The Jag Show

To paraphrase a great philosopher of the early 2000's.....FINALLY.....The Jag Show....has come back....to podcasting. First, apologies for the hiatus. I've spent much of the last six months on a passion project - the WJPZ at 50 podcast - interviewing alumni from a half century of my college radio station. Look for a case study on that show soon in this space. Also, on Tuesday, April 4, I'll be co-presenting "How to Launch a Podcast," with my client Angela Buccellato of The Resume...

What's better than one podcast producer's 2023 predictions? How about 5? I moderate this month's roundtable with Matt Cundill of The Sound Off Media Company, Catherine O'Brien of Branch Out Programs, Johnny Podcasts of Straight Up Podcasts, and David Yas of Pod 617. We agree on some ideas, and have pleasantly divergent opinions on some others.

Hey everyone, it's been a minute. Gonna break down the last month or so of podcast news and look forward to 2023. First, a programming note. Yes, I've "pod faded" with this show a bit. That's largely because I've been dedicating a lot of time to a passion project, a show called WJPZ at 50. It celebrates 50 years of the radio station at my alma mater, Syracuse University. We are releasing interviews with alumni every Monday, Wednesday and Friday through the beginning of March and our annual...

It's been awhile since we did a recap of news in the podcasting world - so I'm gonna share some headlines that have grabbed my attention over the last month or so: The biggest story is Edison Research's Spoken Word Audio report, released at the end of October, and surveying Americans ages 13 and up. Some of the key takeaways: 131 million Americans listen to Spoken Word Audio daily, that's up 25% since 2014. Also, 29% of all audio consumption is now spoken word. That's up 1.5x from eight...

A great way to promote your podcast is in other podcasts. It's what's known as a "Feed drop." If you can work out a trade with a similar podcaster, you can promote each other's shows. The old adage is "fish where the fish are." It's a lot easier to land a podcast listener from another podcast than it is from a social media channel. They're already on their podcast app! With that in mind, here's a demonstration of how that works. I'm working on another project - a podcast commemorating the...

My wife and I are back from a week in Disney World with some friends, and a lot of the things they do there can apply to you and your podcast. Now I realize Disney has about a 90 year head start on you, and 50 for Disney World specifically. Nor do you have a multi-billion dollar marketing machine and 4 generations of super fans at your disposal. But here are 8 takeaways from the Mouse House that you can scale down to your podcast. better To talk more about podcasts and how I can help you,...

TikTok continues to out-innovate (and out-grow) other social media apps. And podcasting could be their next feature. PodNews, via AudioMeans, reports that there is a new "bot scraping our feeds." Or, in English, another party is starting to look at our podcasts. And it traces back to TikTok servers. Details are scant so far, but this makes total sense. TikTok has been rapidly gaining on other social media apps, so it only makes sense they'd want a bite of the podcast pie as well. What I...

The big news in podcasting this week was Spotify canceling 10 shows from its Parcast and Gimlet studios, leading to a layoff of just under 5% of its workforce. And it's all because of...greed. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/spotify-cancel-podcasts-parcast-gimlet-1235234758/ These shows are Spotify exclusives. While it's true Spotify is one of the biggest players in podcasting, they are far from the only game in town. When you keep a product off of certain distribution...

I really don't want this to be a podcast where I talk about radio, an industry I left in 2017 after almost 20 years. But for the second straight week, we've got a radio company who's trying to break podcasting. Last week it was iHeartRadio, and their sketchy practice of buying podcast downloads as ads in video games. How sketchy was that? Well depends on who you ask. This week, it's Audacy, formerly Entercom, and CBS Radio before that. They're the company that saw how badly ClearChannel and...

Is iHeart scamming the podcasting industry? That's the implication of an article this week that was widely discussed in the podcasting world. The story is from Bloomberg and written by Ashley Carman, one of the most respected reporters in our industry. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-27/inside-podcasters-explosive-audience-growth Advertising buys in podcasting are based on audience size - downloads and streams. According to Carman, publishers are buying ads inside mobile...

Yesterday, I went to the North American International Auto Show, known to locals here as the Detroit Auto Show, or just the Auto Show. And it reminded me of a common question I get from podcasters - when should I release my new episodes? Now, whether you release, weekly, biweekly, monthly, whatever, the key to growing your show is consistency. As your show grows, your listeners will learn when to expect new content - whether that's the 2nd and 4th Tuesday each month, or every Wednesday...

Did you see 16 year old Shane Hawkins pay tribute to his dad at the recent Foo Fighters tribute to Taylor Hawkins? Well, turns out how you heard about it and how you watched and reacted to it - can teach us a lot about podcasting. How did you hear about it? For me, it was a combination of social media post after social media post, and hearing friends talk about it. Was it the same for you? Did you run to YouTube to see it? Or did you actually pull up the Paramount Plus app to watch the one...

Welcome to Season 4 of the Jag Show. We're going to start with what I learned this year at Podcast Movement, and how you can improve your show. The first thing you should know about is video. Your show needs to be on YouTube. According to Edison Research, 48% of the podcast audience has consumed a show on YouTube. So even if your show is audio only, put a graphic, or an audiogram with a moving waveform up, and upload that audio to YouTube. OK, what about short-form video? One of my big...

You may have noticed that it's been awhile since I've come out with a new episode of this podcast. And for that, I apologize. I've often talked about "PodFade" in this show - it's when after a certain number of episodes, a podcast falls down your priority list. Well, it happened to me. Today, I'm going to tell you how it happened, and what I'm doing about it. My wife and I are doing a lot of traveling this year - call it pent up wanderlust from COVID, scratching an itch, whatever. Well, as...

In our May 2022 livestream, the 5 "Podcast Superfriends" assembled to talk about how Matt Cundill pushed through the usual podcast obstacles to get to the 300th episode of The Sound Off Podcast. We cover lessons learned, and how they can apply to our clients. What's changed since the show started? Should you "batch record" or do one episode at a time? What about live vs recorded? The five podcast "Superfriends" are: Johnny "Podcasts" Peterson of Straight Up Podcasts in Fort Worth:...

For over a year now, three co-hosts and I have been working on a podcast for the Royal Oak Michigan Chamber of Commerce. We interview various members of the Chamber about themselves and their businesses. Once a quarter, we turn the tables on one of our co-hosts. This week, it's yours truly in the hot seat. Show Notes: Today, we turn the tables on our co-host, Jon Gay of JAG in Detroit Podcasts, and put him in the hot seat. We talk about his radio-turned-podcasting career and get some...

To watch this podcast as a video, you can do so here: https://youtu.be/hp4JmAZhTPE Elon Musk is buying Twitter for $44 billion. And while much has been discussed about the political and free speech ramifications of this move, the podcasting piece has largely been overlooked. Earlier this week, I asked, via Twitter of course, what this move would mean for podcasting. My good friend, colleague, and collaborator Johnny Peterson suggested we have a conversation about it. That's what you'll find...

I joined Brenda Meller of Meller Marketing on Tuesday for a presentation on how to repurpose LinkedIn Live videos as podcasts. While Brenda works mostly with LinkedIn, the tips here are applicable to video webinars of all kinds. After a brief intro on how important podcasts have become and the power of audio, we broke the presentation down into three key areas: We talked about microphones and equipment, recording environment, recording software, and how to handle visuals in your...

iHeart has launched a podcasting network for NFT's. More on that later. Here are this week's podcasting headlines: Wanna know which advertisers are investing in the top 5,000 podcasts? Podchaser has a new tool to track that. https://features.podchaser.com/api/? There's a new service to rate podcasts for kids - it's from Common Sense media and will let you rate shows for audiences 17 and under: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/podcast-reviews Old school journalists will remember the...

Some hand wringing over Infinite Dial 2022 - a slight dropoff in podcasting. Monthly listeners went from 41% of the population to 38%. My take: it's nothing to worry about. The pandemic turbo-charged podcasting growth, and people are settling back in to routines. 109 million Americans still listen to shows every month, and that's more than pre-pandemic. Further, podcasting awareness continues to grow - now up to 226 million, or 79% of US Adutls. Deep Dive from Tom...