Justin Jackson: Why RSS Feeds Still Matter

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The Sound Off podcast, the show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
Justin Jackson is one of the founders of transistor.fm They are a podcast hosting company. Did you know they're Canadian? Did you care? I'm not sure it matters unless you feel good about shopping Canadian. As podcasting has evolved, so has Transistor. And today I want to know how Justin arrives at the decisions about what to add as a feature on Transistor, and what listeners find valuable. Now, there's a fair amount of radio talk in this episode. Justin grew up in the Sherwood Park area near Edmonton, and listened to Matt and Jake on the bear as a teenager. By the way, the Matt and Matt and Jake is me, for those who never mind. Justin was also exposed to a fair amount of talk radio around the house. This is going to be fun, and pay attention to where Justin believes podcast is going because I think we're all headed there. And now Justin Jackson joins me from Vernon, BC. How did you come about to founding transistor.fm and why did you create it?

Justin Jackson  1:16  
So I started podcasting in 2012 I've been listening to podcasts, I think, since 2006 2007 and I was a product manager at different startups and tech companies, and over the years, because I had this podcast for product people called Product People, a lot of people had pitched me on podcast app ideas and products for podcasters, and I'd always thought this isn't a great market to launch a product until cereal broke. Once cereal broke, it was clear that podcasts were in the cultural zeitgeist. I heard people talking about podcasts at the cafe, and so I was kind of like, okay, this market seems to be heating up. A lot of the people I knew were starting podcasts. I had started multiple, and then my friend John Buddha, who had met at a festival in Portland in 2014 he was working for Cards Against Humanity at the time. This is around 2017 and they were launching a new podcast, and he was going to build some software for them to be able to launch this show and host the show, and I said, John, I think we should do this together, and he thought about it for a couple of weeks, he'd been burned in the past from some bad partnerships in the past, but we'd done a few smaller projects together, and yeah, at the basically the end of 2017 he said let's do it. We signed papers early 2018 and just started working together, working in public to launch this podcast hosting platform, and I think it was just the perfect partnership. He's a crafts person. He's very good engineer, very good product person. I'm really good, I think, at understanding customers, understanding market demand. I'm good at marketing, and I'm also, I think, good at the other side of product. And when you combine that, we were just able to take, for example, you know, the insights I was having as a podcaster myself, but also hanging out with a lot of podcasters and translate that into product, and so yeah, we bootstrapped the whole thing starting in 2018 and we recorded our progress on our podcast every week, so we would share with this podcast called Build Your SaaS, which is software as a service, and telling the story about how we were trying to build this company, and now we have this record of us building this company, and if ever I start to have a story that drifts from reality, I can go back and listen to real episodes and go, oh yeah, yeah, there was some hard grinds in there, because we didn't take any funding, I think I put in 5000 and John put in 5000 and we launched it that year, august 1, 2018 And then by the following year, august 1, 2019 we were able to quit doing our other things. He was still working at cards, I was running my own business. We were able to quit doing those things and start getting paid full time for transistor, even though we'd been working on it pretty much full time for free for a couple years, and yeah, that's basically how it started.

Matt Cundill  4:31  
So, such a millennial term, and I need some help here, because when I think of bootstrapping, I think of two things, I think of trying to hack satellite when we would try to bootstrap some code to bring in the porn channels, and the other thing I think of is Han Solo and Chewbacca trying to hold the Millennium Falcon together. I feel like they were bootstrapping to keep that thing together. So, what exactly is bootstrapping? Am I close?

Justin Jackson  5:01  
Yeah, so bootstrapping, I think, in the tech startup business world comes from the saying pull yourself up by your bootstraps, meaning you're going to do this yourself without outside funding. So a bootstrapped business in the tech world, at least, is a business that starts without any external funding from venture capitalists. It's completely self-funded, so it's kind of a blanket term for an independent self-funded company.

Matt Cundill  5:36  
2018 was a very interesting year, because there were a few other podcast hosting companies that also came into the space, so you had established ones like, you know, SoundCloud, although podcasting wasn't the first thing it was really known for. Lipson had been doing it since the very beginning. A few other ones began to pop up, and you know, the year before, a few years before, you know, companies like Art 19, which came out of California, many others, but 2018 I remember there was Transistor, but Cast Box was sort of closely in there too the year before, and then you began to get luminaries and the Netflix of podcasting and all sorts of other hosts that would show up. So, how did you guys separate yourselves from that onslaught?

Justin Jackson  6:19  
I mean, I have a very simple theory around business, which is typically independent businesses don't make the waves, we ride the waves like a surfer would, and so if you can imagine a surfer going to a beach and learning how to first of all surf, just getting the basic fundamentals of surfing, but then learning how to recognize the size and shape of a good wave, and I think at that moment in time there was just a good market demand wave that was building, and we were able to capture a lot of that momentum as a small independent company. There hadn't been very many new podcast hosting platforms for a while, so there was a few that had popped up, maybe a couple years before us, but there hadn't been anything, you know, like a Libsyn hosting platform for quite a while. I think Buzzsprout was kind of the last significant one that was launched, and so when you have a bunch of new entrants coming into a market, who are excited, highly motivated, and have the intent already to start something, to build something, to create something for us to capture some of that new demand. When they were looking for the first time, what is the best podcast hosting platform? What is a modern podcast hosting platform? And we had some positioning that hadn't really been done before, which was based on my experience as a podcaster, which is we allowed you to start multiple shows for one price, so Buzzsprout used to charge you a price for every show you started, Simple Cast would charge you a monthly fee for every show you started, at Transistor you'd pay one monthly fee, and you could start as many shows as you wanted. So, if you did a show for a year and you wanted to archive it, you could keep it, but then you could keep Transistor subscription around for your next show. So that really helped us to grow.

Matt Cundill  8:12  
Is it still like that today? Can I just pay you one price and have 30 shows?

Justin Jackson  8:16  
Yeah, yeah, including with video, by the way, which is something that our competitors haven't done, most are charging per show, like Flight Cast charges a per show subscription fee, and we haven't totally finalized our video pricing, but one thing I'm adamant about is that we want it to be multiple podcasts for one price, and I think that was just recognizing how customers operate, if you're a podcaster, if you're a podcaster, you've probably started one show by yourself, and then you found some friends, and then you started another show, and you know, so on, and we're not even that strict about, like, you can invite a friend to your account and have them start a show on your account, for us the usage is the oxygen for the whole thing, and so, if, if you have somebody you know with 10 shows on their account, and their two are in production, and the other eight are still just being listened to in the back catalog, that's the ideal for us.

Matt Cundill  9:14  
And so, How did you make your decision about what you would do next? Because it costs money. I totally understand this value, by the way. Where the more people who come in to join the podcast party, as it were, the more data you get to see, and the more you know where to take the company next. So, how would you decide what you would want to add to as a feature, for instance?

Justin Jackson  9:35  
Yeah, so for me it was often just observing what I wanted as a creator, what my friends wanted, what the other people I saw online were kind of in motion already doing. So, you can't again in product and business, you can't just go and ask somebody what they want. You actually see this on Reddit all the time, people come into the podcasting subreddits and go, hey, I. I'm wondering, what pain points do you all have, you know, and invariably everybody says, well, growth, I want more listeners or more audience, and time, I'm spending so much time editing my shows and all that stuff, but that's not actually helpful from a product development perspective, and the other thing is, if you prompt people or survey people with a direct question, they'll often deceive you, not purposefully, but just because people, what they say and what they do, there's often a difference. And so I'm very interested in what people do. What are people already actively searching for? And so I would just observe what are people already in motion searching for one was private podcasts. I wanted to have private podcasts for myself. I'd written a book called Marketing for Developers. I had created an unlisted feed for it, but I wanted something that was more direct, where we'd actually create a unique RSS feed for every subscriber. We would email them a new episode. When it published, we would make it easy for them to one click add that feed to their podcast player, and so that was the impetus for private podcasts. Was it was something I wanted, it was something I could see my friends wanted, it was something I could see the market was searching for, and then you could test things out by, you know, sometimes just like publishing a blog post about private podcasts, and see how much traffic you get from it, and how many signups you get from it, and that was the case for private podcasts. I think that was a big feature for us. Yeah, and just observing the things that I cared about, you know, we had a Patreon when we were doing our show, and previous shows I'd done, I had made this thing where you could, if you were a monthly subscriber, even before Patreon, I would give you a shout out at the end of the show, and so I knew that, like, listener support was an important piece, and we built a Patreon integration, so that people could automatically pull in all of their patrons into their show notes, it just automatically brings them in, you know, in a bulleted list. Hey, thanks to all of our supporters, they're listed on the website as well, automatically. Yeah, so just things like that. As, as I'm in motion myself as a creator, I've always had a show, at least one or two, that I'm actively making while I've been running the company, and I like to create the whole thing. The reason I got into this is because the dream of having my own broadcast studio in my house was just that, was it? You know, I remember I told you this story before, but my dad was a big talk radio listener in Alberta, where I grew up.

Matt Cundill  12:40  
630 Chad,

Justin Jackson  12:42  
630 Chad, and 740 CBC. So it was so interesting, you know. Now the world is so polarized, and my dad was probably leaned more conservative, but he would listen to the Conservative talk radio show, which was 630 Chad, and he would listen to CBC 740 and I just loved the idea of broadcasting, you know. My friends and I would record little radio shows on tape recorders and little other recording devices, reel to reels, even. And I also loved making movies when I was a kid. My, my dad had a video camera at work, and I would borrow it and make movies with my friends, we pretend to be much music VJs, and you know, have a whole variety show, and so I was like, How can I do this, you know, and how can I do it independently? I was always pretty independent, like, you know, I was at the advent of the internet and home computing, so it was like, if you want to have your own zine. Well, you can make it on the computer, you can print it out, and you can photocopy yourself, like that's how it works, you know. And if you want to have your own bulletin board, you can make it yourself and put it out, and people might call it, and you know, play your games and leave messages on your message board. So I was like, how do I do this, and there's a fellow at my church whose family from the Adler family, and he, they had bought 930 CJCA, and I was like, how expensive is it to get into radio? How could a person like me start a radio company? And he was just like, Justin, you can't, there's no way, like it's incredibly expensive, so the dream of being able to make something in my house or my little home studio, and then publish it, and have actual listeners the same way that Dave Rutherford, or, you know, the DJs at the Bear, or any of these radio stations I listened to growing up, being able to broadcast myself and have people listen, or I don't know if you remember Peter Hill.

Matt Cundill  14:48  
Oh, he was on Shaw Cable or Videatron, one of those ones.

Justin Jackson  14:52  
He was on Access TV, which was the public access TV channel that we had out in the country. We had originally three channels. CBC, ITV, CTV, and then Access came around as Channel Nine. It was the free broadcast kind of public access TV, and I just thought Peter Hill, like I wanted to be Peter Hill.

Matt Cundill  15:13  
It was so strange,

Justin Jackson  15:15  
very strange. He would, he would go around and interview people, and very low budget, but a lot of my home movies were me pretending, doing my best Peter Hill impression, you know, walking around with a video camera and interviewing my friends. So that's always been the dream to me. So that's what got me into it. That's what motivates me still to this day. I still think it's crazy that I can record a video and put it on YouTube. I think it's crazy that I can record some audio and have listeners around the world listen to it. I just love that part of the internet. There's lots of bad in the internet, but this part is the part that has just endured as something I really cherish, which is we can start our own radio stations, we can start our own TV stations, and there's no gatekeepers, and I just think it's so fun.

Matt Cundill  16:04  
Listen, I'm right with you. I started my studio in 2014 started building it, and at some point I said, you know, I really should just do a podcast, and yeah, out one went and put it on SoundCloud, that was my first mistake, and then there were many more mistakes after that, and then we kind of figured it out, in a sense, to get to this very point, which I think brings us to you and Jeremy Ends, who's been on this show before, someone else who's native to British Columbia, and talking at the London podcast show. Podcasting is cooked was the headline in Pod News, but I watched it, and I understand what you were saying. It really is incredible where podcasting is right now, as video has come in, it's so many different things. So, if somebody were to come up right away and say, 'Hey, Justin, I heard you said podcasting is cooked. What do you mean?

Justin Jackson  16:53  
I mean, we are tapping into a very real emotion that people have. One of the most poignant points in that talk is at the end, when we're doing Q and A. There's a producer slash editor there saying, "Listen, like I really love doing these research-heavy narrative-driven audio shows where we really sweat the audio storytelling and the quality, and I want to keep making these kinds of shows, and there's this feeling that they're going to lose it with video, and what Jeremy and I wanted to do was to present a clear-eyed view of what's actually happening, and really mostly from the consumer demand lens, there's so much talk in the industry, and you know, radio's gone through this, as you know, broadcast TV has gone through this as well. There's this idea that an industry gets built and we get attached to the things we like in the industry, or the things we're used to in the industry, and I wanted to have just a frank, open conversation to say, listen, if we look at the history of radio, and we look at the history of TV, there's things that have come in that have disrupted those industries. What was it? Well, it was consumer demand changed, consumer tastes changed. So the answer to some folks might be, listen, the demand for both on the funding side and the consumer side. Well, the demand on the consumer side might still be there, but the demand on the funding side has diminished, and that's just the reality. So, if you want to keep making those kinds of shows, I totally understand it, but there might not be the economic model for you to do that anymore. That's true. Is podcasting cooked? No, podcasting as a, an amorphous thing, which to me has always meant an independent way to broadcast audio or video. I mean, there's other kind of characteristics of what a podcast is. It's basically the things that were on radio that also work on TV, you know. So, Howard Stern works on radio, he also works on TV. Even the bear had audio, and then they had video, right? So, some people wanted to listen to the bear, this rock radio station. Some people wanted to watch the bear, you know, I think for a while the bear had like one of the most popular video clip archives ever. So these things have always existed, and I think people are really, really want there to be a succinct definition of what a podcast is. Well, we've never had that with any form of media, like what is Howard Stern? Is he radio or is he TV, or is he both? I mean, he's many things, right? He's, he's also, he's media, and what has attracted me to podcasting is I want to make shows, and maybe one day I'll want to make a narrative show, and maybe I'll see. You know, what the best form for this is audio only, and I want to have the freedom to be able to do that, and to be able to call it a podcast, because some people are just searching for, oh yeah, I like those kind of podcasts that tell a story, and there's lots of drama, and they're non-fiction kind of documentary style, you know, they're searching those keywords for other people, they're saying, oh, I really like Charlie Rose style interviews, and I want to listen sometimes, but I also want to be able to watch sometimes. That's the kind of show they're looking for. And the overriding point in the talk was Jeremy and I saying ultimately the consumer gets to define a lot of this. I know that we really wanted to have this top down, like no, we are the industry, and we're going to tell you what this is, and the truth is, is that you're never going to win that battle. Every time I get into an Uber, I ask people, "Hey, are you into podcasts? And they'll say, "Oh, yeah, I'm totally into podcasts. I'll be like, "Well, where do you consume your podcasts? And they'll say, "YouTube, or they'll say, "Oh, I listen on TikTok. I'm like TikTok, they're like, yeah, you can listen to long form content on TikTok.

Justin Jackson  21:05  
Okay, well, now there's no RSS feed, which is an open protocol that runs podcasting that I care deeply about, but I'm not going to argue with an Uber driver and browbeat them and shake my finger and say, well, no, no, no, that's not what a podcast is, you dummy. I think that that is a just a fruitless endeavor. I'm far more interested in the kinds of things that people are already searching for, the kinds of things that people desire, and the kinds of things that I want to make, and finding a Venn diagram between those things. What do people want? What am I good at? What do I want to make? What am I passionate about enough to stick with for a long time? So that is good. Those are the things I'm thinking about.

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Matt Cundill  22:26  
So, some good news, like you said, it's always good to go to the numbers and the hard data to see exactly what's happening, and I just know from people that they've got more time available for their ears than they do for their eyes. That's, I think, the same for a lot of people, so I don't think audio is in any danger of ever disappearing or going away, or even coming in second to video.

Justin Jackson  22:50  
Yeah, well, the stats show that there's actually very few in that barbell - it's actually not a barbell. The stats are something like 8% are video only, maybe it's 10% audio only, and the big bulk in the middle, 70% is a mix of both. So, podcast consumers saying, what do we consume? Generally, we're consuming a mix of content, and you're right. I think I'm a perfect example of this. I walk to work every day. I got 30 minutes down the hill, 30 minutes up. I'm not watching anything, I'm listening. I've really been enjoying talking with another Canadian broadcaster, Peter Mansbridge's new podcast called The Bridge, and I think that's actually just also a great example of I get pushback about this, but I think independents should be looking at what Peter Mansbridge is doing, because the audio quality of his show is actually not great. The video quality is not very great either, but the audio quality is, they're all on, like, Peter's got a mic, his mic technique is actually not that good, he's like often peeking, he's moving things on his desk, you can hear him shaking his papers, his guests often just have Apple ear pods or whatever, but it's the format and the content and the guests that really shine. But I listen to that show, walking up the hill from work, it's about an hour long show. I'll get home, audio modes done, throw it up on the screen. Now I'm going to sit on the couch and watch the rest and actually watch them. So I think if people want to keep making audio shows, my message is, yeah, you can do it. There's so many people that are still listening to audio only and that want that to your point, they're driving, they're walking, they're doing the dishes, they're walking the dog like they're not going to be looking at a screen, plus there's a lot of people that are looking to escape the internet, you know, they're looking to like get away from all that attention-grabbing short form video and everything like that. So there's still lots of opportunities in audio only, it just might be there's certain types of audio experiences like. You know, the cereals aren't getting made as much anymore, and there's other factors behind that that actually might have a bit to do with video, but, and you know, Mark Marin just retired. I think part of the reason he retired is he was feeling more pressure to do video, and he didn't want to do that, and so you know there are going to be market dynamics, no matter what. Mark might have wanted to keep doing the show he was doing, but there's too much pressure to make video to keep going that way. But there's lots of categories of podcasts where you could keep doing it audio only and be fun.

Matt Cundill  25:36  
Peter Mansbridge, though, can get away with sounding mediocre or having a scratchy recording. I can't. I'm not Peter.

Justin Jackson  25:45  
Yeah, I think I still push back on that a little bit. I think because he's getting huge numbers on YouTube. This is just my guess. My guess is, and he's getting huge numbers compared to the CBC, which is the official broadcaster. CBC is so like at issue, which is a political show on CBC. Sometimes they're only getting like 10,000 views on At Issue. Well, Peter Ansbridge, when Chantal Ibert is on, he'll get 150,000 views on that episode. Why? Well, people love Chantel. People love who Peter's paired her with. I never remember his name, but he's a good counterpart to Chantelle, so he set up the dynamic properly, and I think he's getting less traffic and interest from his brand than we might think. I think he's getting most of it from the format and the content, and format and content are definitely more important than sound quality, I think he could benefit from having better sound quality, and you're right, maybe, maybe people will give Peter a second chance and Chantal a second chance, because they love them, and you know they are skilled journalists with just decades of knowledge, but it's content first, it's the format second, it feels like it's like, what, what is the content? Well, that's the topics we're going to talk about. The format is all right. Every Thursday is Chantel Hubert Day, and we're going to debate these topics, and I'm going to set them up like this. Every Tuesday is a different panel, you know, and that really works for him, so, and he has recurring segments that people really like, like they'll write him letters, and he'll read out the letters, and so I think there's a obviously a mix that works in anything. Sound quality, I would say, is necessary, but not sufficient to have a good show. There's a lot of other ingredients you would need to really have a show that resonates and absolutely necessary is just something that people want to hear and a format that really works, so that you can do it on a repeatable basis all the time.

Matt Cundill  27:56  
Bruce Anderson, by the way, is the third person on the show with Chantelle Bear that you were thinking of, here's something that does worry me. Because it came up in Halifax at the Echo Podcast Summit, and it came up on two different occasions, and I get, I got very, very frustrated hearing complaints. We had the usual complaints of, I have difficulty building an audience, I need more growth, it's taking a long time. There was a lot of that, but there was a lot of accusations around podcasting around suppression, and you know, subjects around, for instance, like, you know, stuff away on the Middle East, amongst other things, and you know that content being suppressed, and I was sitting here in my mind going, that's not happening, and so I pressed both people, and I said, What podcasts are being suppressed, and they said, Oh, just in general, the postings on YouTube and Instagram and Meta and Facebook that I'm putting up, and I'm, yeah, okay, if you're going to put up fake news or republish content from Qatar and Iran, you're going to have a problem with your life. But to that point, nobody was really there to say about the value of an RSS feed, and you know, Todd Cochran, get your own.com get an RSS feed, and you can pretty much ride the wave,

Justin Jackson  29:03  
yeah. I think that's important. I'm a founding member of the Podcast Standards Project, whose whole purpose is to innovate on top of the RSS standard and to collaborate and cooperate amongst all hosting providers and all podcast apps, so that when we introduce something, it has widespread adoption, so it's a coordination problem that we're trying to solve, and notably, I think we were able to advocate for the podcast transcript tag, which has now wide distribution and adoption across hosting platforms and apps, and we've introduced some other features, like a person tag, which allows you to add guests and hosts, and it's, it's stored in your RSS feed, so any open podcast app, like Pocket Casts or Fountain or True Fans, or any of these others, can pull your guest info, their photo, their name, their description, and put. It in our app to get that widespread, you need adoption, you need coordination, getting the RSS story out. If we're going to do that, we have to actually do things that creators and consumers care about, and my worry is that a lot of people, they are using their own frame of reference and their own frame of preference to dictate how they talk about RSS, where the truth is, so I hear things, for example, like at a podcast conference, people will say, man, I met two or three Gen Z creators, and they had no idea what an RSS feed was, and it's like this big deal, like, oh my god, they don't know what an RSS feed is, and I'm like, well, why would they? Like, I'm technically, I think I'm Gen X, because I'm 1980 so I'm the youngest Gen X.

Matt Cundill  30:55  
We'll count you in, I guess.

Justin Jackson  30:57  
I've also heard my generation called Xennials, because we're in between Gen X and millennials, but I grew up on the internet, like I got my first, I got a VIC 20 in 1984 I got connected, I got a dial-up modem, probably in 1990 and was on Usenet forums and other things during that time, and the idea of a feed makes sense to me, because I grew up with it, Fidonet bulletin boards and Usenet groups, and all these things, these are all feeds, right? And then when RSS became popular after the admin of the web, so that's probably I'm guessing the web browsers come out in 93 My guess is by 9697 something like that. There's blogs, and I had a RSS reader. It makes sense, I know. Oh, I'm going to subscribe to this blog's RSS feed, and then I'm every day I'm going to have an inbox of articles that are interesting that I can scroll through. Well, that sounds an awful lot like a podcast player, doesn't it. And then you know, I was there in 2005 when Steve Jobs added RSS to iTunes, and it was the same paradigm. I was like, "Oh, I've seen this before, right? In my blog reader, I add the RSS feeds of the blogs I like, and then I get a nice inbox of all the articles I want to subscribe to every day, but a Gen Z didn't grow up with any of that. They didn't grow up with blogs being popular. They didn't grow up with, you know, iTunes. They might not have ever had the user experience of clicking add feed in iTunes and then copying an RSS feed and pasting it in and clicking subscribe and then seeing how that works, if they don't have the frame of reference, it makes sense that they wouldn't understand it, so we're gonna have to, and it's gonna be hard, we're gonna have to talk about RSS in one way that is makes sense to somebody that didn't grow up with it, right, in the same way that us old people, when we look at our kids, we're like, your guys' jokes don't make sense to me, your guys' like culture doesn't make sense to me. We have to be able to bridge the cultural divide in a way that makes sense to a young person, and say, here's what RSS is, here's why it's important, and here's why it matters, and more importantly, here's why you'll like it. Not even like, here's why you should care. There's just so much like finger wagging. It feels like, like, here's why you should care. It's like, well, I don't care. We have to present it RSS in a way that people genuinely are attracted to it, and I think that's going to mean I think HLS video is actually the first thing we really hit on that was a feature that creators and consumers and publishers all wanted, which is I want to be able to, if I choose to, if I walk home and I want to watch the video, I want to just be able to switch to the video in my podcast player, or just at home, and I'm not walking or doing the dishes or anything, I want to be able to consume a podcast in a mindful app, not YouTube or something that's showing me shorts and ads and all these things, I just want a mindful app to consume podcasts in that might be video in the same way that when I got my first iPod, it was an iPod video, and I watched Dignation and all these other shows on my little iPod on the bus. So this was the first feature that we started talking about at the Podcast Standards Project, the ability to add HLS streaming video to an RSS feed, basically bringing video-based podcasts into the modern era using RSS. That was the first thing that really resonated, where creators were like, "I want that. Like, why do you want it? Well, I want to be able to distribute my video more places because. I want to grow my audience. If they're on Apple Podcasts, I want to be able to publish my video on Apple Podcast. If they're on Pocket Cast, I want to be able to do that there. Okay, consumers wanted it. They're already saying, 'Hey, listen, I'm into this.

Justin Jackson  35:13  
Like, I like watching Call Her Daddy, or whatever those shows. I like watching those shows in the same way that people like watching Charlie Rose or The View or Howard Stern, who's a radio personality, they're just recording him as he's doing radio, right? Consumers wanted it, and publishers wanted it too, right? They're looking to make shows, podcast networks and publishers are looking to make shows that people are consuming and that they want in the formats that they want them, so it just aligned on all those fronts, and I think now it also creates a compelling story to tell. So next time I get into an Uber and they say, "Oh, I love watching podcasts on TikTok, I can say, "Hey, you know, if you're getting really distracted by TikTok and you're finding it's really messing with your attention. There are more mindful ways to consume a podcast in both audio and video, and Apple Podcast is one, Pocket Cast is another one. Now you actually have a reason, a motivation for a job to be done for the consumer to consider switching, which is very difficult to do. Why couldn't Microsoft compete with the Zune? The Zune was a fine product, but it was very difficult to get people to switch from the iPod. Why couldn't Betamax compete against VHS? It was just for a variety of reasons, some of which were distribution, but it's difficult to get people to switch from one format to the other. How come mini disc didn't work? Great technology, futuristic. It just was hard to get people to switch from, in some cases, CD players and tape Walkmans to this other format. So, switching is very difficult. The only way you can do it is, you have to have a compelling reason for them to do that, that aligns with something that consumers already want.

Matt Cundill  37:03  
Do you have any early thoughts about HLS and Apple? It's only been a few months. I mean, it was about three months ago that I had you on our other show, the podcast Super Friends, and days later I felt bad because you couldn't announce that Transistor was going to be supporting this. At the time, there were four podcast hosts, and you were only days away from launching that, so timing was just a little bit off, but you know, but now here you are, and you know, if you want on Transistor, you want to, you know, upload your video and have that appear on Apple Podcasts, transistor.fm is the place to go, but you've been looking at this now for a few months, early thoughts,

Justin Jackson  37:41  
yeah, I think it's still early. I think Apple is facing a challenge that the whole entertainment industry is facing, which is YouTube is gobbling up every form of media, live sports, stand-up comedy, just casual TV watching, news, podcasts - it's all getting gobbled up by YouTube, so every studio on the planet is worried about YouTube. Every cable channel is worried about YouTube. YouTube is a big concern for everybody, and Apple - what Apple knows that most people don't know is that their audience is older, they are Gen X, basically, and that has worked for the podcast industry so far, because these Gen Xers grew up with Macs and iTunes and iPods, and then just stayed in the ecosystem. We're an Apple Muzik family. Well, why is that? Well, because we were originally an iTunes family, and why was that? Well, because I came of age, basically, you know, I was 25 when all that happened, and that's what I'm used to, but they have a demographic cliff coming because they have not attracted younger consumers. Millennials mostly went to Spotify, and a lot of Gen Z, older Gen Z, went to Spotify as Black YouTube. That people is definitely attracting a younger audience. YouTube is actually attracting an audience across every demographic, but Apple's challenge is they have no young demographic. Go and ask any young person, Gen Alpha or Gen Z, if they consume podcasts, where do they consume them? When I've done talks at local high schools, it's basically nine out of 10 will be on YouTube and one out of 10 will be on Spotify. So Apple has a big challenge ahead of them. I don't know if they're going to succeed, because this isn't just about video, we know that people want video, but the big thing here isn't whether Apple's going to be able to, I mean, I guess are they gonna be able to get enough people to consume video on Apple Podcasts for it to matter, that is important, but this is really a play for attracting a young audience and. Yeah, so far I haven't seen anything that's going to do that. You're going to need marketing campaigns targeted that way. I also think Apple just needs to change its marketing strategy for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. I think a lot of their marketing is cringe. I think a lot of their marketing doesn't appeal to young people. I think they're actually squandering a lot of their brand equity, which is most kids want an iPhone, but most kids don't care about the Apple products on the iPhone. Most kids would prefer to use Spotify over Apple Music, for example. So, is Apple gonna succeed? I would say, if Apple succeeds at getting Gen Z and Gen Alpha to switch to Apple Music, that would be a bellwether of maybe their ability to attract younger people to Apple Podcasts. I've got ideas on how they could do that.

Matt Cundill  40:56  
You could have, like, a really cool Super Bowl halftime show with Bad Bunny.

Justin Jackson  41:00  
Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's interesting. I wonder if that even helped them, you know? Like, to me, Apple just has this - it's so corporate now, so everything, all their stuff just feels so clean and perfect.

Matt Cundill  41:17  
Well, it looks corporate, it looks gray, it looks like it belongs on a sleek desk in a colorless room,

Justin Jackson  41:23  
yeah, yeah. I think kids want something a little bit more raw, you know. I think Spotify has actually done a great job understanding their consumer, and they're way more edgy with their marketing, they're way more edgy with their brand, and Apple is just very corporate now. So, my guess is that the Super Bowl show did not have a ton of people switching from Spotify to Apple Music in the younger demographic. I think Apple's biggest opportunity, and why I was a little bit encouraged for their latest WWDC, they're announcing parental controls. So you would say, well, why does that matter? Parental controls that are easier to manage, and my hope is that they are going to lean into understanding that kids are addicted to their phones and they hate it, and there is a mental health and addiction crisis.

Matt Cundill  42:19  
Oh, listen, go no further. I've got Gen Z kids, and they.. I don't need Instagram. I don't need this. Another one says I don't need Spotify. I only want to buy physical music. Another one doesn't do Instagram. There's not a lot of posting going on. They know what it does to them.

Justin Jackson  42:36  
Yeah, and I think they increasingly think posting is cringe, you know, like I'm posting all the time for work, and they're just like, "Oh my god, Dad, like, how cringe you're posting, you know? So there's an opportunity with Apple Podcasts to say, "Hey, you want to do something mindful with your time? Well, what's your biggest problem? You're scrolling in your bedroom with the door closed, you're getting brain rot in your room, and we know that you know it's affecting your mental health. You know that you got to get out of your room, you know you got to get outside. Put your AirPods in, which is an Apple product. Put your iPhone in your pocket, which is an Apple product, and say, hey Siri, play me a podcast, and then walk out the door in the sunshine, get some fresh air, and enjoy being outside. That would be a mindful marketing campaign, and I think Apple could lean into it. I think they could lean into it in a raw way that actually acknowledges that there's a problem, which I think they haven't done yet. So that's how I would take it. If Turnus is listening right now, I would. Their new CEO, I think their demographic problem across all of their software products, and I think in terms of brand perception, their problem is that they are not appealing to Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Justin, thank you so much for taking the time to like walk us through all this to get us to exactly where podcast is at these days. I really appreciate it. This is wonderful. Haven't you any time, Matt?

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  44:19  
Another Sound Off Media Company podcast