In today’s episode of Really Specific Stories, I chat with @furstenberg!
Michael recounts his early podcast consumption, expands on his music fandom and offers a Norwegian perspective on US-centric tech discussion. Listen now. 🎙
@martinfeld nice pun based name. "creative fan narratives in the tech podcasting community" seems like a pretty meta podcast
@warner Thank you for your comment! Yes, you’ve described it well. The idea of the podcast is to fuel my research on tech podcasting, with the aim of including producers’ and listeners’ voices. 😀
@warner No worries! Hopefully I’ve understood you correctly here and am not telling you what you already know. 🙂
Generally the best first step once you’ve set up your podcast (and added an episode to it) is to submit your feed to Apple Podcasts. Other apps like Overcast, Pocket Casts and Castro scrape submissions to Apple and present them in their own directories. Podcast search sites like Listen Notes will then also display it after a day or two, where you can also claim the show there. Sometimes you have to be patient for things to appear.
Services like Spotify and Amazon require separate submission, with the former re-hosting your content (somewhat controversial), while the latter apparently doesn’t.
Nope I really needed that introduction to the bizzarely complex array of directories. Fwiw I expect it will go the way of music distribution and an aggregator like Zencast will become the go-to indie choice like DistroKid for music (distributes over half of global music tracks). Probably why AmazonMusic just acquired Art19: AM pretty stagnant sub 1% consumers, probs because Music in the name, so that's their Bezos monopoly trick play I reckon, own the distribution.
Re. hosting: recently as two months ago, Riverside claim that "Spotify doesn’t host your podcast mp3 files; rather, it streams them from your podcast host." which as you say Amazon also claim.
You don't believe them?
Spotify is easily 2nd highest-reach platform (was briefly top) so I'd have to have strong reason not to list there.
How do you distribute Really Simple Stories?
Do you think M.b is up to it for a personal microcast? I'm concerned I won't have enough control over customization. E.g. say I accidentally upload an .mp3 music file, it will go out as a pod and I'm not sure I'll be able to delete it from all stores.
@warner Apologies for the delay in my response...
Interesting point regarding Spotify! My reading up suggested that the company did ingest MP3s, but if they aren't or have changed something since then, then great! 👍
I distribute Really Specific Stories with Fireside and really enjoy the service.
Yes, I think that Micro.blog is a great platform for microcasts. I'm not sure that your proposed MP3 (song) file example would be an issue: if you were to delete the file and replace it with a new one, then other directories should eventually update according to what you've changed.
Micro.blog is perhaps the best place to start a podcast because it is affordable, easy, aligns with your existing blog and gives you a reasonably safe space to experiment. If you want more analytics and customisation, which frankly are less necessary than you may think, then you can explore other services. My decision to use Fireside for my PhD podcast was because I wanted a separate space and was impressed with the service after using it with @HemisphericViews.
@martinfeld thanks for the recco of Fireside as an advanced distro tool > Anchor, Zencast, Art19 etc. If I want a venture pod, I'll look at the Standard $19/mo plan mainly cos of custom URL.
Re. M.b Microcasts for personal: I see you've done well at titling your M.b posts with audio for Feld Notes with S1 E11 etc. so that if you pickup S1 E12 after Micro Camp it will still make sense even though you had this Micro Camp pres in.
Maybe I should clean up the titles of my posts caught by wa.rner.me/podcast.xml incl deleting the test audio (song). And I'll choose a custom image like you.
That's good to know that directories will update based on latest state of the podcast.xml.
My concern would be that the 2nd order directories you mentioned like Listen Notes would freeze/remember the initial pull.
I know with song distribution it's really hard to get song off all stores once distro'd out!