SNL's sharp dig at podcasting

Kind of says it all:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YEmeXsknE4

Conference Blues

Perhaps it’s my own ignorance, but last week I checked out the National Association of Broadcasters NAB New York Show, and, having only been admitted to the exhibit hall, even as a media representative, found it a bit lackluster.

I guess I was expecting a lot more broadcasting content to be showcased in the exhibit hall, rather than aisles and aisles full of displays for audio and video hardware and equipment, such as sound mixing and recording, video cameras and editing, and other broadcasting hardware. I was also expecting some podcasting content to be showcased, since there were sessions on the conference agenda concerning podcasting.

The most prominent presence of podcasting on the exhibit hall floor was one small table crowded with business cards for something like 50 to 100 different small, lesser known podcasts. None of the big podcasting names such as Slate, NPR, Earwolf, Midroll or The Ringer were represented. Only one podcast distribution company of any consequence, VoxNest, had its own booth on the floor, and this company is focused mostly on hosting services, for small podcasts, although it does also provide such services on a larger enterprise level for companies, possibly from industries other than podcasting.

Again, possibly another aspect of ignorance, but it’s surprising that podcasting doesn’t have a better conference or exhibition in the New York market on a regular basis. There’s Podcast Movement, but that goes to different cities each year. This could be a prime opportunity for the right conference production company.

Acquisition Opens A Box Full Of Questions

Sirius satellite radio’s plans to acquire streaming music service Pandora, announced last week, raise a lot of questions. 

First, what should Sirius do with Pandora? Fold it into its own service? Remove Pandora’s free ad-supported option? Cannibalize the useful parts of its “music genome” technology?

Sirius had developed its own version of customization using certain songs or artists as seeds, called My SXM, but that appears to have been phased out with its redesign of its mobile phone app. So if Sirius already thought customization of music was on its way out, what is it doing with Pandora? Or does Sirius plan to replace My SXM with Pandora?

Some analysts have suggested that the purpose of the acquisition is for Sirius to use Pandora as a funnel to try to convert free listeners into paid subscribers, as Spotify does all by itself with free and paid tiers. Another idea about the reason for the acquisition is that it’s a bet on, or reaction to the likelihood that the market can support multiple streaming music and talk services. However, the Sirius-Pandora deal may also be pushing the streaming space toward just having two or three behemoths – them, Spotify and perhaps Apple Music.

Secondly, in the space this blog is more concerned with – podcasts and talk shows – there are still more questions about the impact of this acquisition.

Should the podcasts being distributed through Pandora be walled off from Sirius? Would podcasters who agreed to distribute their shows through Pandora agree to distribute them to Sirius? Would Sirius pay for their content? Had podcasters given their shows to Pandora with an understanding that they were only for that service, not any new master that relies on subscriptions?

It's a rarity that a broadcaster or podcaster operates on both outlets. Kelly Carlin, with her SiriusXM show focusing on guest interviews, and her more free-form “Waking From The American Dream” podcast, is a rare example. Will more hosts emulate that model of doing a more commercial and focused show on paid “airwaves”? 

Something similar does also occur with podcasts such as “Slow Burn,” which offers bonus episodes to those who subscribe to its parent, Slate’s, Slate Plus program offering subscriber-only content. So, if, as always, the medium is the message, will many more outlets operate on this two-tiered basis, and does it mean the free content is less worthy or less valuable? It’s more complicated than that, if the bonus content is a further deep dive for obsessives, rather than just a better produced and tighter program.

With the absolute flood of programming available, both musical and talk, the number of decisions concerning programming distribution, especially with this merger added to the mix, just rose exponentially.

Podcast of the moment

99.9% Invisible, “The Laff Box,” May 1, 2018. I’ve cited other episodes of this podcast here before, but this one was particularly good in the way it explored an interesting aspect of sound design, complete with a more recent example. The episode covers how laugh tracks for TV sitcoms were invented and used, and then how they fell out of favor, with a turning point being the early 2000s sitcom “Sports Night,” whose creators were forced to use a laugh track against their better judgment, and eventually phased it out slowly, without ABC’s permission, in a manner that was hard to spot until it was gone. That part of the story is told through an interview with Joshua Malina, a member of that show’s cast.

Sirius acquisition of Pandora

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/24/siriusxm-to-buy-pandora-in-all-stock-deal-valued-at-3point5-billion.html

This may a big deal with big impact on the streaming audio and podcasting space. Back in January, I had written a comparison of the two companies, noting that SiriusXM had already started to invest in Pandora:

http://shashonpod.blogspot.com/2018/01/whats-in-pandoras-podcast-box.html

I'll have some more thoughts on what this may mean later.

#samedayplays

This entry is more like a few listening recommendations than observations about the podcasting medium and business, but it’s been some time, and this inspired me to write. As a comprehensive and extensive podcast listener, it’s a rarity for me when a new podcast episode drops that is so compelling that I have to listen to it on the same day it appears. Marc Maron’s WTF has had two just about a month apart recently.

Seeing that Jay Leno appeared on August 6, I had to listen that same day. The prospect of Leno being interviewed by Maron, a candid but fair host with an ingrained stake in comedy as an art form and a business, about the slings and arrows Leno has taken from the comedy community, struck me instantly as likely to be compelling.

The episode didn’t disappoint. Maron related his own discomfort at appearing on Leno’s “Tonight Show” in the introduction to the interview, and how Leno chatted with him backstage before that taping, knowing that Maron, especially as a frequent Conan O’Brien guest, might have issues with him. Maron was genial and respectful with Leno, to get the ball rolling, and ended up covering ground about Leno’s past, and great stories, like Leno getting a reaction out of a largely incapacitated Rodney Dangerfield in the hospital before he died.

At the same time, Maron pulled no punches about Leno’s controversial fractures with Letterman and Conan, but again, in a respectful way, getting Leno’s side of these stories in a way no one has heard before.

And it looks like Maron has another #samedayplay in store, with a Paul McCartney interview that just dropped today, September 6.

The only other closest thing to a #samedayplay right now that I can think of might be dependent on your interest in politics and history. That’s the new second season of “Slow Burn,” about the Clinton impeachment (the first season covered Nixon and Watergate). A documentary podcast that drops weekly, like “Slow Burn,” can become a #samedayplay if you happen to be getting into it right as it’s premiering from week to week. And “Slow Burn” is uncovering new wrinkles of the Clinton impeachment story that most people haven’t heard before.

Why Package Pricing Can Attract More Data Consumers Than Per-User Pricing (A Diversion From The Data Desk)

The following piece is a LinkedIn blog post about another subject area that I write about, financial industry technology operations, including data management. I'm posting it here because it uses an example that touches on the audio entertainment world and themes I've covered before in the blog here.

More stand-alone blog entries coming soon.

Some recent remarks at FISD’s New York general meeting by James W. Watson, global head of sales, market data, for global interdealer broker Tradition, about the ways that selling and distributing pricing data can be outmoded, reminded me of my experience as a SiriusXM satellite radio subscriber. Watson spoke about changes in the music industry to illustrate his points. Technology advances have shaken up such a wide range of industries and business sectors, but the principles around purchasing products of any kind still remain the same as they ever were. You just have to identify them in their new clothes.

Previously, telling SiriusXM that you wanted to cancel their service at the end of a subscription term prompted them to give you a better price. But by the beginning of 2018, that tactic was no longer working as well as it had in 2015 or 2016. Had SiriusXM gotten the upper hand over its customers? Maybe not. After letting the subscription lapse in February, I’ve gotten multiple offers to return that gradually got better and better the more I ignored them. 

It’s exactly like the unsuccessful example Watson related about a bank being sold a package of market data for one region, that normally costs about $5,500 a month. The weaker salespeople, eager to sell the package, would immediately offer it for a “finger in the air” price of, say, just $800 a month. This leads to confusion and no price consistency, especially as it then gives the buyer an opening to talk down the price even further.

There are two other forces, however, that feed into these kinds of market data buying decisions. The first is package pricing and the second is per user pricing. Watson described the pitfalls of each with an eye toward guiding the industry to find some better way. He had his own analogy to frame his argument – about the seismic shift in the music industry since the rise of Napster followed by the rise of the iPod and iTunes, which broke down the old ways of getting listeners to buy whole albums for one or two favorite songs. 

“Pricing needs to match the product value,” Watson said. “The conclusion here, continuing, with the music theme, is that I only want the one Metallica song because I only value that song. If your users and your clients only want a specific thing, then you've got to have that thing available, but at the right value for that, as there’s got to be a perceived value for the data.” Watson added that users or customers should have more control in how they consume the data through client-friendly pricing.

For example, that weaker salesperson in Watson’s example might have gotten more than $800 if they packaged the right pieces of data – more relevance of the dataset equates to more value to the consumer – together, to truly meet that customer’s needs. “It’s Sales 101,” Watson said. “Tell me how you want the data. If they open up to you and you're honest with each other, what will happen is that you'll create something where you're both winners, you're both happy.”

Per-user pricing, as Watson describes it, is another model that requires challenging, because it risks losing valuable accounts by nickel-and-diming those clients. “The amount of times that I go into places and they say to me, ‘Oh, we don't really use your data.’ I say fine, I’ll turn it off,” he said. “Then they find out there's a pile of people over there that use it. … We have taken the decision in our company that we don't count users so the value of the data to the business has to be sound and well understood. We decided that it's a pain in the client’s neck, certainly a pain in my neck to spend hours counting heads and doing administration audits. So therefore, our pricing in some cases could be slightly elevated versus our competitors because when I give it to my clients, I say, ‘I don't care how many people look at the data. You're buying data from me for your business as a whole and not based on how many people sit on a floor. We contend that this is a better way to manage your costs and worth a small premium to remove the admin overhead.”  

The lesson other providers can learn from Watson’s approach with Tradition is one part confidence in one’s product – to avoid the temptation to discount deeply to keep or attract customers, and another part willingness to craft bespoke solutions rather than demanding customers pay for items they don’t want or need. Think about combining these two principles. By assembling market data packages at the customer’s direction, Watson and Tradition are ensuring that their product has greater value, and by treating each company that is a customer as a single account, they’re gaining loyalty and trust despite the disruptions that technological advances can create.

Michael Shashoua writes thought leadership pieces and blog articles for fintech industry service providers. 

Finding Untapped Advertising Potential

Nielsen’s Podcast Insights report for the first quarter of 2018, referenced in the previous entry for its facts bolstering the premise that Apple’s domination of podcast distribution is not necessary unbreakable, contains another nugget with just as much relevance to podcasting’s place in the media landscape.

Those who are not yet familiar with podcasting are prone to stereotype their listeners and creators as either tech-obsessed nerds and or overly concerned with esoteric subject matter. However, Nielsen’s figures of what podcast listeners buy contradicts that impression, or at least supports the idea that podcast audiences have value and buying power. 

Looking at just one slice of consumer behavior (or should I say bowl?), breakfast cereal, Nielsen states that the podcasting audience influences $4.5 billion (that’s no typo – billions with a ‘b,’ not millions) in cereal sales annually. Those categorized as avid podcast fans (25% of all podcast listeners) spend about $9 more per year on breakfast cereal, which adds up. Notably, 94.4 percent of all listeners of podcasts about kids and family issues buy breakfast cereal, and 57.2 million households who are fans of music podcasts are also cereal buyers.

Overall, in a host of industries and fields, Nielsen points to “lift” statistics showing that podcast advertising increases listeners’ intent to buy from those advertisers, based on a survey of 7,000 listeners ages 18 to 49. Among those listeners, society and culture shows produced a 9.2% lift, news and politics shows created a 12.8% lift, comedy shows made a 7.3% lift, sports shows had a 9.3% lift and business shows had a 14% lift. Also, among all of the listeners surveyed, 69% said podcast ads made them aware of new products or services.

So, putting all of this together with the consideration of podcasting’s potential if distribution platforms become more diverse and competitive, the industry is still sitting on a lot of untapped value that could be unlocked. One wonders why CEOs of companies with skin in this game, like Gimlet, Panoply and Midroll, aren’t pushing Google to get cracking on that podcasting native app. It’s in their own interests.

Podcast of the moment:

Slow Burn, Season 1, Dec. 5, 2017 – Jan. 30, 2018: Slate’s eight-part series about Watergate manages to find and explore unfamiliar ground about the scandal that led to President Nixon’s resignation in 1974. There are great moments, such as the account of special prosecutor Leon Jaworski’s investigators finally getting some of Nixon’s tapes from the White House, and having to ask for a box to put them all in, then carting them out through the gates, past crowds of protestors, to their offices to sit down and listen to them. It’s unbelievable that such a momentous development was so unceremonious. 

There’s also perspective provided by Jane D’Arista, a staffer of Congressman Wright Patman, a Democrat in his late 70s at the time, who tried to investigate the break-in before the rest of Congress eventually got on board, and also an interview with former securities industry association executive Marc Lackritz, whose first job after law school was as a staffer for the Senate Watergate Committee. By listening to “Slow Burn” one gets a better sense of the humanity of the figures involved in Watergate, at both the highest and lowest levels.

Apple's Hold On Podcasting: Not Insurmountable?

Last month, I was intrigued by an item in Nielsen’s Podcast Insights report for the first quarter of 2018, which noted that podcast listeners are loyal to the Apple ecosystem above any other, namely Android.

This seconds or confirms what Rob Walch of Libsyn said in March here about how podcasting’s reach as a medium would be increased if Google finally developed a native podcasting distribution app for Android devices.

I don’t think that Apple’s hold on podcast distribution is ironclad or unbreakable forever. But the competition does have to get its act together and correct the long-running lack of a competing interface. It would be a challenging task but not an impossible one.

For instance, if Amazon thinks Android is important enough to make sure its Audible distribution channel is available through that format, that should tell Google something. After all, according to Nielsen, the use of smartphones to download podcasts has increased 157 percent since 2014.

Next time – I’ll consider another surprising item from Nielsen’s report: that marketing on podcasts can influence buying decisions for something as prosaic and old-school as breakfast cereal.

The Big Technology Barrier Blocking Podcast Discovery

When writing about podcasting in this blog, particularly in 2016 (see this June 16 entry), I have been concerned with, and been asking about, what the medium’s growth potential is. Certain shows, such as “Serial” and “Making Oprah,” and certain guests (President Obama appearing on Marc Maron’s WTF) have become part of pop culture, water-cooler conversations.

At the same time, however, the medium is often a target for comedians who will joke that “everyone has a podcast now.” That’s even though so many comedians themselves seem to be popping up with podcasts of their own. Or actors such as Dax Shepard and Anna Faris launch conversational shows (I haven’t gotten to those yet, so I can’t say whether they are worthwhile or self-indulgent). These might be what satirizing comics also have in mind.

Still, the undercurrent of these points is that podcasting still is seen as, or in fact exists as, a secondary medium, the province of those who are among a highly educated elite or obsessive consumers of media, rather than entertainment for everyone in the mainstream. As Kevin Allison, founder and host of the “Risk!” podcast puts it, “People in their 50s and 60s are a demographic that maybe have yet to discover podcasts to the extent that they would probably really enjoy them if they found them.”

Once listeners do discover the medium, they are more likely to first find podcasts spawned by organized media interests, because those have more promotion and marketing muscle. Or those listeners can discover those podcasts through those organizations’ other properties.

However, Rob Walch of Libsyn, who expressed in last week's entry that independent podcasters still have plenty of exposure despite the rise of organized media interests in the medium, identifies a technology barrier to the continued growth of podcasting’s reach and influence. That barrier is Google’s lack of a native application for podcast listening in its Android smartphone operating system, like iTunes has for podcast distribution. Apple’s iOS (operating system) and its ability to handle podcasts is a big reason why the most relevant podcast ranking is the iTunes podcast charts.

Apple iOS or iTunes users consume 25% more podcasts than an average Android device user, according to Walch. Although there are about five Android devices for every single Apple device, the lack of a native app for Android magnifies the disparity of podcast listening of any kind to 25-to-1, Apple to Android, accounting for Android users who do listen even without such an app.

Google declined to develop a podcast app because it could not see immediate profitability in such a venture, as Walch explains, while Apple took a longer view and was rewarded with a firm grip on the podcasting medium, and a giant head start as the medium expanded, and as it continues to expand. “Now Google is at the point where they realize that not having a podcast app for Android makes them look silly and hurts their ecosystem,” says Walch. “Since profit was the motivation for them not to do it, shame is going to be the motivation for them to do it.”

Assuming Google does get around to offering a native podcast app, in Walch’s analysis, the consumption of podcasts would double just from the Android user population having the same access Apple users already have. And that, according to Walch, is the only development that can possibly significantly boost the reach of podcasting, sometime in the next five years.

Podcast of the moment:

Stay Tuned With Preet, “The Death of Sergei Magnitsky,” October 26, 2017. Former U.S. Attorney for the district including New York City, Preet Bharara began a podcast in September, tackling politics and criminal justice issues that concerned him when he held the office. This episode will make you better understand the depth of menace Vladimir Putin exerts on his country and the whole world. Bharara interviews Bill Browder, a businessman who had interests in Russia and abroad, who was targeted by Putin for exposing corruption. Magnitsky, a lawyer and prominent Putin opponent, suffered a cruel fate which played out slowly over the course of one year. Browder and Bharara tell a powerful story that will make you indignant.