is a great format. Use talk radio. But talk radio is different than podcast.

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Exactly. What do you get next?

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Yeah, I'm with you. The other thing that I think that some of the folks are talking about is Google's bombshell that they're dropping Google podcasts. They actually made a decent product, and now they're going, Yeah, we're going to get rid of it in favor of moving all podcasts over to YouTube Music, which I don't use YouTube Music, I use Spotify for music, and I use YouTube to watch videos. I don't get why they're killing the branded podcast that actually ended up delivering pretty decent SEO for podcasters because it showed up in the search results and you could play some of the podcasts. Some of the browsers let you play the podcast in it. It was a great tool. And when I went to go check out YouTube Music to see how you would upload a podcast to it, you can't do it. It doesn't take your RSS feed. So then make this announcement saying we're getting rid of Google Podcast, we're sending everybody YouTube Music. Then you go to YouTube Music, we're not ready yet. Go away. Come back later. Yeah.

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I think if you take a step back and I've heard this analogy before and it explains a lot of what Google and what a lot of Apple does. Google is there to make money. Apple, yes, of course, makes money, but they're more that software, soft touch. We want you in the Apple Store. We want you to buy apps. They're making money that way, where Google, that product has to make money. And Google Podcast software was never designed to make money for them. But YouTube Music will. At least I'm looking at it that way. I think that some of it, I don't know if that's my speculation, I don't like where it's going either, though. I loved Google Podcast. In my newsletter, I always did a Google Podcast link. It was universal. You could get it on an iOS device. You could do it on an Android device. If anybody had an Android device, I told them to go there specifically because the user experience for Google Podcast is excellent. It's simple, it's lightweight. It's nice.

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It's nice. They went to the effort to have an app on both Android and iOS, which is it's not just Webbase, which if I was Google, would just made a Webbase. Why bother with an app? Just make it work on the website. To me, it's another couple of things. You mentioned there in the business to make money, of course. But when I go to the Google podcast page, what Google became famous for making money for was those tiny ads that populated on the pages. When I go to Google podcast, it's a great big white margin on the page. Why didn't they fill that with ads? Just the regular ads. But then start thinking about all the ads, the bid, the auction ads that they could have sold to the podcasters who wanted to get placement. So I'm going to search for a podcast on cybersecurity. Well, I'm going to get paid to cybersecurity podcasts, the people who paid for the privilege of being there. Then I'll get the organic results, then I'll get ads for cybersecurity products and blogs to go to. They had a perfect canvas to sell advertising on. I'm not sure what their need was, except hire a salesforce for it.

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I mean, it's there. They could have function using the exact same tools and just have another category. Now you can sell ads on the podcasting, and they never did. It hasn't been around long enough. You just started getting people used to it. Now you're going to kill it. I saw the news and was immediately yanked back in time to when Google decided to kill their Google Reader. I used their Google Assess Reader. It was awesome. And they complained that, well, if you're pulling the blogs into a reader, then we can't sell the ads when you go to search for the blog. Again, blank canvas on the reader page, they didn't populate it with ads. They could have. They could have charged for placement on those pages. They didn't. The other thing they killed was Google Bookmarks. Google Bookmarks was fantastic, and they killed it. It was the place I stored my bookmarks. It worked great in the Chrome browser. I could search for anything saved because it was limitless, and they ditched them. I don't get their process of we're going to make this product, people are going to love it, and then we're going to kill it.

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Yeah, I agree. And even going back to our previous story about the radio station, it just seems as though these changes are doomed to fail and just another black eye for this medium. It's like, okay, we're going to promote it on a radio station. Didn't work. Okay, Google podcast was great. It didn't work. We're going to go to YouTube Music. Well, YouTube Music is clunky, it's big. It seems as though going to that point, they're almost trying. They read the Apple playbook where it's like, well, now in Spotify, that Spotify now has audiobooks. They want to be one stop destination for everything. Maybe that's it by design. I don't know. To me, Spotify having everything in one place, I don't know. I guess I'm in the mindset of one app does one thing for me. I don't know.

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Yeah, YouTube has always been a place I went to for video. It's the number two search engine. I'll go search for How-tos there. Yes, there is a decent amount of music discovery going on there, but I'm not going to subscribe to YouTube music. I do subscribe to Spotify. But Spotify has podcasts, but I don't listen to podcasts on Spotify. I know they're doing the audiobook thing and an interesting development there that wasn't on our list of headlines to cover, but originally they were trying to sell audiobooks, like they were going to compete with Audible, but because they ran into so many issues with Apple wanting to take a cut of audiobook sales, you had to buy it in your browser and then listen to it in your mobile player, and that wasn't going to work. So what they started now is if you're a Spotify subscriber, you're going to get X number of hours of free audiobooks. That could be a way to get me to try and use Spotify for audiobooks because I'm a big audible listener. At least I'll give it a try because it's free. Yeah.

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And if you're already in the mindset - We'll replace it? Yeah. And if you're utilizing Spotify for podcast you're in that long form mindset. So it's a logical step. It really is. Where YouTube music to podcast? No. Three minutes versus 30 minutes? It. You go to a specific app for a specific thing in your mind. You do. I've always -Yeah.

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And even just the categorization that they're going to need, because Spotify does a lousy job of separation of audio from podcast. You really got to search for it. You're searching for one audio, you're looking for a song title, and you end up getting results for a podcast. They're blended too much. Put the tabs at the top or something. And I think YouTube is going to be the same. You've got YouTube Music. All right, well, where do I find YouTube Podcast? Is it blended? Am I going to be able to sort by podcast? The other thing I don't like about the YouTube Player is you pretty much have to keep it the live player. You have to keep it your active window or it stops playing. Well, that doesn't work for podcasts. Podcast is a background medium. I need to be able to minimize it and still be able to hear it. They have so many things to fix to make that a usable podcast tool that is so far ahead to say we're closing down Google Podcast. Because what that's going to do is prevent people from using Google Podcasts. It's not to miss new people to YouTube because it's not up and ready for podcasters yet.

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So they're going to go find some other tool.

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Yeah, exactly. One other positive thing that could come out of it maybe, and I don't know, is that now you can have a music-based podcast because it's on YouTube Music. I don't know. Maybe the licensing can be there somehow because you're on YouTube Music.

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I don't know.

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Maybe, but I don't think so either. Yeah.

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No. I don't think you still have to -If you're uploading music to YouTube, you still have to prove you have the license andand half the time when you have permission, they still take down your video because they need more proof that you do own the license to it. So I don't think that's going to work at all. Until they were ready to say, Go to Google Podcast and push the big button that says, import it into YouTube music, they should have just kept this information to themselves.

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They should have. Exactly, yeah. You've got one more. Let's end on this one.

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Yeah, I was checking out producthunt. Com and ran across something called sponsorbrew. Com, and it is a new tool that is designed to help people find the active brand deals on YouTube that brands have with content creators. So if you go to sponsorbrew. Com, B-R-E-W, sponsorbrew. Com, it will show you it's a very simple site, says close more brand deals on YouTube. You can set your country. We'll click on United States here, and then it's got industry. You can search for all, which that's what it defaults to, or you can sort by business, entertainment, fashion, food, gaming. So all the content creator categories that are out there on YouTube, and when you click one of these topics, I'll just click gaming, you get a list as a free visitor to the site of six content creators that's got their channel name and it tells you the brand that they are connected with. So there's a guy here, called the Actman, who's got a deal with HelloFresh. The same content creator has a deal with War Thunder. If I go into food category, there's somebody called the Food Ranger, and he has a deal with better help.

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And it shows the number of views the video has gotten, the length of the video, how many likes, and how many comments that the specific video has received. I think it's interesting, as a content creator, to be able to go in, look at some of these top performing deals, see the brands that are connected to them, and to see what their expectation was on views and interaction. Because if you're creating content and you're getting 10,000 views and you're wondering why you can't get a deal with better help, well, that's because Food Ranger is getting 40,000 views. So it gives you some things to shoot for. You can click through and watch the videos they're doing. I think it's an interesting resource. Have you had a chance.

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To check it out? I didn't yet. I didn't yet, but I'm glad you're explaining it down. It's a better picture in my mind what's going on. But then later in the article, you're talking about the price point for fall access. Oh, my God.

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So you'll see... Yeah, it's a little ridiculous. So you've got the industries that you can sort by, and there's one, two, three, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. There's like a dozen industries that you can sort by. You can sort the deal type by direct link affiliate and their own media. Then channel size, you can just look at ones that have under 10,000 followers, 100,000 or 500,000. But then when you see your top six results for each of those and you get to the bottom of the page that says you have to upgrade to see more brand deals. When you go to look at what the cost is to upgrade, it's a little ridiculous. For something that is scraping YouTube for these deals and maybe matching it up, they want $200 a month if you're just a YouTuber. So if you've got one YouTube channel and you want to subscribe to this service, it's $199 a month to see more results. If you're an agency and you want to be able to use this for your advertising clients, so you want to go in and see these brand deals yourself, they won't charge you $500 a month.

[: 00:24:51

I think it's priced ridiculously high for something that will definitely have a knockoff within 30 days. You can't all go in and search for branded YouTube videos. I think there are other resources out there if you're a creator who's looking to find sponsorship deals. I could think of three off the top of my head that still might have a free version and a premium version, but the investment you're asked to make is so much lower than this $199 or $499 deal that maybe we should do an episode about those resources.

[: 00:25:30

I think we ought to considering it costs you $200 to do this and you get our podcast for free. Let's hurt them a little bit. Sorry, but you didn't do your market research very well. You just slapped a number on it thinking, Let's try 200 for those YouTubers and agencies. They suck it up. Let's do $600 a month, $500 a month. Yeah, wow.

[: 00:25:54

It's worth mentioning. I mean, it is an interesting format, the way they deliver the results to you. It's updated the results I'm looking since it was updated four days ago. That's cool. They tell you the brand name and the content creator right there and you get six results for each of the categories. And that's some value there, but man, quite a jump. I mean, why don't you do like seven days free to make me at least see, Oh, there's deeper value here or something. But that's a big jump. Maybe they just need some marketing help. They would need to give them a call.

[: 00:26:29

It's possible. Exactly. Yeah. I know agencies would salivate over something like this if it was done for podcast. That information is not really available until the beginning of 2024 when podcasts are on YouTube Music. You'll have some of those numbers. It'll be specific to YouTube Music. Again, going back to it's that numbers, numbers, numbers and podcasters hold those numbers to the best. They don't want it public. They don't want it known.

[: 00:26:59

These big brand deals that they're displaying on this channel, anybody who's got one of those deals is typically issued to press release. So you could go to any of those marketing or Adweek websites and you're going to see these announcements about the deals anyway. It's still a good headline generator to check out, but we've done a past episode on formatting your podcast and creating opportunities for sponsorship deals. But we haven't really talked about resources that are out there that are available to find brands that are already striking deals or brands that are looking for these deals. So I'd say let's do a call out. Hey, listeners, if you want to hear an episode on this, leave a comment or reach out to Brad, send us an email and.

[: 00:27:46

Let us know. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Yeah, exactly. And if they want to know more about you, get a session with you. What's the best way to get a hold of you?

[: 00:27:57

I am on all the socials as dontheideaguy.Com. I'm not tough to find. Just google Don, the idea guy.

[: 00:28:04

Yeah, that's pretty darn easy. You're exactly right. And if you want to talk about podcasting and what it can do for you and your business in the next year, gosh, we're already coming up at the end of the year, get a hold of me. You can reach me at circle270media.com. And until next time, thanks for listening to The Circle Sessions.