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School of Podcasting: Expert Tips for Launching and Growing Your Podcast
Why SNL’s 50th Is a Goldmine of Podcasting Wisdom!
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So I'm leaving my kitchen, getting ready to walk back to my office and start recording today's episode, and I get a text from my brother that says, hey, are you watching this? Ladies and gentlemen, 50 years of music on SNL. And I turn it on the TV on YouTube TV, and it's so good, it makes me sit down, I watch the whole thing and I'm like, oh, there are so many lessons and to be learned from this. And so whatever I was going to talk about today is coming later. And today I'm talking about lessons you can learn from Saturday Night Live as they turn 50. Because not every show we're talking about 50 years later, nobody's going, hey, let's do a retrospective on Jake and the Fat Man. And yes, that was an actual TV show back in the day. So we're going to learn some lessons from snl. Hit it, ladies. The school of podcasting with Dave Jackson. Podcasting since 2005, I am your award winning hall of fame podcast coach, Dave Jackson, thanking you so very much for tuning in. I'm glad you're here. If you're new to the show, this is why I help you plan, launch and grow your podcast. And sometimes we'll talk about monetization we do have in the future, we're going to talk about running your podcast as a business. And speaking of business, let's talk about mine. Schoolofpodcasting.com use the coupon code listener when you sign up to save on either a monthly or yearly subscription. And that comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. And today I got to tell you, I am on Creative Juices. I just watched a program and was like, oh, so many lessons for podcasters to learn from. Now here in America, you cannot escape the fact that there's a show called Saturday Night Live. And first things first, most people call it snl. But here's the thing. SNL did not glom themselves. Snl, the audience did. So lesson number one, you can't make yourself like your own nickname kind of thing. Like, I never said call me the Dave Jackson, but it's kind of a running gag with some of my friends that they'll go, oh, he's the Dave. And I'm like, I still don't know what that means. But if I had said that, case in point, Radio Shack, for a while, when they were still around, before they went out of business, tried to call themselves the Shack. And right now, Pizza Hut's trying to do it. Nobody out pizzas the Hut. Like, nobody's Calling you the Hut. Quit trying to glom your own Nick. Nicknames are given to you by people that love you. My brother growing up decided to call me Ved, as in the second half of Daved. And he's one of the few people that he doesn't do that because somewhere along the line we figured out that's kind of weird. And so they don't. He does occasionally call me Davey, and he is the only person that can call that. But I watched this special called Ladies and Gentlemen, and it's SNL music for the last 50 years. Because Saturday Night Live, they have a big special tonight. And I know that because when I watch this special, I'm here to tell you there's so many commercials. And the commercials were the same 15 second commercial over and over about this big special that's on tonight. But there were a lot of lessons here. And so the first one I want to talk about is as much as I say know who your audience is, you got to know who your audience is. If you don't educate or entertain the who, you're sunk. You'll never grow your audience. Well, there is another philosophy, and that is what SNL did. They said, look, we made the show we wanted to watch and that is absolutely an option. But just realize your kind of strategy changes then from go find your target audience to go find more people like you. Which is kind of the same thing, but a little different. But they just said, yeah, because in the early days of Saturday Night Live it was a little weird. And I think we need to bring more weirdness into podcasting. But the one thing I want to talk about, we always say open with a good opening and grab people by the throat. And this particular show, again, ladies and gentlemen, 50 years of SNL music. I watched it on YouTube TV. I'm sure it's going to be on Peacock because that's owned by NBC. But I always say if you break it down to the bare bones minimum, a great podcast is about content and delivery. Well, they have 50 years of content. So if they can't find, and this was two hours out of 50 years, I got to find two hours worth of content to fill it up. Well, they had that, but it was the delivery. And I saw where one of the directors was Questlove. Now, if you're not familiar with that name, he's the drummer in the Roots, and he's the Roots are on Jimmy Fallon. But also he DJed a party, I believe it, podcast movement. And there were people talking about how amazing he is as a dj. And that's where I'm like, that had to be Questlove doing this because he took 50 years of performances and just mixed them into each other, where at times he found musical guests that were playing at the same tempo. And it just. It was like. It was so good. I'm telling you about it. It's that kind of like, wow, how'd they do that? And holy cow, that took a lot of time. So what makes great content or what makes a great episode? It's content. Sure. And delivery. And that was just. It made me. I'll put it this way. I turned it on. I'm like, oh, I'm going to go record this other episode. I was going to talk about newsletters and some other things. We'll get to that in the future. And this was like, oh, wait a minute, I got to sit down and watch this. And it was two hours long. And now I'm firing up the mic because I'm fired up. And so what it was is when they first started, the show was called, you know, Saturday Night Live. And the big catchphrase is Live from New York. So that's New York City. And when it started 50 years ago, it kind of reflected New York City. And apparently at that time, there was an emphasis, I guess, a bit on new comedy and what some people might call weird, but it was improv. One of the people they brought on was Andy Kaufman. And Andy Kaufman is almost like a performance artist to where he actually, at times, really enjoyed doing things to upset the audience. The more upset they were, the more enjoyment he got out of it. But here's the thing. I'll put a link in the show notes to him. And he stands there for a good, I don't know, 30 seconds doing nothing as he plays the theme to Mighty Mouse, which is an old cartoon that was probably grid googly back in the 50s. It's a very long setup for a very weird punchline. And so it was weird and it was different. And if you're someone in, I don't know, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, out in the middle of America, you're going, I have never seen anything like this. And at that point, you're either gonna love it and tell someone, wait till you see this thing. Or you're gonna go, that was so stupid. You're gonna call your friend the next time you see them and say, I saw the dumbest thing on TV last night. You know, that's. And so I'm like, they weren't afraid to be weird. They Used to have magicians on there. Penn and Teller got their start on Saturday Night Live and comedians and a lot of musical acts. They brought on musical acts that at times I remember growing up going, what am I watching? You know, they'd bring in some punk acts. They were the first probably showed ever on a national TV, put on rap, like back in. It was like 70. I don't know what it was. It was early the Funk four plus one that led the Doors to other people because they were trying to be either hip or new. Like, they put Nirvana on because of the network. Lorne Michaels is the producer and was pretty much the producer for all those 50 years, except for like two where he took a break, but because of his network, David Geffen, owner of Geffen Records, said, hey, I got this band called Nirvana, like last year, last week they sold 60 million albums or maybe 60,000, and this week they sold 140,000. So something's going on with this band. And they put them on Saturday Night Live. So a lot of times when you watch these bands, you go, I have no idea who I'm watching. Yeah, but you probably will. And so the other thing they did, they brought in people who obviously had zero comedy chops, like Steve Forbes. Steve Forbes is one of the richest men in America at the time. He had just ran for president and had, you know, he was as dry as yesterday's toast, basically. Elon Musk, not known for his comedy, has been a host of Saturday Night Live because he's a lightning bolt. And some people, like, I got to tune in for that train wreck. And it was Steven Seagal, you know, the kind of overweight, karate chopping dude from the 80s. He was on there. And from what I understand, not only a horrible host, but a horrible human being. Like, not fun to work with at all. But they swung the bat. They're like, you know, because again, sometimes you don't want to do everything horrible, but if you can get people talking about your show, it makes you wonder, you know, if you tell a friend if it's excellent, you'll probably tell too, if it was horrible. So I kind of go, kudos to them for at least swinging the bat and trying something different. I do this kind of every 100 episodes. I will break my format and sometimes it will go good and people will talk about it. Hence, man, it sounds like forever ago, Binky and the Wiz was episode 400, Groundhog Day, which. Which people talked about. I still have people like, man, when are you bringing Binky and the Wiz back, and it was just a one time thing. And then other times I did on episode 500, a thing on Groundhog Day, which was not funny or entertaining. It was just weird. And I look back now and go, yee. But, you know, it is what it is. But when you try something creative, it stops the podcast from being boring for you. And here's the thing. I saw Sammy hagar in the 80s at a little theater here in Akron, Ohio, where I live. And he came out after he had played all of his hits and started playing things like Led Zeppelin and the who. And he basically said, look, uh, if I get bored, we're all screwed. Except he didn't say screwed. And so by occasionally trying something new, if that keeps you interested in the show, well, that's good. Because if you get bored with the show and quit, you're not helping anyone. So I like the fact that they're not afraid to be weird and they're not afraid to try new things. Now another one. The story that they showed is how many? Because this whole thing was about musicians. So first things first, why did Dave like this show so much? Consider your audience. I'm a musician, right? I play the guitar, I can carry a tune. So I love seeing these bands, even if they're really weird. And they had, they told the story of how Bill Hader, who is, was a great cast member, went on to do Barry on hbo. If you've never seen that show, Barry. Amazing, amazing stuff. And he said he was a writer there. And they heard Adele, the singer, and this is before she was Adele. And they stopped like it stopped them. They're, you know, throwing out ideas and spitball and stuff. And all of a sudden they hear this voice and they're like, what is that? And so Adele went on the actual performance, crushed it. And she said she remembered she had to fly to the UK for something. So that's a long flight. And so she leaves New York City, flies way over across the pond. And when she left, she said her, I think she said her, her album was like at number 49 on the charts. And by the time she landed less than 24 hours later because of her appearance on Saturday Night Live, she was either in or very near the top 20 because of one appearance. And so the lesson we can learn there is every time we turn on this microphone, we have an opportunity to impact people to where they go, what is that? And they stop what they're doing to listen. I realize. Easier said than done. But never underestimate the power of RSS yes, our good friend openrss feeds allow us to be heard all over the world. Let me take a tangent to. For crying out loud. Here comes another 10 second tangent. 10 seconds indeed. Such absolute rubbish. I'm seeing this more and more people that are using Spreaker as a media host. Nothing wrong with Spreaker. Nowhere near my top five. But they're okay. They're owned by iHeart and I'm running into people who, I don't know if they were courted by iheart, but they're on Spreaker and Spreaker only. And I just wanna remind people the top two places to put your show are Apple and Spotify. Now, I would say put your show everywhere, but if you're just on iheart. I know iheart says iheart number one in podcasts. And you know what? They lie. Well, actually they don't lie on the chart that they control. But I'm just. I see that. Ugh, finally back to the show. And RSS lets you be heard everywhere. What an opportunity. Because 20 years ago you couldn't do that. 20 years ago you could not do that, and now you can. The other thing I want to point out while we're talking about this, never put the word only in front of your download numbers. I see people say things like, I only have 29 downloads, okay, per episode. That's a full classroom. That's a more than full classroom. That could be doing a lot of stuff. Xbox, Netflix, etc. And they chose to listen to you. So take advantage of the opportunity. One more thing I'm going to throw in here. I hang out a lot in Facebook groups and Reddit groups and I'm just watching what people are talking about when it comes to their podcast. Why? Because I want to know who my audience is and what they're struggling with. And look, we all have different lives and lives or lives. Take your pick. And this person had been podcasting for a year and was quitting. And I said, well, I'm always interested as to why people quit. And he podcasted for a year and I think it was a. He could have been a she. Long story short, they were waiting to be discovered. And the whole build it and they will come is just not the way that works. You know, you're not going to grow your network from behind a desk. Yes, you can meet people online, but I'll just give you an example. When I was growing up and it dawned on me probably about the age of 13, that, oh, my family doesn't have as Much money as other families. And this is before there were vending machines in schools. I would go down and buy a couple packs of gum and sell it by the piece to people. And I got to be known as like the gum guy. And so if people wanted gum, they'd come to me. I'd go down and buy a pack for a dime or something ridiculously cheap and then sell each piece for a dime. And after a while, you know, I wasn't on easy street, but I. If I wanted to go buy an album, I wanted to go buy Kiss Alive or something. I raised that money by selling gum at school. I didn't go, oh, nobody giving me money for nothing. You gotta get that. You gotta hustle. And so. And then later I got a paper route with a friend. I was his helper and I was like, hey, I'm noticing that the guy. And it was my best friend. I still know that guy. And but later I got my own paper route. And I got that because I made friends with the paper boy who was getting older. And I was like, be cool if I could get the paper out. That was my house on it. So you got to get out there and hustle a little bit, know who your audience is, go to where they are, make friends with them and tell them about your show. But you have a huge opportunity, but people have to know you exist. And that's where they talked about it in this show. John Belushi was one of the original cast members at snl. He was an animal house, very funny guy, the Blues Brothers. And unfortunately, drugs are bad. Okay, yeah, drugs took out John Belushi. But here's the thing. It's not always who you know, but who knows you. There was a punk band called Fear, and they didn't even have a record label, according to the singer. They interviewed them, but John Belushi knew them and John Belushi liked them. And John Belushi got this unheard of band in front of millions of people on Saturday Night Live on the Halloween special, because the band was called Fear. Now, they did some things outside the box. They got creative and they brought in a mosh pit, back before anybody knew what a mosh pit was. And the director thought they were having a riot, so they cut to commercial, basically. But again, the more people that know who you are and what you do, the lucky you're going to get, because there is a sense of luck. And the other thing is that I thought was interesting, for the first probably decade, the musical guests might as well have been playing In a closet. It was them on a very kind of boring stage, just playing, you know, Ladies and gentlemen, Billy Preston. You know, and, you know, it was great because it was Billy Preston. Love Billy Preston. And. But it wasn't much to look at. It was kind of like you were standing on the stage with them and, you know. But it was the 70s, so you get it. But after decades, Lorne Michaels, again, the producer, realized that the music segment needed to feature visual musicians. And one of the first ones who's kind of in hot water right now because we talk about being creative and being dangerous. Kanye west was the first guy that said, hey, wait, wait, wait. I want to do this thing with, like, sheets. And we'll pull the sheets out, and there'll be people on the sheets, and then this and that. I'm going to be standing on a box. And he's also a bit of. They kind of point out that Kanye. It's one thing to be creative, it's another thing to be, oh, I want to use naughty words here. Kind of a diva. And you must have your own way, because you think you're the best thing since sliced bread. Don't do that. But anyway, he did this. And that's when they went, wait a minute. Going forward, we have to make sure that the music part is very visual. And not that everybody had to be David Bowie, but let's do something with that. Because they realized that this was a comedy show, but it also was very much music. And in the same way that they took chances with their comedy, they also took chances with their music. And. And there were people. There were times when I tuned in to SNL because of the musical guest, and then I had to sit through the funny stuff before they finally came on. So they realized that, hey, we should kind of spice up the look of this. And you might do this. You might have a segment of your show and find out that half the people are tuning into the segment. They could care less about part one, Part two. They're here for part three. Back in the day, I listened to John Lee Dumas, entrepreneurs on fire. Why? Because one of the questions he always asked, like, the six same questions, and one was, what's your favorite tool? And I was tuning in to hear what the tools were. And then after about hearing, I don't know, 20 episodes of People going Evernote, which wouldn't be the case today, because Evernote was one of those companies that got bought and, I don't know, tripled their price. I use notejoy now, but nonetheless, it's an example of a segment. And so the other thing about this is right now it's weird because in a couple of episodes ago, I talked about how you just need a clear view of yourself, right? Doesn't have to be this super decked out background. People just need to see you and they need to be able to hear you when you get those down. That's pretty much it. But it, it does kind of help if you look cool as well. Because I forget who said this. I would love to give them credit, but I don't know that people are scampering and running to their computer to watch your show. That looks like basically a zoom meeting. And I always say if, I mean, if that's it, look, if you're on YouTube, then you might get found by YouTube. But that is something to keep in mind. But I wanted to bring this up. There's a report that came out. Ashley Carmen looked at the top 50 podcasts. So picture that top 50. So these are the people that got teams, they got time and they got a budget. And out of the top 50, only 79%. Now, that's a big number. We're doing video. But notice that's not all of them. That's still 21% that are not. And of those, most of them were on YouTube. A very small amount was on Spotify. And so I just say that because if you're still thinking I have to be on video. No, you don't. You can. Not a bad place to be. But I just want to release that pressure for the person that's freaking out, that doesn't want to do video. You don't have to. So keep that in mind. The other thing that makes snl, SNL is it is Saturday Night Live. It's kind of in the title. And that means that when you watch it, you kind of not sure what's going to happen. One of the most famous ones was Ashley Simpson was lip syncing. And on her second show, the drummer accidentally triggered song number one. The band starts playing song number two, and out comes Ashley's voice singing song number one. She did some sort of little funky hoedown dance and they went to commercial. People talked about that for years. And also I don't remember a lot after Ashley Simpson. She probably got into fashion or something of a nature after that. But they also love when people break. The cast members know they're not supposed to laugh, even though it's a comedy show. And one of my favorite is Heidi Gardner. There was a sketch where they brought back Beavis and Butthead. And the makeup department did this fabulous job of making these two people look like Beavis and Butthead. And when Heidi actually, even though they've gone through a dress rehearsal, Heidi just sees them and just loses it. Like, she doesn't even have a chance to try to maintain. And of course, there's always the Sinead o' Connor who ripped up a picture of the Pope, and that got made a lot of news. Why? Because it was live and nobody on Saturday Night Live knew she was going to do that. The occasional band will throw in an F bomb. Thank you, System of A Down. And the other thing that some of it is you're just being dangerous, you know? And I know some people that like the show. It's kind of weird because I watch Saturday Night Live out of routine. I would say if there are 13 episodes in a season, two make me laugh. The rest of it is kind of meh. And I just wonder sometimes if it's the fact that, a, I'm not 20 anymore, and B, I'm watching this recorded. I'm not watching it at 11:30 when I was tired, so I wonder about that. But I'm sure there are members of their audience that when something happens in the news, and with Trump, that's about every 10 minutes, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to, you know, feel in the Grand Canyon as a dump. We're going to use it as a dump. And people like, wait, what? And then there's part of you that's like, wait, did he really say that? You kind of don't know what's going to work. And so that's either going to be a sketch or what are they going to do? They have a new segment in the middle of the show called Weekend Update. And so sometimes they like to go right to the line, and sometimes, you know, they're being a little dangerous. Now, the other thing I want to point out, kind of stepping away from SNL for a second, and then we're going to come back to it. I saw another documentary on Amazon about Tom Green. Now, if you were around in the 90s on MTV, Tom Green is a Canadian. And I love. I just remember one episode he was talking something about a watering can. Watering Glenn. I'm watering the flat with a watering can. And I was just. He sounded so Canadian. Watering can Glenn. And it was weird. He was very, very strange. He would, I don't know, tie meat to his head and then interview people on the street and just acting like there wasn't meat tied to his head. I saw him suck milk out of a cow's udder. Just bent down on the ground and latched on. He humped a dead moose. You know, things that you don't normally see on tv. And again, whether you love Tom or you hated him, you probably told somebody about him. And so, again, maybe we need to just spice up the creativity here. Not so much that you have to be crazy, which Tom is kind of known for. But here's the thing I thought was interesting, because there's a documentary on Amazon about this in 2007. So think about that. 2007, two years after, what, three years when podcasting kind of first started getting and going. He made a TV set in his living room, and he would broadcast live to YouTube whatever he wanted. And he had a guest on. And you got to Remember, this is 2007. Nobody was doing this. And I'll put a link to the video in the show notes. One of the guys he came on as a guest was Joe Rogan. And Joe Rogan's like, let me see what you're doing here. And you can just see Joe going, hmm. And even talks about how this is great except for sponsors. Yeah, I would agree. Then the other thing is, Tom, on his show would do outlandish stunts, many of them involving his parents. It seemed like about every other week, he was waking up his parents at 4am and he would just do, like. I remember once, he basically airbrushed pornography on the hood of his father's car and then woke them up at 4am to look at. It was very strange. And unfortunately, Tom had testicular cancer. And, you know, cancer's not really funny. Although my buddy Brad over@cancerandcomedy.com talks about that, that when you do get cancer, one of the best medicines is comedy. So Tom had to take time off. Well, he was one of the top rated shows on mtv. And so they needed another outlandish show to kind of fill his time slot because there was a big group of people that liked outlandish things. And so they replaced Tom as he went on to battle and beat cancer, which is great. And that show was called Jackass, which went on to have, what, three or four movies, along with being, you know, launching the careers of Johnny Knoxville and everybody else over there. So without Tom Green, probably no Joe Rogan, no Jackass. And what made people talk about Tom Green? Well, he was weird and he thought outside the box. So maybe we need to inject a little weirdness into this. Now, the Other thing, I want to talk about this SNL again. It was called, Ladies and Gentlemen, 50 Years of SNL Music. I was like, man, you know, and, oh, by the way, how did I find out about this? My brother texted me and said, are you watching this? Word of mouth, as always, word of mouth, that is not artificial intelligence. That is real intelligence. Because my brother was like, oh, man, my brother's gonna love this. I watched it. It made me sit down. Why? Number one, it's a music thing, so I liked it. Number two, presentation grabbed me by the throat and I was like, wow, look at all this stuff. And then number three, information you can't get anyplace else. And this was really cool. Like, they talked about. They interviewed Tom from Rage against the Machine and he talked about how originally they were going to have upside down flags on their amplifiers when they played. And SNL was like, no, no, no, no, can't do that. That's going to offend the sponsors. And so they had their roadies right before they're going on, put the flags back on, and they have audio of people going, hey, hey, hey, hey. Put that. No, you can't do that. And there was a little bit of a tussle with the roadies versus the, you know, New York union guys. And in the end, the flags are off the amplifiers. But I didn't know that. And they're all, you know, Dave from the Foo Fighters was talking about how nervous he was when he played with nirvana. And 20 seconds into the performance, he broke his stick and how he, you know, and then you go back and watch the tape and you even know that was going on behind the scenes. Information you can't get anyplace else. So great content, and I sure hope so. 50 years of that. So Dave is there. They had Debbie Harry today. So we know her from Blondie back in the 70s and 80s when she was Debbie Harry. And now she's, like, not holding up too bad. Debbie Harry. And they had ex cast members. So what did this do? It. It provided, again, information you can't get anyplace else. And validity that, oh, these people took time to come back and talk about their appearance. So that's where having guests on your show sometimes look, your show is valid. It's absolutely valid because you put it out. But when you have other guests on it, there are times when people go, whoa. You had, you know, Gary Vee on your show. Holy cow. It gives it a little validity. So that was another thing. I was like, oh, this is kind of cool. And Those people were talking about the behind the scenes stuff. So Debbie Harry was talking about the Funky four plus one. I'd never heard of these people. And again, it's not who you know, it's who knows you. So the first rap act on the Saturday Night Live show was through Debbie Harry. So it was interesting. So that's what makes great content, right? Information you can't get anyplace else. It was entertaining because it was funny. They showed some of the sketches, they talked about Jason. Jason, boy, I can't remember anybody's name. Justin Timberlake did a sketch and if you know it, you know it. I'm not even going to try to say it here. D and A B is how they referred to it. And they gave the history of that particular very like right on the line of the sensors. And the reason they got away with that is they were mixing that particular video up into the last minutes to where nobody saw it before it went on the air. That's insane. So information you can't get anyplace else. It's entertaining. You've got celebrities and love them or hate them, there were celebrities in there telling their stories and it was delivered in a very entertaining. And it just flowed. The only thing that kind of was awful about it is, and it wasn't horrible. I will give YouTube TV or in this case NBC credit. They would let it go a fair amount, but it wasn't, you know, every 10, 15 minutes now, probably not that much, probably every eight minutes they were breaking in for a 15 second commercial. And that commercial was watch the live 50 year celebration tonight at 8. And then they'd show a bunch of other stuff. But I thought it was interesting just the way. And I was like, oh, this is good stuff. There are lessons here to be learned. And between that show and watching a documentary on Amazon about Tom Green, I'm like, I need to think more out of the box. Yes, I do interviews and yes, I talk to you, but maybe there's something I can do to make this more entertaining, make it more educational, things of that nature. And I always say, especially if you don't have a big budget, if you don't have tools and things like that. TikTok went away for a day and I kind of wish it would have stayed away for a little bit just so those people that were using it for everything would go, okay, now what? Because that's when creativity really happens. And sometimes not having the right tools or having the right circumstances leads to things that are so cool. One of my favorite stories the lead guitarist of Black Sabbath, Tony Iommi, was working in a factory and cut off the end of his, I think, pointer finger on his left hand. That is the one you really use when you play the guitar. And he made some sort of weird finger condom to put on the end of his finger, but it still hurt to like bend strings and stuff, which you do when you play the guitar. So to eliminate that pain, he just tuned his guitar down so the strings weren't quite so tight and a little easier to bend. Well, by tuning his guitar down, it made it sound omnis. Omnimous omnibus. It made it sound scary. And Black Sabbath was born. So sometimes when you don't have the fancy lights and you don't have the fancy camera and you just use your iPhone by a window, you end up with really cool stuff. But I'll have links to everything we talked about. But maybe we need a little more weird in podcasting. Maybe we need formats that aren't quite the same old thing that everybody else is doing. If you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear it. Links are in the show notes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Couple quick updates I want to say as we head towards the end of the month. If you haven't answered the question of the month schoolofpodcasting.com? and also I've started back up podcasterhappyhour.com and this month in January. January, yeah, February, the one and only Mike Dell is coming in to show off some of the AI tools from Blubrry. Go to podcasterhappyhour.com to sign up. That is absolutely free. If you enjoy the networking of events like Podfest and Podcast Movement, there's a lot of that there as well. So we have the presentation, we do open Q and A and then we just network our butt off. Check it out. Podcasterhappyhour.com yeah, yeah, yeah. Want to know more about what I think when it comes to podcasting? Check out my newsletter@podcastingobservations.com that's podcastingobservations.com links in the show notes Every voice has a story and yours is worth sharing. At the school of podcasting, we nurture your journey from the idea to the influencer. It's time to be heard. Let your voice be your Legacy. Go to schoolofpodcasting.com join and use the coupon code listener. I know Spotify released some numbers on what they're paying video people. Now they're trying to get people to use Spotify as video. The Criteria for that is pretty much ridiculous. And so it's the super popular people that apparently are going to make some bank. And. And I always like to remind people that a large chunk of Spotify is owned by the record industry and the record industry treats the people that make the art horrible. And so I found a clip and I wanted to play this for you that's giving some insights on how the record labels are treating musicians.
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I just got off the phone with my friend who got laid off from Atlantic Records a couple of weeks back, and he told me something pretty wild. Major record labels and Live Nation are secretly doing partnerships behind closed doors. My friend called this the new 360 deal. Up until about 10 years ago, labels were signing artists to 360 deals. So they got a cut of everything the artist did. The artists wised up to that. They realized how bad of a deal it was and the artists started saying, we're not signing 360 deals anymore. But the labels found a loophole. What they're doing now is signing the artist to the label and then feeding that artist to Live Nation to sign a live events contract. Live Nation secretly has a partnership with the label and is breaking the label off the revenue coming from the artist, live shows. Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged back in 2010, so they have full control over venues and pricing of tickets. All those fees you see attached to a ticket when you go buy a ticket for a show, the convenience fee, the service fee, et cetera, those are just acting as a fund to be able to break off their partners. The labels with a piece of that revenue, they're doing the exact same thing they always have.
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The.
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They're just hiding it a little better. Definitely pretty shady.
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And so realize you might be going, what does that have to do with podcasting? Dave, that's about the recording industry. Those people are the people that are partially calling the shots at Spotify. If you haven't watched it yet, watch the playlist. It's a kind of documentary. Ish. Not really a document. Well, it kind of is. It's the history of. Of Spotify. And you will see where Daniel Ek doesn't care anything about the people that make the music. And so obviously it's a movie. Is that 100% true? Maybe, maybe not. But I. It's just one of those things where I get worried when people are like, oh, we're just going to use YouTube and Spotify. I go, and what happens if you get kicked off of those? I just was listening to the Buzzcast and Jordan was saying how there have been a ton of shows, including hers, where she uses kind of background music. She does some sort of bedtime story thing. And, you know, they're booting people off for having music in their show and because they don't care. You know, now some cases those people are using music illegally, but there are people that are using it legally, and they don't care. They're kicking them off anyway. So I just. Again, it always sounds like I hate Spotify. I'm a bit of a hypocrite. I love their music service. I use it all the time to listen to music. But I don't know that I want to put all my eggs in their basket when it comes to podcasting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, where am I gonna be September 26th through the 28th in Charlotte, North Carolina. You attend this one. It's going to be great. The Empowered Podcasting Conference. I'll be there and I'll be speaking for all of my appearances. Simply go to schoolofpodcasting.com where and if you want me to talk at your online or offline event, Simply go to schoolofpodcasting.com contact. So some things coming in the future. I've been doing a lot of investigating on newsletters and the power of newsletters. And that kind of ties in because I interviewed Steve Stewart. Stevestewart me, and we're going to be talking about running your podcast as a business. Now, here's the thing. Number one, I realized that might not apply to you at all. You just want to talk about Batman in the basement, and you're getting paid and fun, and that's great. And when that episode comes out, I will let you know that if you're not interested in business at all, your class is dismissed. I don't want to waste your time listening to something that doesn't pertain, but I am going through the process of kind of, what would you auditing your business and setting up this system that Steve talks about. It's called Profit first. So I can come back to the table with firsthand knowledge, as here are the benefits. Here's the things to go over. Because if you think about it, when you talk about numbers, man, is that boring in audio, look, it's 17% and 12% and 6%. So how do you fix boring numbers? You paint them with a story. And so I'm working on a story to go with that, which will be partly my story of running the school of podcasting as a business. But also, there are people that I know and Love that were making millions of dollars and they went out of business, which is kind of what inspired the whole thought of. Maybe we should talk about running your podcast as a business so that you don't do silly things with your money. So that's coming in the future. Of course, if you have anything you would like me to talk about, the Show's for you. Schoolofpodcasting.com contact is where you can contact me and leave me your feedback and your thoughts because I do this show for you. And speaking of schoolofpodcasting.com that's where you can go out there and click on the button to join. Don't forget that contains step by step tutorials that will get you through the whole process. You think this is hard? It's not as hard as you think. Then you've got an amazing community with people with backgrounds in marketing and taxes and speaking and all sorts of stuff. An amazing community. I love the school of podcasting community. And then you've got me right by your side. And every day I wake up. In fact, as I look at my computer right now, two questions on a special app I use. I'll answer those with a personalized video and in some cases that will lead to Zoom. We'll get on Zoom and figure out whatever it is you need. And if you think that can't be real, no, it is. Ask any of the members if you need testimonials. I'll put a link to that as well. I got lots of people saying, holy cow, you should join the school of Podcasting. And I tend to agree with that. So thanks so much. Until next week. Take care. God bless. Class is dismissed. If you like what you hear, then come tell somebody. If you like what you hear, then go to Slumber. But today I'm inspired. This is gonna be fun. I got a few notes here, but a lot of this is just me riffing on something I just saw. And that is. I didn't even do the listener thing, did I? Nope, didn't do the. See, I'm excited to talk about this. I'm skipping ads, all sorts of crap. Hey, you're still here. So you get a bonus tip. I know moving from one app to another is not always. It's kind of easy, but kind of not. I switched to Pocket cast and here's why. A I can listen on the web. It works on any device. So your phone or whatever. But they also have an app for the woman in the tube from Amazon. I don't want to say the word because I don't want to trigger yours to where I can go into the kitchen. So I've just left my phone on my desk. I go into the kitchen and I say, lexi, open Pocket Casts. And she'll say, would you like to open pocket casts? And I'll go, yes. And she'll say, would you like to listen to whatever the last thing I was listening to? And I'll go, yes. And she will pick up right where I left off. When I'm done cooking breakfast, when I go back to my desk, I can open up the Pocket cast on my Mac or my PC and. And pick up right where I left off. My favorite thing of pocket cast is they have bookmarks. And so if somebody says something cool and I'm like, oh, I got to remember this, I can just add a bookmark and come back to it later. Which, as I often use podcast for research, I find that really, really handy. It's. I do have the paid version, and I forget what it is, but whatever it is, it's cool enough to where I would pay it. The only thing I hate is they don't do the streaming satoshi thing for podcasting 2.0. So if your show is 2.0 enabled, I still listen on what am I using for that podcast guru right now? But I'm gonna go to the podcast guru guys and go, hey, can you make, you know, bookmarks? Because I really love that feature. If you like what you hear, man, go tell someone.