**The Podcast Landscape: A Conversation with James Kiddland**

In this latest conversation with Apple Insider, we sat down with James Kiddland, editor of a popular podcast newsletter, to discuss the current state of the podcasting industry and the future of podcasting on Apple devices.

One of the main topics of discussion was the rise of Spotify as a major player in the podcasting world. Kiddland expressed his suspicion that Apple may struggle to keep up with Spotify's innovative approach to podcasting. "I think we'll see one of two things happening," he said. "Either Apple will get overtaken by Spotify and that will be such a loss, I think, or we'll see Apple suddenly realizing they need to kick everything up a gear here and start spending proper money on podcast training." Kiddland pointed out that Spotify has been doing this for a while, and companies like Acast have also been innovating in the space. "Great competition means great innovation and movement in this space," he said.

Kiddland also discussed his own experience with podcasting on Apple devices. He uses a Google Pixel phone and has previously used the Google Podcasts app, but has since switched to Pocket Casts, which is available on both Android and iOS. On his iPod Touch, he primarily uses Overcast, a popular podcast app that offers a range of features and customization options.

However, Kiddland also highlighted the importance of discovering new podcasts and finding them in a convenient way. He mentioned an app called Hark, which offers playlists or "hark lists" curated by radio presenters. These playlists provide listeners with a trusted guide through individual clips of different shows, making it easy to find new content. Kiddland was excited about this innovation and recommended checking out the app.

In addition to his podcasting experiences, Kiddland discussed his use of Apple devices and his personal preferences. He revealed that he has not yet got an iPhone for himself or his 12-year-old son, who uses an iPod Touch to listen to podcasts. Kiddland saw the iPod Touch as a cheap way to try out features on iOS before committing to an iPhone.

The conversation also touched on Kiddland's podcast, Pod Clock, which was launched in April and is about time. The podcast tells you what time it is when played, but Kiddland uses this as an excuse to test various apps and features on his iPod Touch. He appreciated the ability to test the latest version of iOS and upcoming betas, which has been helpful for him.

Finally, Kiddland pointed out that he and other users like him are still using iPods, despite what one might assume about their usage. "There are other iPod users out there," he said with a smile. "Long may the iPod Touch continue to exist as far as I'm concerned."

**Additional Resources**

For those interested in discovering new podcasts or learning more about podcasting, Kiddland recommended checking out his newsletter at podnews.net. The newsletter covers all aspects of the podcasting world and is available on various platforms, including Siri speakers, Google speakers, and Amazon devices.

It was a pleasure to have James Kiddland join us on Apple Insider, and we hope you've enjoyed this conversation about the future of podcasting on Apple devices.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to the Apple Insider podcast today I have a special guest with me James kidland he's the editor of pod news a daily podcast newsletter and you've written and spoken a lot on radio and podcasting you've done copyrighting and all that and so James kidin thanks for joining me today oh it's a great pleasure thank you so much for asking and you also have a great accent for podcasting let me just say I think you're the first well you're you're originally from the UK you're now living in Australia so which is your accent is it UK or is it Australian it's most definitely a UK accent I've had 50 years of doing a UK accent I can't possibly change now that's right and because you're currently in Australia we are podcasting across time you are living in the future it's 700 a.m. for me and what time is it for you yeah and it's 9900 p.m. for me so yes so it's been a it's been a long day right that you still have to experience do did anything Earth shattering happen today that I need to look forward to or look out for not really no not really we we're currently we're we're currently in lockdown again so um oh good yeah I know so therefore frankly there's been very little going on which is probably a good thing I thought Australia was doing like really well with the whole pandemic a number of months ago and we kind of showing how everything was opening back up again well we've we've been doing pretty well in terms of not allowing anybody else in it's almost as if it's a some kind of a prison col I don't know but anyway um so we've been doing pretty well in terms of that just over the last week or so there's been a Spate of uh cases so there's two cases in the entire CA in the entire state of Queensland I think maybe there are three now the whole three of those uh cases means that um much of the state is is in complete lockdown and we're not not allowed to go anywhere do anything only for you know maybe 3 days maybe 5 days so it's going to come it's going to come uh you know it's going to come okay but that's the first lockdown that we've had since uh April I think so so just three cases in the country is like everybody stay home yeah and so three cases in the state stays home so you know it's a big deal we've we've basically had very few cases very few deaths thankfully but that has come with the downside of the borders just simply not being open so if you're Australian and you're wanting to come home it's really hard and if you're you know a Brit and you're wanting to go home every so often then it's impossible right so still there we are well we hope we hope that passes quickly for sure I wanted to have a very meta podcast on the Apple inside of podcast today because it's going to be a podcast about podcasting because of all the stuff that's been in the news and Spotify and Facebook and we'll get all into that but for you yourself you've been in radio for a long time what made you make the transition to get into po podcasting and why are you so passionate about it that you would write about it you know all the time every single day every day yeah yeah well I mean i' I've been involved in radio since the late 1980s a long long time but I started being involved in what the future of audio was um in the early 2000s so I was looking after a website for uh Virgin Radio in London which was Richard Branson's radio station and one of the things that we were doing is we were the first radio station to stream online in Europe we were the first radio station to do you know a bunch of really interesting things and one of those was to um have the first radio app in the world where you could uh tune in to us in glorious glorious 9 uh 9 kilobits a second audio quality feel the quality um but also uh that same year which was 2005 we launched the first daily podcast from a radio station so just to put that into context that was um January of 2005 Steve Jobs only put podcasting into the iPod in um the middle of the year in June so it was very very early times so I've been you know sort of really involved in on demand audio and podcasting ever since then really that's awesome so because you have this great experience and I think you really have great foresight into what's coming want your thoughts on Spotify first and so Spotify has been making the play I would say the past 2 years to really go with those exclusive shows you got Joe Rogan armchair expert with Dak Shepard and they're announcing more and more exclusives seemingly every month these exclusives are a little different than what Apple has now offered and we'll get to that in a moment just to be clear these exclusives are not things you have to pay for they're just shows that you have to listen using spotify's app and so it is a platform lock in play not necessarily A subscription play at least just yet what are your overall thoughts about these kinds of exclusives going to Spotify yeah I mean you know Spotify has a number of different plans here some of them are exclusive so if you listen to Joe Rogan the only way that you can get Joe Rogan is on the Spotify app and that's all fine and then you have things like Barack Obama and Bruce Springstein where that show is available everywhere including Apple but there is a window um where you can only get it exclusive in the Spotify app and then you also have Spotify um they own a couple of big podcast hosts anchor and megaphone and so therefore they are also making a bunch of their shows available you know of course across the internet but paid for by Spotify with Spotify advertising in them so there's a bunch of sort of different things that they're doing it seems to be working very well for them so if you have a look at human beings people who listen to podcasts then you can see that there's a good amount now who are using spotify possibly more people using spotify to listen to podcasts than Apple and that's a big deal now that's not the case in terms of downloads uh because uh people who use apple podcasts um tend to download quite a few different shows but in terms of just you know human beings using spotify there's a bunch of people now who are consuming all of their podcast CS through Spotify and that of course is where Spotify wants to be wants to go because that way Spotify can sell advertising to those people can lock people into the platform where of course they can also get music if they pay for that as well and so it's beneficial for them to keep people within the Spotify ecosystem and their plan is to be the destination for audio so I've been in podcasting for a while back when you had to hardcode your RSS feed and XM and upload a text file to a server I think in the Indie podcast World especially a lot of us who have been in it in a long time we loved it because it was an open venue like it was an open media you know you can use any app you want even you just want to download MP3 files to your computer and podcasts were that podcasts by definition were MP3 or audio files served through an RSS feed that's publicly available on the internet and some people now feel like these exclusive shows is not really a podcast anymore this is something different do you feel like there's a distinction there are we losing something because of we've lost some openness with these shows well I mean I think the two sides of that conversation I think one side of that conversation is very much focusing on what a podcast is and what we might think a podcast is from a technical point of view isn't necessarily what normal human beings think a podcast is the most popular uh platform to listen to podcasts in the US by um by quite a margin is a thing called YouTube now YouTube is not a podcast app it doesn't use RSS feeds it doesn't use enclosures In Mp3 or a format um it doesn't use you know non-drm you know downloadable uh uh stuff it it's a very different experience but for audio first that is what a lot of people are saying that they listen to podcasts on now quite a lot of people will turn around and say well James that's not a podcast well that's fine but if people are calling something a duck it's probably a duck so at the end of the day you know I I kind of um Guided by what normal human beings are saying on this but to come back to your point around you know podcasting has always been uh a very Level Playing Field anybody can get involved and that really hasn't changed if you have an RSS feed and you you have MP3 or AAC files you can get that into Spotify you can get that into Apple music you can get that into Amazon music into a bunch of these individual uh apps and you can still do that now and in fact I still um write my own RSS feed and upload audio onto my own server and it's available on Spotify and on Apple just as as as well as everything else is so you can still do that yeah I think one of the difficulties if you're getting involved into podcasting now is that there are an awful lot of podcasts out there so Apple has uh broken the 2 million uh Mark recently and in fact if you have a look overall um including the podcasts which are available only on Spotify and podcasts which are available in other platforms as well then there are over 4 million RSS feeds with podcasts out there that is an awful lot of content and it's therefore much harder to find a great show than if you were going to find This Week in Tech back in 2006 that was an awful lot easier than it is now so you know clearly it is much harder to be a small Creator it really helps if you're part of a large podcast network if you've got you know iHeart Radio promoting you and all that kind of stuff then that certainly helps but it doesn't mean that you can't get involved if you're just you know one person by themselves and I think you know the Advent of free podcast hosts like anchor which Spotify owns like red circle Launchpad which is owned by podcast one and so on and so forth those free podcast hosts are again leveling that that playing field so that you don't even need a credit card to start being involved and get getting your uh your show out there and that's a great thing yeah and I think for people wanting to get into podcast creation you're absolutely right you know the tools we have today make them much easier again 10 years ago 15 years ago it was difficult yeah you had to learn how to XML and RSS so I think as a Creator it's you have more tools and access to get to listeners but as far as discoverability like you were saying and exclusivity you know Apple now has a podcast subscription service and there are certain shows either paid for exclusive content or what have you that you could only use or listen in the Apple podcast app then Spotify has their exclusives Amazon Prime is now making their play for their exclusives for the typical listener or user not someone creating podcast but just one who wants to listen to shows that they would enjoy do you think that this kind of fracturing of podcast meaning you have to go to this app for this one and this app for this one is that going to make it a worse experience for the average list I don't know about you but I mean I have you know four podcast apps on my phone but most people do not most people are going to use one app to listen a podcast and if your show your podcast your exclusive subscription is not in that one you're probably not going to reach that listener so I guess I'm asking is that fracturing of this podcast space is that good for discoverability and for ease of listening to podcasts well I think the answer is probably both yes and no um so it's bad for audiences if they have to be bullied into downloading specific app to listen to specific shows although we are quite used to that in the video World we're quite used to shows only being available on Netflix or only being available on Hulu right or on any of the other um platforms there so we're kind of used to this in the in the world of video but maybe not so much in the world of audio so it's bad from that point of view however looking at it the other way around it does mean that Spotify for example is much more likely to put serious money into PR oting some of their shows and I remember you know when I was in uh Chicago this time a year and a half ago uh I was seeing you know ad banners um all over all over town um they're not called ad Banners are they those big things next to the bus stop Billboards yes Billboards thank you uh it's been a long day you know I was seeing a bunch of those for individual Spotify shows you know that that Spotify were really piling some cash into now would they have done that as much if they were you know just pushing a show which you could get anywhere I don't think so so I think it's probably a good thing for getting the understanding of what a podcast is and how to find individual shows and all of that I think it's a good thing from that point of view but yeah you know I think um Adam Curry for example is very very keen on not calling these things podcasts and calling them netcasts or something else instead because he he thinks that they don't qualify as being a podcast if they're not you know open anymore again I'm not so sure about that but I can see where he's coming from and um and I think that you know we need to be a little bit more clear when we're talking about exclusive podcasts you know spotty casts um Amazon you know casts and so on and so forth I think we we just need to be careful there yeah I think Le aort really tried to make the netcast thing catch on too and I don't think it has I think we're we're with podcast now for the long yes he did no he he was doing that for a long long time and um but I think he had a very good point which was that the word podcast because it contains a bit of a bit of the iPod in it I mean firstly very out ofd um because who listens to a podcast on an iPod anymore but also secondly he was worried that Apple might go away and trademark that particular name and I know that apple have been quite um cautious around people who have used the Pod portmanto um way of actually you know naming uh things um they haven't talked to me about pod news but um they I I do know that they've um talked to a bunch of folk so I can well see that his his plan there was to actually make sure that netcast would be a trademark that could be used for all of netcasting right right and I can kind of see his point of view there weirdly enough LG ended up um uh bagging that particular uh trademark for something to do with fridges I think so who knows who knows what's going on there wow anyway anyway it's available again if you want to yeah very good so Apple has long been kind of the silent curator I don't know if curator would you call it but you know they've had the iTunes podcast directory which powered many many podcast apps through the years yeah it was the Free Directory you could submit your show there was no money Chang ing hands and they were kind of like the benevolent Arbiter of like the podcast directory basically until recently and so now they have paid subscription content and you can offer exclusive or bonus content through Apple podcast directly curious there's no apple podcast app for Android yet so there's a huge portion of listeners that you couldn't reach with those subscriptions or exclusive content but you can do that now on Apple and they take the 30% cut from your sub subscribers at least in the first year 15% the second yes at least right now they do yeah right right now what are your thoughts on that and apple now offering those kind of paid subscriptions well look I mean I think Apple have done a couple of things this year one of the things that they have done is is um redesigned the way that you get podcasts into Apple podcasts and they've rebuilt the Apple podcasts connect which was um which was a dreadful miserable failure and everything broke and people were you know I think what was frustrating to many podcasters was that it was completely broken Apple knew it was completely broken and apple never said anything so as a result if you were a podcast consultant and you were there saying I'm sorry I can't get you into Apple at the moment because Apple's broken they would turn around and say well where's the where's the Press you're just making this up you're just a useless consultant yeah and so you ended up you know it ended really hurting the industry they also made a quite a few changes in terms of the way that podcasts were actually appearing in their app to the point where if you had a daily podcast it would take uh sometimes 3 Days To upgra to update your your individual show so that was completely completely useless so from that point of view that was a pretty bad experience and a very apply experence experience of not saying anything at all not coming out and fessing up and saying we've messed up we're really sorry um and that and that was and that was you know a bit sad but on the other side I think that the Apple subscriptions stuff that they've been doing their paid subscription model has been really well thought out they've done it in a very good way where you can subscribe to channels so you can get a bunch of different shows you can subscribe to IND idual shows if you want you can um pay in certain ways you can get money off for buying a year in advance you can do all of this kind of clever stuff and they've done that in a really clever way and in a in in a way where they've obviously been talking to a bunch of different podcasters and come up with some really good uh plans so I think I think what they've done there is really good and really smartly done and I think what excites me is that that then open opens up alternative business models in podcasting for pretty well the first time no longer do I have to play a kids podcast to my daughter that has advertising in there right you know I can actually just pay money and get rid of the advertising that's a great thing there are some people who are producing audio to meditate to um there are some people who are producing you know different audio which is um which is just free from advertising free from the you know having to please every every Advertiser um you know that that that is actually in there so I think from that point of view that really opens up Apple podcasts to be a very creative place and a place where you will hear some really innovative ideas for content in the future so I think Apple has done a fantastic job there so as getting into podcasting has been made easier for creators with all the free tools out there now if you want to monetize your podcast through these kind of subscription services and things like that I know at least for me it now feels like the work to produce an episode is exponentially increasing for instance to offer an adree version of the show previously before Apple launched this I would do it to patreon because that was the platform that you know everybody knows patreon and so I would do that and now there's kind of a whole third step you know I have my free public episode I have published that to our host then I have the patreon episode which is an MP3 and I do that ad free edit that but now I also have to do it in apple which Apple only accepts wave or flak files so I have to export a third file there and because their show notes have been broken as far as their HTML links and they haven't really said anything about that publicly but we all know it's broken you can't click links in app podcast like so now I have to do that whole third thing it well do we do we know it do we know it's broken or or or is that just the way that it it'll always work in the future I well now I have we don't even know that but supposedly the uh when Apple podcast subscriptions were just launching someone from Apple reached out to me to get like artwork together for our channel for Apple Insider and I did ask them directly you know is this something that's going to be fixed and they did say like yes it will be fixed soon so I don't think it will last this way forever I really hope not because again then you have to have two versions of your show Notes too to do that inde and so if I want to offer a Spotify subscription that would be a fourth thing do you think that this is sustainable for podcast creators to have to offer subscriptions everywhere so you can reach those listeners who would pay for your show or do you think podcasters are just going to choose a platform stick to it and just say if you want it you have to listen to it here there's probably two things there I think one thing is that um Apple have been very clever in terms of their pricing so it does mean that you can offer your show somewhere else as long as they are price parity yeah um you can offer a show on you know Spotify as well as on Apple as well as on patreon and again I think that that's a bright plan I think one of the weird things about podcasting in the whole Apple world is that Apple has never really been one for apis has never been one for you know any access into any of the Apple uh ecosystem right and what that essentially means therefore is that um there's no apis into uploading a special vers version of your show directly from your audio editor or directly from descript or whatever it is that you end up using and so there's a lot of manual steps here and that's a bit a bit frustrating there are also manual steps of course in actually going into the Apple podcasts connect and grabbing the data um about who's listening and and you know how many people you have and all of this kind of uh stuff because there's no apis into that either and that is I think a bit of a frustration I'm sure that um well I'd like to think that it would get fixed you know eventually um but uh I think that that's something that Apple uh are still working on is it getting harder yeah absolutely it is and I think it's certainly getting harder if you end up offering you know special additional versions of shows um you know adree versions what you could do in terms of ad free incidentally is you could use Dynamic ad insertion uh and then you're essentially making an adree show upload that one to Apple and just um and and then upload exactly the same show with the with the ad points to your normal podcast host and then hey Presto you've theoretically done no extra work but it's still it's still a little bit of extra sort of fiddling around sure sure so yeah I mean I think I think some of the tools will you know clearly take a little bit of time to get there I mean if you edit your audio with um descript as one example then that has inbuilt apis for quite a lot of the podcast hosts so you can press one button and it just uploads the same for hinder hind B journalist Pro which is the audio editor I use so you know so those do exist but not yet for the Apple podcasts premium uh host and that's something that you know clearly needs to be done I mean I would I would probably step back a little bit and just say I wonder I've not read all of the terms and conditions but I do wonder whether you can offer a a subscription version of your podcast which is actually exactly the same but it's the version of your podcast where you want to allow your audience to help pay for it and so if you like to you can you know a little bit like shareware you know if you like to you can pay you can pay five five bucks a month and that would be a lovely thing you know the the rules around using patreon are you don't need to give people extra things if you don't want to and so it may well be that you can actually you know get away without uh without doing that if you feel that that's right for your audience if your audience are comfortable enough um then you know maybe that's uh maybe that's an interesting way and that's of course the plan if you watch a patreon supported YouTube uh show right then you know quite a lot of the times you end up just um you know seeing people um you know with their names up in lights at the end of a show and you think well that's well that's all that all that people are interested in that is one of the the things that you can't do with the Apple podcast subscriptions is say support the show but there are no bonus there is no bonus content or exclusive content like you said with patreon you could do that with apple podcast when I first set up our subscription for Apple Insider I tried putting two benefits one being ad free episodes which I had a couple waves loaded and Early Access but because we were in the middle of publishing episodes I didn't have one set for Early Access and so Apple denied the subscription I wasn't able to put the subscription through and I had to change it I had to take out that early access benefit cuz in the Apple podcast dashboard you can choose the benefits from a drop- down and so they wanted to really make sure that you had audio already loaded in podcast connect that matched the benefit you were offering and again unlike patreon you don't have access to your listeners as far as if you want to send them a message if you want to send them merch or offer other benefits that are not audio related you just don't have that option in in apple podcast and that's something I don't know if they're going to offer that in the future because they are very big on privacy and don't want they don't want to give you all these email addresses you know all these iCloud accounts from the thing so again that's something that I don't know we just we'll have to see if they'll actually have some kind of mechanism to do that but before we go too long I wanted to get your thoughts on this now new wave of live audio namely Clubhouse Twitter spaces and now even Facebook has gotten in on the game with live audio rooms and this is you know we've had live stream video for a long time yeah and we've had live stream audio it's just not been very prevalent and so now we have live audio and it's kind of the new hot thing as far as you know the exciting medium what do you think about this is this something that you think is going to last a long time is this kind of like here to stay I think in some respects it's here to stay in quite a lot of respects I think it was born out of the pandemic and Clubhouse did a very clever job of um of you know signing up a number of influences now that those deals have all finished Clubhouse is beginning to be quite quiet uh if you've ever if you've ever been in there recently I have not which is why I'm asking this question well there you go uh so I mean I think I mean I I'm on record as saying that Clubhouse is mostly full of of the worst people from LinkedIn just with a microphone um I'm going to get tweet I'm going to get tweets for that one I'm going to get tweets I think possibly slightly over the top but I think you know what what I found interesting is Clubhouse has a certain vibe to it of you know people who think they are experts and and to be fair people who think they're experts more than people who are experts on that platform Twitter spaces seems to be much more of a friends platform where you have people who know each other in I'm going to use the word meat space sorry um but people who know each other in real life real life is a better phrase me not me a well I kind of actually meant me a but anyway yes okay okay yes actually you know human beings but anyway um uh so you know Twitter has a very different vibe Facebook's live rooms are are only available to you folks in the US so therefore um the likes of us don't get to uh play around with those also by the way podcasts on Facebook are only available in the US as well which is a mad mad idea but anyway not go there um the one that I've been particularly impressed at actually is spotify's version which is Spotify green room and what Spotify have done they have a few additional features in there that actually makes it a really good place to record podcasts and one of those additional features is you can send messages to people so you can uh there's a sort of there's an ongoing chat which is actually really handy for knowing which questions you want to actually take from the audience but it it will also automatically record everything and send you an a file after the event so that's really handy in terms of making a show so I've been quite impressed at the Spotify uh version and also by the way it's available on Android phones as well as on iOS phones which Clubhouse wasn't for a long long time right um so the 80% of the world that don't use iOS could still actually play along you know so I'm I'm really interested in those I think um quite a lot of them haven't yet had the the Direct Tools to allow you to produce something that's good but I think that Spotify is beginning to get there and my suspicion is because Spotify has so much access to big stars particularly in the music world my suspicion is that we will see a bunch more you know integration between spotify's music product and their um social audio uh service they announced a couple of weeks ago a sports podcast which is going to be produced on Spotify group room so after every um particular sports ball game um you'll have uh a sports commentator coming on and you know taking questions and you know uh after match reactions and all that kind of stuff which will then be turned into a a podcast afterwards so they're clearly using the tool to make shows which is really interesting so it'll be interesting seeing how that works in terms of um what it replaces I don't think it replaces podcasts in particular I do think is that it has the capacity of replacing is conferences and there are a bunch of a bunch of uh conferences where there are some which are multi-day conferences which you want to go to because you'll bump into people in the corridors and everything else but there are some shorter conferences that frankly you don't want to jump into an airplane and travel across you know half of half of the country for and so if you can do those in a in an experience like a Twitter space or a or or a clubhouse room um and maybe even charge for them then that seems to be quite a an interesting plan for conferences but maybe not for podcasting and that sort of thing well let's look towards the future and what we think that might hold so podcasting again in the past has been largely small Creator medium individuals or you know I think twit was probably the largest Network for a long time but now we have huge companies you you have gimlet you have wonder you have you know these big names and Amazon Spotify producing their own first-party content do you think that there will be room in the future for the small individual creators or small networks as these large companies are kind of taking not taking over but really taking a lot of the airwave space or like the Mind space of the Casual podcast listener I mean I think that um what we're certainly seeing is a lot of vertical consolidation what do I mean by that I mean companies who are buying a hosting company so Amazon for example last week bought r19 um Amazon uh also owns uh wondery uh Amazon have just bought another podcast um called smart less for 80 million us for a podcast and what they get for that is they get a week's whole a whole week's exclusive wow brilliant but anyway so there's clearly an awful lot of money going on in in terms of that that essentially is how all of the big media companies are working so SiriusXM owns some adte owns a podcast host owns a bunch of people making shows the same goes for iHeart Radio the same goes for Odyssey used to be called intercom another broadcaster so we're seeing a bunch of that going on my suspicion there is that we um that the void that that's left of not having large Independent Producers is probably a good thing because that is essentially means that we will have far more smaller independent production houses who are making Niche content and that's what podcasting is it's very different to broadcast broadcast is let's reach as many people as we possibly can Steven colar we'll sign him we'll sign you know whoever it is when you're looking at podcasting it's a much more Niche experience and so therefore Niche content works really really well you couldn't necessarily have an awful lot of broadcast TV about the new M1 ship but you could certainly have an awful lot of podcasts as I'm sure that you have yes around that sort of thing one of the things I I'm particularly excited about is seeing the rise of audio fiction and the good old days maybe of the 60s um and the 50s when you had drama on the radio and people people used to sit around the radio and listen to you know Lone Ranger or whatever it was it's that sort of thing which is happening now I think Cadence 13 is calling it um movies for the ears and I I just love that phrase so we're seeing a bunch of that sort of content happening from smaller independent you know folks who are making independent shows and I think that that that's quite that's quite an exciting time and what we're also seeing is we're we're seeing you know a bunch of individual podcast hosts who are there to help smaller podcasters get in yeah I'm an adviser for one called Captivate which is very good based in the UK but there's also you know everywhere from anchor which is specifically built for tiny podcasters to uh libin transistor simplecast there all of these individual uh individual um you know hosts what I think is interesting is we're seeing more of those yes being owned by large media companies but that means that they can spot you and as you do an amazing podcast that is beginning to Trend and beginning to really take off they can jump in and say would you like a to help with your ad sales would you like us to help with a bit of your promotion and so on and so forth so actually that may help get more interesting uh voices and interesting content uh into the podcasting world yeah that's great well do you think podcasting is here to stay and is there anything you haven't mentioned that you think the future holds for the podcasting industry the other big thing that we will see is historically as you were saying earlier Apple has been basically in charge of podcasting I think quite a lot of people have been calling them a benign dictator right they've basically been making the rules because nobody else was um but they've also not had their foot on the gas I think what we're seeing now now that podcasting is actually be beginning to earn Apple some money right I think that we'll see a big change in terms of that and a big change in terms of how seriously they are taking it but but they also need to because they have lost the market share um that they used to have which was easily 70% of all downloads that I calculate is down to about 40% now Spotify is around 30% and there are a astonishing amount of podcasts now who are launching putting their show onto Spotify and not caring about Apple because it's too difficult and too complicated wow and I think one of the things I know it's it's it's an amazing thing I was talking to the folks at Buzz Sprout and they shared some data with me about how many of their new shows are on Spotify and how many are on are on Apple and they just uh and and there are way more on Spotify and the reason for that is you know the hassles of signing up for an Apple ID if you don't have one of those of you know doing the terms and conditions which you have to have an Apple device for somehow and all of this kind of uh stuff people just uh you know can't be bothered so my suspicion is that we will see that we will see one of two things happening either Apple will get overtaken by uh Spotify and that will be um such a loss I think or we will see apple suddenly realizing wow we need to we need to kick everything up a gear here and you know Apple beginning to spend proper money on podcast training which Spotify have been doing for a while which acast have been doing for a while um you know Apple jumping into that particular space and you know doing what they can to regain some of the Lost um market share yeah and if they do that well wow won't that be exciting because all of a sudden we know that great competition means that there is there's great Innovation and there's great movement in in this space and that's perhaps something that we haven't had over the last five or 10 years yeah all right my last question what app do you use to listen to your podcasts well I have uh I mean that's a bad thing to ask editor of a podcast newsletter because obviously I've got 400 million sure sure I use a Google pixel other phones are available it turns out and so therefore um for a while I was using uh the Google podcasts app which is it's okay yeah but I really use pocketcasts which is a great app it came out originally on um on um uh Android and uh it's very good comes from Australia yes and is a very good thing um on my iPods Touch which I have earlier I was saying that nobody listens to podcasts on their iPod I I do because I have an iPod Touch so that I can um you know stick my little toe into the world of iOS every now and again and so that mostly is running overcast which is a great great podcast app yes the one that I would recommend which isn't necessarily a podcast app it's a bit more than that is a thing called hark um I interviewed the CEO of it about a week or so ago and one of the things it's got in there is yes it's got all of the podcasts and you can have listen to all the podcasts and that's great but what it's also got in there is um playlists or as they call them hark lists and a hark list is essentially a radio presenter um guiding you through a bunch of different shows that are about I don't know they might be about um uh the anniversary of the end of slavery or they might be about the Corona virus or they might be about whatever they are and you have this trusted guide who is taking you through individual clips of these individual shows and it's a great way of finding new podcasts and I think you know that's that's the sort of innovation that I'm quite excited by and by the way the Innovation that things like paid subscriptions and indeed Apple's affiliate scheme which they also have as well should actually unlock for U more folks so um I would I would certainly recommend giving apps like ha or good pods a try because that's a great way of finding great new shows that you might want to have Listen to I had never heard ofk and I'm on their website right now and this looks beautiful first of all and so I'm going to be signing up to be a Creator around here for sure that's awesome and I will say my 12-year-old son we have not gotten him an iPhone yet and so he too uses an iPod Touch to listen to podcasts and so you're not the only one left in the world there are other iPod users as well yeah it's a very cheap way of um being able to try the very and greatest on on iOS I do a bunch of uh of of testing I have a podcast called pod clock which you'll find which uh um I I launched it on April 1st and I called it a um a podcast about time it is literally a podcast about time when you play the podcast it tells you what time it is but the point of all of that is to do a bunch of testing around individual apps and everything else and obviously being able to test on the very latest version of iOS and even the the upcoming betas has been really really helpful so um long may the iPod Touch continue to exist as far as I'm concerned I hope so well James kidland thanks so much for joining us on Apple Insider listeners of course can read your work and listen to you at pod news.net is there anywhere else you would like to point people to to discover your content yeah and if you've got a Siri speaker then firstly I am sorry but secondly you'll find pod news on there in the news briefings as you will of course on uh Google speakers and on Amazon as well very cool well James thanks so much for coming on the show thank you so muchwelcome to the Apple Insider podcast today I have a special guest with me James kidland he's the editor of pod news a daily podcast newsletter and you've written and spoken a lot on radio and podcasting you've done copyrighting and all that and so James kidin thanks for joining me today oh it's a great pleasure thank you so much for asking and you also have a great accent for podcasting let me just say I think you're the first well you're you're originally from the UK you're now living in Australia so which is your accent is it UK or is it Australian it's most definitely a UK accent I've had 50 years of doing a UK accent I can't possibly change now that's right and because you're currently in Australia we are podcasting across time you are living in the future it's 700 a.m. for me and what time is it for you yeah and it's 9900 p.m. for me so yes so it's been a it's been a long day right that you still have to experience do did anything Earth shattering happen today that I need to look forward to or look out for not really no not really we we're currently we're we're currently in lockdown again so um oh good yeah I know so therefore frankly there's been very little going on which is probably a good thing I thought Australia was doing like really well with the whole pandemic a number of months ago and we kind of showing how everything was opening back up again well we've we've been doing pretty well in terms of not allowing anybody else in it's almost as if it's a some kind of a prison col I don't know but anyway um so we've been doing pretty well in terms of that just over the last week or so there's been a Spate of uh cases so there's two cases in the entire CA in the entire state of Queensland I think maybe there are three now the whole three of those uh cases means that um much of the state is is in complete lockdown and we're not not allowed to go anywhere do anything only for you know maybe 3 days maybe 5 days so it's going to come it's going to come uh you know it's going to come okay but that's the first lockdown that we've had since uh April I think so so just three cases in the country is like everybody stay home yeah and so three cases in the state stays home so you know it's a big deal we've we've basically had very few cases very few deaths thankfully but that has come with the downside of the borders just simply not being open so if you're Australian and you're wanting to come home it's really hard and if you're you know a Brit and you're wanting to go home every so often then it's impossible right so still there we are well we hope we hope that passes quickly for sure I wanted to have a very meta podcast on the Apple inside of podcast today because it's going to be a podcast about podcasting because of all the stuff that's been in the news and Spotify and Facebook and we'll get all into that but for you yourself you've been in radio for a long time what made you make the transition to get into po podcasting and why are you so passionate about it that you would write about it you know all the time every single day every day yeah yeah well I mean i' I've been involved in radio since the late 1980s a long long time but I started being involved in what the future of audio was um in the early 2000s so I was looking after a website for uh Virgin Radio in London which was Richard Branson's radio station and one of the things that we were doing is we were the first radio station to stream online in Europe we were the first radio station to do you know a bunch of really interesting things and one of those was to um have the first radio app in the world where you could uh tune in to us in glorious glorious 9 uh 9 kilobits a second audio quality feel the quality um but also uh that same year which was 2005 we launched the first daily podcast from a radio station so just to put that into context that was um January of 2005 Steve Jobs only put podcasting into the iPod in um the middle of the year in June so it was very very early times so I've been you know sort of really involved in on demand audio and podcasting ever since then really that's awesome so because you have this great experience and I think you really have great foresight into what's coming want your thoughts on Spotify first and so Spotify has been making the play I would say the past 2 years to really go with those exclusive shows you got Joe Rogan armchair expert with Dak Shepard and they're announcing more and more exclusives seemingly every month these exclusives are a little different than what Apple has now offered and we'll get to that in a moment just to be clear these exclusives are not things you have to pay for they're just shows that you have to listen using spotify's app and so it is a platform lock in play not necessarily A subscription play at least just yet what are your overall thoughts about these kinds of exclusives going to Spotify yeah I mean you know Spotify has a number of different plans here some of them are exclusive so if you listen to Joe Rogan the only way that you can get Joe Rogan is on the Spotify app and that's all fine and then you have things like Barack Obama and Bruce Springstein where that show is available everywhere including Apple but there is a window um where you can only get it exclusive in the Spotify app and then you also have Spotify um they own a couple of big podcast hosts anchor and megaphone and so therefore they are also making a bunch of their shows available you know of course across the internet but paid for by Spotify with Spotify advertising in them so there's a bunch of sort of different things that they're doing it seems to be working very well for them so if you have a look at human beings people who listen to podcasts then you can see that there's a good amount now who are using spotify possibly more people using spotify to listen to podcasts than Apple and that's a big deal now that's not the case in terms of downloads uh because uh people who use apple podcasts um tend to download quite a few different shows but in terms of just you know human beings using spotify there's a bunch of people now who are consuming all of their podcast CS through Spotify and that of course is where Spotify wants to be wants to go because that way Spotify can sell advertising to those people can lock people into the platform where of course they can also get music if they pay for that as well and so it's beneficial for them to keep people within the Spotify ecosystem and their plan is to be the destination for audio so I've been in podcasting for a while back when you had to hardcode your RSS feed and XM and upload a text file to a server I think in the Indie podcast World especially a lot of us who have been in it in a long time we loved it because it was an open venue like it was an open media you know you can use any app you want even you just want to download MP3 files to your computer and podcasts were that podcasts by definition were MP3 or audio files served through an RSS feed that's publicly available on the internet and some people now feel like these exclusive shows is not really a podcast anymore this is something different do you feel like there's a distinction there are we losing something because of we've lost some openness with these shows well I mean I think the two sides of that conversation I think one side of that conversation is very much focusing on what a podcast is and what we might think a podcast is from a technical point of view isn't necessarily what normal human beings think a podcast is the most popular uh platform to listen to podcasts in the US by um by quite a margin is a thing called YouTube now YouTube is not a podcast app it doesn't use RSS feeds it doesn't use enclosures In Mp3 or a format um it doesn't use you know non-drm you know downloadable uh uh stuff it it's a very different experience but for audio first that is what a lot of people are saying that they listen to podcasts on now quite a lot of people will turn around and say well James that's not a podcast well that's fine but if people are calling something a duck it's probably a duck so at the end of the day you know I I kind of um Guided by what normal human beings are saying on this but to come back to your point around you know podcasting has always been uh a very Level Playing Field anybody can get involved and that really hasn't changed if you have an RSS feed and you you have MP3 or AAC files you can get that into Spotify you can get that into Apple music you can get that into Amazon music into a bunch of these individual uh apps and you can still do that now and in fact I still um write my own RSS feed and upload audio onto my own server and it's available on Spotify and on Apple just as as as well as everything else is so you can still do that yeah I think one of the difficulties if you're getting involved into podcasting now is that there are an awful lot of podcasts out there so Apple has uh broken the 2 million uh Mark recently and in fact if you have a look overall um including the podcasts which are available only on Spotify and podcasts which are available in other platforms as well then there are over 4 million RSS feeds with podcasts out there that is an awful lot of content and it's therefore much harder to find a great show than if you were going to find This Week in Tech back in 2006 that was an awful lot easier than it is now so you know clearly it is much harder to be a small Creator it really helps if you're part of a large podcast network if you've got you know iHeart Radio promoting you and all that kind of stuff then that certainly helps but it doesn't mean that you can't get involved if you're just you know one person by themselves and I think you know the Advent of free podcast hosts like anchor which Spotify owns like red circle Launchpad which is owned by podcast one and so on and so forth those free podcast hosts are again leveling that that playing field so that you don't even need a credit card to start being involved and get getting your uh your show out there and that's a great thing yeah and I think for people wanting to get into podcast creation you're absolutely right you know the tools we have today make them much easier again 10 years ago 15 years ago it was difficult yeah you had to learn how to XML and RSS so I think as a Creator it's you have more tools and access to get to listeners but as far as discoverability like you were saying and exclusivity you know Apple now has a podcast subscription service and there are certain shows either paid for exclusive content or what have you that you could only use or listen in the Apple podcast app then Spotify has their exclusives Amazon Prime is now making their play for their exclusives for the typical listener or user not someone creating podcast but just one who wants to listen to shows that they would enjoy do you think that this kind of fracturing of podcast meaning you have to go to this app for this one and this app for this one is that going to make it a worse experience for the average list I don't know about you but I mean I have you know four podcast apps on my phone but most people do not most people are going to use one app to listen a podcast and if your show your podcast your exclusive subscription is not in that one you're probably not going to reach that listener so I guess I'm asking is that fracturing of this podcast space is that good for discoverability and for ease of listening to podcasts well I think the answer is probably both yes and no um so it's bad for audiences if they have to be bullied into downloading specific app to listen to specific shows although we are quite used to that in the video World we're quite used to shows only being available on Netflix or only being available on Hulu right or on any of the other um platforms there so we're kind of used to this in the in the world of video but maybe not so much in the world of audio so it's bad from that point of view however looking at it the other way around it does mean that Spotify for example is much more likely to put serious money into PR oting some of their shows and I remember you know when I was in uh Chicago this time a year and a half ago uh I was seeing you know ad banners um all over all over town um they're not called ad Banners are they those big things next to the bus stop Billboards yes Billboards thank you uh it's been a long day you know I was seeing a bunch of those for individual Spotify shows you know that that Spotify were really piling some cash into now would they have done that as much if they were you know just pushing a show which you could get anywhere I don't think so so I think it's probably a good thing for getting the understanding of what a podcast is and how to find individual shows and all of that I think it's a good thing from that point of view but yeah you know I think um Adam Curry for example is very very keen on not calling these things podcasts and calling them netcasts or something else instead because he he thinks that they don't qualify as being a podcast if they're not you know open anymore again I'm not so sure about that but I can see where he's coming from and um and I think that you know we need to be a little bit more clear when we're talking about exclusive podcasts you know spotty casts um Amazon you know casts and so on and so forth I think we we just need to be careful there yeah I think Le aort really tried to make the netcast thing catch on too and I don't think it has I think we're we're with podcast now for the long yes he did no he he was doing that for a long long time and um but I think he had a very good point which was that the word podcast because it contains a bit of a bit of the iPod in it I mean firstly very out ofd um because who listens to a podcast on an iPod anymore but also secondly he was worried that Apple might go away and trademark that particular name and I know that apple have been quite um cautious around people who have used the Pod portmanto um way of actually you know naming uh things um they haven't talked to me about pod news but um they I I do know that they've um talked to a bunch of folk so I can well see that his his plan there was to actually make sure that netcast would be a trademark that could be used for all of netcasting right right and I can kind of see his point of view there weirdly enough LG ended up um uh bagging that particular uh trademark for something to do with fridges I think so who knows who knows what's going on there wow anyway anyway it's available again if you want to yeah very good so Apple has long been kind of the silent curator I don't know if curator would you call it but you know they've had the iTunes podcast directory which powered many many podcast apps through the years yeah it was the Free Directory you could submit your show there was no money Chang ing hands and they were kind of like the benevolent Arbiter of like the podcast directory basically until recently and so now they have paid subscription content and you can offer exclusive or bonus content through Apple podcast directly curious there's no apple podcast app for Android yet so there's a huge portion of listeners that you couldn't reach with those subscriptions or exclusive content but you can do that now on Apple and they take the 30% cut from your sub subscribers at least in the first year 15% the second yes at least right now they do yeah right right now what are your thoughts on that and apple now offering those kind of paid subscriptions well look I mean I think Apple have done a couple of things this year one of the things that they have done is is um redesigned the way that you get podcasts into Apple podcasts and they've rebuilt the Apple podcasts connect which was um which was a dreadful miserable failure and everything broke and people were you know I think what was frustrating to many podcasters was that it was completely broken Apple knew it was completely broken and apple never said anything so as a result if you were a podcast consultant and you were there saying I'm sorry I can't get you into Apple at the moment because Apple's broken they would turn around and say well where's the where's the Press you're just making this up you're just a useless consultant yeah and so you ended up you know it ended really hurting the industry they also made a quite a few changes in terms of the way that podcasts were actually appearing in their app to the point where if you had a daily podcast it would take uh sometimes 3 Days To upgra to update your your individual show so that was completely completely useless so from that point of view that was a pretty bad experience and a very apply experence experience of not saying anything at all not coming out and fessing up and saying we've messed up we're really sorry um and that and that was and that was you know a bit sad but on the other side I think that the Apple subscriptions stuff that they've been doing their paid subscription model has been really well thought out they've done it in a very good way where you can subscribe to channels so you can get a bunch of different shows you can subscribe to IND idual shows if you want you can um pay in certain ways you can get money off for buying a year in advance you can do all of this kind of clever stuff and they've done that in a really clever way and in a in in a way where they've obviously been talking to a bunch of different podcasters and come up with some really good uh plans so I think I think what they've done there is really good and really smartly done and I think what excites me is that that then open opens up alternative business models in podcasting for pretty well the first time no longer do I have to play a kids podcast to my daughter that has advertising in there right you know I can actually just pay money and get rid of the advertising that's a great thing there are some people who are producing audio to meditate to um there are some people who are producing you know different audio which is um which is just free from advertising free from the you know having to please every every Advertiser um you know that that that is actually in there so I think from that point of view that really opens up Apple podcasts to be a very creative place and a place where you will hear some really innovative ideas for content in the future so I think Apple has done a fantastic job there so as getting into podcasting has been made easier for creators with all the free tools out there now if you want to monetize your podcast through these kind of subscription services and things like that I know at least for me it now feels like the work to produce an episode is exponentially increasing for instance to offer an adree version of the show previously before Apple launched this I would do it to patreon because that was the platform that you know everybody knows patreon and so I would do that and now there's kind of a whole third step you know I have my free public episode I have published that to our host then I have the patreon episode which is an MP3 and I do that ad free edit that but now I also have to do it in apple which Apple only accepts wave or flak files so I have to export a third file there and because their show notes have been broken as far as their HTML links and they haven't really said anything about that publicly but we all know it's broken you can't click links in app podcast like so now I have to do that whole third thing it well do we do we know it do we know it's broken or or or is that just the way that it it'll always work in the future I well now I have we don't even know that but supposedly the uh when Apple podcast subscriptions were just launching someone from Apple reached out to me to get like artwork together for our channel for Apple Insider and I did ask them directly you know is this something that's going to be fixed and they did say like yes it will be fixed soon so I don't think it will last this way forever I really hope not because again then you have to have two versions of your show Notes too to do that inde and so if I want to offer a Spotify subscription that would be a fourth thing do you think that this is sustainable for podcast creators to have to offer subscriptions everywhere so you can reach those listeners who would pay for your show or do you think podcasters are just going to choose a platform stick to it and just say if you want it you have to listen to it here there's probably two things there I think one thing is that um Apple have been very clever in terms of their pricing so it does mean that you can offer your show somewhere else as long as they are price parity yeah um you can offer a show on you know Spotify as well as on Apple as well as on patreon and again I think that that's a bright plan I think one of the weird things about podcasting in the whole Apple world is that Apple has never really been one for apis has never been one for you know any access into any of the Apple uh ecosystem right and what that essentially means therefore is that um there's no apis into uploading a special vers version of your show directly from your audio editor or directly from descript or whatever it is that you end up using and so there's a lot of manual steps here and that's a bit a bit frustrating there are also manual steps of course in actually going into the Apple podcasts connect and grabbing the data um about who's listening and and you know how many people you have and all of this kind of uh stuff because there's no apis into that either and that is I think a bit of a frustration I'm sure that um well I'd like to think that it would get fixed you know eventually um but uh I think that that's something that Apple uh are still working on is it getting harder yeah absolutely it is and I think it's certainly getting harder if you end up offering you know special additional versions of shows um you know adree versions what you could do in terms of ad free incidentally is you could use Dynamic ad insertion uh and then you're essentially making an adree show upload that one to Apple and just um and and then upload exactly the same show with the with the ad points to your normal podcast host and then hey Presto you've theoretically done no extra work but it's still it's still a little bit of extra sort of fiddling around sure sure so yeah I mean I think I think some of the tools will you know clearly take a little bit of time to get there I mean if you edit your audio with um descript as one example then that has inbuilt apis for quite a lot of the podcast hosts so you can press one button and it just uploads the same for hinder hind B journalist Pro which is the audio editor I use so you know so those do exist but not yet for the Apple podcasts premium uh host and that's something that you know clearly needs to be done I mean I would I would probably step back a little bit and just say I wonder I've not read all of the terms and conditions but I do wonder whether you can offer a a subscription version of your podcast which is actually exactly the same but it's the version of your podcast where you want to allow your audience to help pay for it and so if you like to you can you know a little bit like shareware you know if you like to you can pay you can pay five five bucks a month and that would be a lovely thing you know the the rules around using patreon are you don't need to give people extra things if you don't want to and so it may well be that you can actually you know get away without uh without doing that if you feel that that's right for your audience if your audience are comfortable enough um then you know maybe that's uh maybe that's an interesting way and that's of course the plan if you watch a patreon supported YouTube uh show right then you know quite a lot of the times you end up just um you know seeing people um you know with their names up in lights at the end of a show and you think well that's well that's all that all that people are interested in that is one of the the things that you can't do with the Apple podcast subscriptions is say support the show but there are no bonus there is no bonus content or exclusive content like you said with patreon you could do that with apple podcast when I first set up our subscription for Apple Insider I tried putting two benefits one being ad free episodes which I had a couple waves loaded and Early Access but because we were in the middle of publishing episodes I didn't have one set for Early Access and so Apple denied the subscription I wasn't able to put the subscription through and I had to change it I had to take out that early access benefit cuz in the Apple podcast dashboard you can choose the benefits from a drop- down and so they wanted to really make sure that you had audio already loaded in podcast connect that matched the benefit you were offering and again unlike patreon you don't have access to your listeners as far as if you want to send them a message if you want to send them merch or offer other benefits that are not audio related you just don't have that option in in apple podcast and that's something I don't know if they're going to offer that in the future because they are very big on privacy and don't want they don't want to give you all these email addresses you know all these iCloud accounts from the thing so again that's something that I don't know we just we'll have to see if they'll actually have some kind of mechanism to do that but before we go too long I wanted to get your thoughts on this now new wave of live audio namely Clubhouse Twitter spaces and now even Facebook has gotten in on the game with live audio rooms and this is you know we've had live stream video for a long time yeah and we've had live stream audio it's just not been very prevalent and so now we have live audio and it's kind of the new hot thing as far as you know the exciting medium what do you think about this is this something that you think is going to last a long time is this kind of like here to stay I think in some respects it's here to stay in quite a lot of respects I think it was born out of the pandemic and Clubhouse did a very clever job of um of you know signing up a number of influences now that those deals have all finished Clubhouse is beginning to be quite quiet uh if you've ever if you've ever been in there recently I have not which is why I'm asking this question well there you go uh so I mean I think I mean I I'm on record as saying that Clubhouse is mostly full of of the worst people from LinkedIn just with a microphone um I'm going to get tweet I'm going to get tweets for that one I'm going to get tweets I think possibly slightly over the top but I think you know what what I found interesting is Clubhouse has a certain vibe to it of you know people who think they are experts and and to be fair people who think they're experts more than people who are experts on that platform Twitter spaces seems to be much more of a friends platform where you have people who know each other in I'm going to use the word meat space sorry um but people who know each other in real life real life is a better phrase me not me a well I kind of actually meant me a but anyway yes okay okay yes actually you know human beings but anyway um uh so you know Twitter has a very different vibe Facebook's live rooms are are only available to you folks in the US so therefore um the likes of us don't get to uh play around with those also by the way podcasts on Facebook are only available in the US as well which is a mad mad idea but anyway not go there um the one that I've been particularly impressed at actually is spotify's version which is Spotify green room and what Spotify have done they have a few additional features in there that actually makes it a really good place to record podcasts and one of those additional features is you can send messages to people so you can uh there's a sort of there's an ongoing chat which is actually really handy for knowing which questions you want to actually take from the audience but it it will also automatically record everything and send you an a file after the event so that's really handy in terms of making a show so I've been quite impressed at the Spotify uh version and also by the way it's available on Android phones as well as on iOS phones which Clubhouse wasn't for a long long time right um so the 80% of the world that don't use iOS could still actually play along you know so I'm I'm really interested in those I think um quite a lot of them haven't yet had the the Direct Tools to allow you to produce something that's good but I think that Spotify is beginning to get there and my suspicion is because Spotify has so much access to big stars particularly in the music world my suspicion is that we will see a bunch more you know integration between spotify's music product and their um social audio uh service they announced a couple of weeks ago a sports podcast which is going to be produced on Spotify group room so after every um particular sports ball game um you'll have uh a sports commentator coming on and you know taking questions and you know uh after match reactions and all that kind of stuff which will then be turned into a a podcast afterwards so they're clearly using the tool to make shows which is really interesting so it'll be interesting seeing how that works in terms of um what it replaces I don't think it replaces podcasts in particular I do think is that it has the capacity of replacing is conferences and there are a bunch of a bunch of uh conferences where there are some which are multi-day conferences which you want to go to because you'll bump into people in the corridors and everything else but there are some shorter conferences that frankly you don't want to jump into an airplane and travel across you know half of half of the country for and so if you can do those in a in an experience like a Twitter space or a or or a clubhouse room um and maybe even charge for them then that seems to be quite a an interesting plan for conferences but maybe not for podcasting and that sort of thing well let's look towards the future and what we think that might hold so podcasting again in the past has been largely small Creator medium individuals or you know I think twit was probably the largest Network for a long time but now we have huge companies you you have gimlet you have wonder you have you know these big names and Amazon Spotify producing their own first-party content do you think that there will be room in the future for the small individual creators or small networks as these large companies are kind of taking not taking over but really taking a lot of the airwave space or like the Mind space of the Casual podcast listener I mean I think that um what we're certainly seeing is a lot of vertical consolidation what do I mean by that I mean companies who are buying a hosting company so Amazon for example last week bought r19 um Amazon uh also owns uh wondery uh Amazon have just bought another podcast um called smart less for 80 million us for a podcast and what they get for that is they get a week's whole a whole week's exclusive wow brilliant but anyway so there's clearly an awful lot of money going on in in terms of that that essentially is how all of the big media companies are working so SiriusXM owns some adte owns a podcast host owns a bunch of people making shows the same goes for iHeart Radio the same goes for Odyssey used to be called intercom another broadcaster so we're seeing a bunch of that going on my suspicion there is that we um that the void that that's left of not having large Independent Producers is probably a good thing because that is essentially means that we will have far more smaller independent production houses who are making Niche content and that's what podcasting is it's very different to broadcast broadcast is let's reach as many people as we possibly can Steven colar we'll sign him we'll sign you know whoever it is when you're looking at podcasting it's a much more Niche experience and so therefore Niche content works really really well you couldn't necessarily have an awful lot of broadcast TV about the new M1 ship but you could certainly have an awful lot of podcasts as I'm sure that you have yes around that sort of thing one of the things I I'm particularly excited about is seeing the rise of audio fiction and the good old days maybe of the 60s um and the 50s when you had drama on the radio and people people used to sit around the radio and listen to you know Lone Ranger or whatever it was it's that sort of thing which is happening now I think Cadence 13 is calling it um movies for the ears and I I just love that phrase so we're seeing a bunch of that sort of content happening from smaller independent you know folks who are making independent shows and I think that that that's quite that's quite an exciting time and what we're also seeing is we're we're seeing you know a bunch of individual podcast hosts who are there to help smaller podcasters get in yeah I'm an adviser for one called Captivate which is very good based in the UK but there's also you know everywhere from anchor which is specifically built for tiny podcasters to uh libin transistor simplecast there all of these individual uh individual um you know hosts what I think is interesting is we're seeing more of those yes being owned by large media companies but that means that they can spot you and as you do an amazing podcast that is beginning to Trend and beginning to really take off they can jump in and say would you like a to help with your ad sales would you like us to help with a bit of your promotion and so on and so forth so actually that may help get more interesting uh voices and interesting content uh into the podcasting world yeah that's great well do you think podcasting is here to stay and is there anything you haven't mentioned that you think the future holds for the podcasting industry the other big thing that we will see is historically as you were saying earlier Apple has been basically in charge of podcasting I think quite a lot of people have been calling them a benign dictator right they've basically been making the rules because nobody else was um but they've also not had their foot on the gas I think what we're seeing now now that podcasting is actually be beginning to earn Apple some money right I think that we'll see a big change in terms of that and a big change in terms of how seriously they are taking it but but they also need to because they have lost the market share um that they used to have which was easily 70% of all downloads that I calculate is down to about 40% now Spotify is around 30% and there are a astonishing amount of podcasts now who are launching putting their show onto Spotify and not caring about Apple because it's too difficult and too complicated wow and I think one of the things I know it's it's it's an amazing thing I was talking to the folks at Buzz Sprout and they shared some data with me about how many of their new shows are on Spotify and how many are on are on Apple and they just uh and and there are way more on Spotify and the reason for that is you know the hassles of signing up for an Apple ID if you don't have one of those of you know doing the terms and conditions which you have to have an Apple device for somehow and all of this kind of uh stuff people just uh you know can't be bothered so my suspicion is that we will see that we will see one of two things happening either Apple will get overtaken by uh Spotify and that will be um such a loss I think or we will see apple suddenly realizing wow we need to we need to kick everything up a gear here and you know Apple beginning to spend proper money on podcast training which Spotify have been doing for a while which acast have been doing for a while um you know Apple jumping into that particular space and you know doing what they can to regain some of the Lost um market share yeah and if they do that well wow won't that be exciting because all of a sudden we know that great competition means that there is there's great Innovation and there's great movement in in this space and that's perhaps something that we haven't had over the last five or 10 years yeah all right my last question what app do you use to listen to your podcasts well I have uh I mean that's a bad thing to ask editor of a podcast newsletter because obviously I've got 400 million sure sure I use a Google pixel other phones are available it turns out and so therefore um for a while I was using uh the Google podcasts app which is it's okay yeah but I really use pocketcasts which is a great app it came out originally on um on um uh Android and uh it's very good comes from Australia yes and is a very good thing um on my iPods Touch which I have earlier I was saying that nobody listens to podcasts on their iPod I I do because I have an iPod Touch so that I can um you know stick my little toe into the world of iOS every now and again and so that mostly is running overcast which is a great great podcast app yes the one that I would recommend which isn't necessarily a podcast app it's a bit more than that is a thing called hark um I interviewed the CEO of it about a week or so ago and one of the things it's got in there is yes it's got all of the podcasts and you can have listen to all the podcasts and that's great but what it's also got in there is um playlists or as they call them hark lists and a hark list is essentially a radio presenter um guiding you through a bunch of different shows that are about I don't know they might be about um uh the anniversary of the end of slavery or they might be about the Corona virus or they might be about whatever they are and you have this trusted guide who is taking you through individual clips of these individual shows and it's a great way of finding new podcasts and I think you know that's that's the sort of innovation that I'm quite excited by and by the way the Innovation that things like paid subscriptions and indeed Apple's affiliate scheme which they also have as well should actually unlock for U more folks so um I would I would certainly recommend giving apps like ha or good pods a try because that's a great way of finding great new shows that you might want to have Listen to I had never heard ofk and I'm on their website right now and this looks beautiful first of all and so I'm going to be signing up to be a Creator around here for sure that's awesome and I will say my 12-year-old son we have not gotten him an iPhone yet and so he too uses an iPod Touch to listen to podcasts and so you're not the only one left in the world there are other iPod users as well yeah it's a very cheap way of um being able to try the very and greatest on on iOS I do a bunch of uh of of testing I have a podcast called pod clock which you'll find which uh um I I launched it on April 1st and I called it a um a podcast about time it is literally a podcast about time when you play the podcast it tells you what time it is but the point of all of that is to do a bunch of testing around individual apps and everything else and obviously being able to test on the very latest version of iOS and even the the upcoming betas has been really really helpful so um long may the iPod Touch continue to exist as far as I'm concerned I hope so well James kidland thanks so much for joining us on Apple Insider listeners of course can read your work and listen to you at pod news.net is there anywhere else you would like to point people to to discover your content yeah and if you've got a Siri speaker then firstly I am sorry but secondly you'll find pod news on there in the news briefings as you will of course on uh Google speakers and on Amazon as well very cool well James thanks so much for coming on the show thank you so much\n"