Everything I learned about podcasting at the Podcast Movement

Communities

1. Ladios Google Group
2. Public Radio NYC

Audio Tools/Resources

1. Freesound.org
2. Bensound.com
3. Audiojungle.net
4. Zencastr is a WebRTC recording tool.
5. Plantronics (headset) 355 is a great mic for guests, $16 shipped, includes adapter (recommended, but we didn’t try).
6. Blubrry for podcast hosting.

Mic Notes

1. three types: cardioid, figure-of-eight, omni
2. condenser vs. dynamic (podcasters want dynamic most of the time because it doesn’t require as much clean up and as much environment control)
3. tranducer: the things in the mic that turns sound waves into electricity.
4. mouth noise
5. get padding around your mic to prevent echo, even a pillow behind the mic is great

Audio Editing

1. You need to compress your audio, because we’ve lost the loudness war, and loudness won.
2. Auphonic for compression.
3. DAW: digital audio workstation (Audacity, Audition, ProTools, etc.)
4. goldilocks zone: -12db to -6db
5. podcasting is at 128kbps, music is 192kbps
6. In Audition, go to Edit > Preferences > Playback > JKL Shuttle Speed. Set this to “half” and the J K L buttons will go forward and back by 0.5x each time you push it.
7. Audition Preset called Radio Announcer Voice

Podcast Business-y Things

1. The most important thing is quality of your product.
2. Libsyn only 1% have more than 50K downloads per episode. Average downloads is in the 100s.
3. 32% of 18–34 year olds don’t own a radio (2008: 6%).
4. Sponsors care most about active and engaged listeners (cultish following).
5. Sponsors custom and authentic reads host’s voice.
6. Sponsors want integration of social, web, email, etc.
7. Know your audience (survey) → SurveyNerds
8. Ad insertion technology
9. Dovetail service is PRX’s ad interstion technology
10. If 50% of your audience drops off in less than 7 minutes, that’s a problem
11. Listening parties for the launch of Invisibilia Season 2

NPR One App (from awesome talk by Nick DePrey)

Downloads:

• they tell you about: audience size, subscriptions, audience loyalty, podcast notoriety, quality of headline, teaser, art
• bad for quality of episodes, can’t compare to other shows/episodes, audience engagement within the episode, crossover between shows/episodes, new content experiments
• daily average listening time is increasing, weekends are good for podcast listens

Skip rate: skips/listens:

• 75% of listeners use the skip button, skip rates range from 8–50%
• skips are not always a bad thing and we shouldn’t judge quality on skip rate

“Thumb-up rate” (mark interesting + shares):

• length, direct invitation, and niche audience affinity all influence this
• same relationships as skips, the longer you have to hit the button the more likely you are to hit the button

Measuring audience devotion:

• mean percent completed (mic) = mean(elapsed-time)
• it’s easy to penalize long pieces

DAES: Duration-adjusted Engagement Score = mean(elapsed-time)/duration ^ a:

• two metrics: love (degree to which the audience interacts, engages, or shows affinity for the piece) & listen (degree to which your audience devotes their time to the piece)
• Rank. Examine. Listen. Learn.
• examine the episodes at the top and the bottom.
• what do the top 5–10 episodes have in common? how do they differ from the bottom 5–10?
• what sticks out for listens might not be the same thing that love tells you
• listen to what you did in the outliers: formats, subjects, intros, hooks, writing

Where did the audience bail?

• the battle is won and lost in the first 2 minutes
• hooked with storytelling in the beginning

Winning intros:

• start with a compelling, exciting, scandalous, or newsworthy idea (you have to justify why the audience is with you)
• get to it. every piece is an audition
• pre-rolls, early funders seem to be OK. no evidence otherwise.

Context:

• opt-in listens are the best: selected this from a menu or search, held the listener’s attention the longest
• re-runs are ok, “Best Ofs” not so much (especially when there’s a new intro)
• crime shows are really holding the audience’s attention
• Stitcher gives you this type of data
• local content works really well, newscasts work well

Storytelling with Sound

1. What’s the scale or your narrative lens? What’s your narrative distance? Are we in the middle of a scene, are we in a memory, is it third-person omniscient? Something more interesting, like the MacGuffin perspective, where you use an object’s perspective?
2. Who are your characters? Consider attaching music to them.
3. Where does this take place? How do you convey this location?
4. What actions require sound? What needs to be said and what can be heard?
5. Moods and tones: You have to trust your audience to pick up on tones and moods without over-explaining.
6. Start with the score when editing. Only you know the beats of the story.
7. When trying to find the right sound and right effect, press all the buttons.
8. When trying to create sounds, aim for the middle, right between reality and expectations. Ex: a bone breaking sounds like celery. Gunshots don’t sound like gunshots.
9. Takes 8–10 hours of editing for Pleasure Town
10. Don’t do an episode in one day, but deadlines are your best friends.
11. Borrow and steal, listen to everything.
12. Played a clip of Embed, where it was super sad and transitioned to a Stamp.com spot. Carried the two sad notes from the story throughout the ad, which carried the weight and sadness of the story through the add.
13. Music: You don’t use sad music, you assign sadness to the music through the story. Music is also great for transition.
14. NPR uses very even, milk music and lets the words give the music meaning.

Awesome Quotes

1. “Honest tape and good tape are the same thing”
2. “That’s the power we have, to be agents of understanding, agents of empathy. Because the world certainly needs it.” — Alex Blumberg
3. “There’s no such thing as fiction, just cleverly disguised truth.”
4. “Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”
5. “You can’t polish a turd.” [said by 2 different speakers]

Interesting Facts

• It takes 3 years to get to audience saturation (note: I have no idea if this is true, no source cited)
• Facebook bought a 3D audio company called Two Big Ears, relaunched as Spatial Workstation.

Cool Speakers

• Kerri Hoffman, CEO at PRX
• Erin Kahoa, Co-Executive Producer of Pleasure Town
• Keith Ecker, Creator of Pleasure Town
• Mitch Secrett, Omniradio
• Andrew Kuklewicz, CTO at PRX
• Nick DePrey, NPR One

Miscellaneous

• promos should be short (30–60 seconds) and should have a strong “out”.
• TOFOP Live where you can experience 3d sound.
• COPE: create once and publish everywhere
• Edison’s Podcast Share of Ear Study: people who listen to podcasts also listen to the radio (people go back and forth)
• NPR Storytelling Lab

We’re on the NPR One App!

If you listen to the CodeNewbie Podcast, I’d love for you to download the NPR One app (it’s free) and listen to us there. It’s a really great listening experience, and if we get even a couple hundred listens, we get a bunch of really helpful feedback and data on how our episodes are doing. Give it a try :)