354 - How To Get More From Spotify for Creators With Chris Stone

0:03 Good morning podcasting, morning chat. It's Tuesday, August 12th, 2025, and today we're talking to Chris Stone about Spotify. I never thought I'd say this, but prepare to be amazed at some of the little known features that'll help you market your podcast. This is going to be one of those get out your notebook kind of shows. So if you're listening on Clubhouse, hit the share button on the left hand side of the screen and share it. However, Clubhouse lets you. And if you're listening via podcast, please share this episode with a fellow podcaster. And now give us about 30 seconds and we'll get things rolling. Thanks for being here.

1:20 All right, Good morning, everybody. So, no, Mark has not had a sex change. This is Dr. Fey. It's not Mark Ronick. Mark is off doing his yearly thing that he does every year for his friend. It's a camp for kids. And he is. I think I can't counselor. I think that's what's going on anyway. So he has left kind of the keys to the joint to the inmates. And I thought this was a great opportunity to interview someone who I've been reading his newsletter for a long time. My guest today knows podcasting inside and out and not just the shiny launch your show kind of stuff, but the real behind the scenes kind of strategy that gets people to actually listen.

2:07 Chris Stone is also the founder of the Podcast Crew. It's a new platform connecting top tier podcast professionals with clients making stand out audio and video content. He's executive producer of the top podcast, I'm sorry, a top political show. It's called the New Statesman. It's auk political show. And he's also the brains behind my very favorite Substack newsletter, podcast Strategy, where he dishes out highly practical tips every single week. He's been at it for a long enough, you know, to remember when podcast, when Apple podcast was the only game in town. And he's been helping creators adapt to and win on every platform shift since.

2:53 Chris, welcome to the show. I really appreciate you doing this. Hello, thank you so much for having me. What a lovely introduction. It's true, but you know, I subscribe to an enormous amount of news letters, as most of the people on Clubhouse know, and there are very few. I can count on one hand the amount that I actually pay for. And you are at the top of the list, my friend, because your podcast is titled with MY2 Trigger Words podcast and the strategy. So just some little background. You have to realize something about Dr. You're one of her boyfriends. OK, let's just know what it is and your fawns.

3:36 Over you like it's. Going to have to make in about 5 to 6 minutes from now. It's sort of a healthy slash unhealthy relationship with newsletters. So the fact that. We really, Chris, this really isn't about you. This is an intervention. We are OK. So if she has to step out, it's not because that she has to make eggs. She has to put herself together because she in her eyes might be true. Answer the door. There's chocolates and flowers coming. I appreciate that. So. You're very, you're very kind. Well, absolutely. I just love, love, love your podcast strategy and it kind of gives me St. cred. And I think in one of your issues you quoted me and so I'm very happy about that.

4:27 So that is cool. Added to my obsession with you. That's fine. So you've been podcasting long enough to see platforms coming go. What's the one change that still makes you shake your head and think, I can't believe we're doing this now? Well, I've actually been doing it long enough that when I started, podcasting wasn't a thing. And I studied TV production of all things at university about 20 something years ago. And I can remember having conversations in my course at the time, you know, about like the Internet and broadcasting coming together and gosh, and you imagine, you know, And the fact is that the thing that I've spent the last 10 or 15 years doing just did not exist when I was studying. So the big macro thing that always surprises me and I have to pinch myself is that I actually get to make a living out of this.

5:28 And it's something that genuinely was not a thing, did not exist. The technology did not exist. And it does make me wonder, you know, my kids, what, what are they going to be doing in 20 years time? What, That doesn't exist now? You know, that's the sort of space that I'm in. Right. So you know this piece that you did on Spotify, it just kind of blew my socks off. There was so many, so many Nuggets, so many great things to take away. And admittedly, I am the one when I get clients, I'm admittedly the one to steer them away from Spotify because, you know, they kind of have a reputation. Can you speak about that reputation they have and maybe how they've come full circle? At least that's what I got from your article. Yes, that's so that's interesting. So Spotify have had like an interesting kind of journey with podcasting, haven't they?

6:17 They were sort of late to the game really. They were primarily a music listening platform and definitely in the UK at least the music listening platform of choice. And then in the US you, you had others as well, Pandora and such that did very well. But when I started making podcasts, it was Apple podcasts all the way. And in fact, you know, the podcast that I work on now predates me significantly, at least in, in the, in the job that I'm doing now. They started in 2013. And if I look at the data from 2013 to now, you know, for the first like 7 years, maybe longer, maybe even up to, you know, 2021, it's Apple Podcasts all the way and everything else trailing behind.

7:06 You know, significantly, like for a long time, it was like 90% of the audience was on Apple Podcasts. But increasingly that's changing. And if I look at the data on the podcasts that I manage now, we're behind the curve, right? Because we were so heavy on Apple Podcasts. But actually our listenership on, on Spotify has increased by 400% over the last, you know, what, five years or so to the point now where it makes up a significant proportion of our audience. Our The New Statesman podcast audience is still predominantly on Apple Podcasts, but it won't be long until Spotify overtakes it. And if you look at the data that Edison have been pulling out in their brilliant Infinite Dial reports, they have Spotify actually as if I pull up the where's the US one. They reckon the servers most often used to listen to podcasts.

8:06 In the US, 33% on YouTube, 26% on Spotify and 14% on Apple Podcasts, 14%. But in the UK that's 33% on Spotify, 20% on YouTube. We have ABBC service called BBC Sounds that's on 16%. And Apple Podcast is languishing way back on 10%. So actually in the UK, Spotify, according to Edison, is the preeminent podcast listening platform right now. Well, so in the issue you mentioned that Gen. Z is already in the listening mode on Spotify. If you were to if you were starting a a like a brand new show today, would you only design it for where your audience hangs out or would you try to pull them somewhere new? I think the brilliant thing about Open RSS is obviously that you can distribute it everywhere and you can make it very easy for people to access it wherever they prefer. But you, you want to be looking at investing your time. You've got limited time to be working on the kind of the promotion for the show.

9:19 So you want to be strategic about where you deploy that time resource, right? So previously, I would have spent most of my time focusing on how do we make this perform really well on Apple Podcasts. Now, if I was launching something new, I would be thinking, how do I spend most of my time making sure that this maximum, this, the reach on Spotify is maximized. And then if I've got spare time around the edge, I might look at Apple Podcasts. I wouldn't eliminate Apple Podcasts altogether, you know, but in terms of where I would spend most of my marketing energy, it would be on Spotify now, I think.

10:00 Great. I want to also mention to everyone up on stage, if you have a question, please go ahead and raise your hand or in this case, it's raise your chili pepper. They took their hands away from Clubhouse and now we have to do a chili pepper instead. So raise your chili pepper. Yes, exactly. There's a lot of new fancy tools on Spotify. Which one is on the the hidden gems? The one that's the one that you're talking about. So one of the reasons that I wrote the article that you were talking about was that, you know, Spotify have released a lot of different options for users to control how they promote their podcasts on the platform, Much more so actually than Apple Podcasts, like Apple Podcasts now, sorry to keep getting back to Apple Podcasts, but that's kind of my reference.

10:50 That's where I came from. But Apple Podcasts like really is kind of curated by the Apple team. And like, you have quite limited options in terms of what you can actually control in terms of your presence on the platform. Whereas with Spotify, they give you a lot more options. I think you asked for like the hidden gem now. I mean, I think there's I think all the tools are useful. That's the ones that I like the most and that I think probably lean into what podcasting is best at are those that facilitate a sense of community. So for me, my favorites are the fact that users can comment on episodes on Spotify and that you can ask for direct feedback in polls.

11:36 And Spotify allows you to set a poll under a bespoke poll, a specific poll under each episode. So you're immediately giving somebody something to do and to contribute as they listen or off or after they listen. Right. So let's break that down just a little bit because that has been a bone of contention with me for a long time. I do not understand why all hosting platforms do not have do not give the ability for listeners to comment. I could very well put a link in the show notes that leads to some place on, you know, Captivate. And in my case, it would be Captivate and there would be something there for, you know, for people to chat. That way they could have a really accurate count of engagement, you know, at least a more accurate count of engagement.

12:29 So this has been a bone of contention with me. And it kind of rubs me the one way that Spotify by Nemesis is the one that has it. But I'm going to deal with it. Have you tried a feature that you thought, well, you know, this is this is useless, but then later on it kind of surprised you a little bit? I don't know about the second-half to that question, but the one that I tried once and was like, I'm not doing that again was video. This is where Spotify gets interesting, and by interesting, I mean not very good. We've been talking about video, haven't we, in the podcasting community for the last couple of years. It's the next big thing. Everybody's got to do video. Some people don't like it, some people do like it. Spotify have waded in and added video to that platform and have worked quite hard to try and get people to upload video so that their users can either listen or watch. But there is massive red flag on Spotify video, which is that if you upload a video version of your episode, so you distribute via RSS, your audio version gets picked up by Spotify via RSS with all of your dynamically inserted ads and you know everything else.

13:47 And then they say, oh, and you can upload a video version of this and then your listeners can choose to watch or listen. But if you upload the video, then it overwrites the RSS. So when you upload a video, you no longer serve your dynamically inserted ads and the audio version gets completely forgotten. If then a user toggles to listen instead of to watch, then what they're listening to is the audio from that video. So right now I do not upload video and I don't advise other people to until or unless Spotify make moves to somehow keep the RSS incorporated.

14:31 I saw Nick's hand up. Go ahead, Nick. Hey. Chris, good morning, welcome. To our to our chaos. So you mentioning that if you upload the audio and then you go Spotify and upload the video, it's. Yeah, you're overriding it. What if someone is hosted on Spotify specifically? Does that process actually change? Because now I would imagine Spotify still has to distribute the RSS to the different hosting platforms and the reason people are hosting through Spotify. Yeah, that is a brilliant question. And actually I don't know the answer to that because we, I don't host with Spotify. The podcasts I managed don't host with Spotify, and therefore the only surface that I see is, you know, the one that you're presented with as somebody who hosts elsewhere.

15:18 So yeah, I don't know, but that's a great question and I'd love to know the answer if anybody else does. I'm in the kitchen now making eggs for my husband. I'm going to turn the rest some of the interview over to Ashley. Ashley, go ahead and pick it up. So what would you say is? One of the features I was reading the newsletter. Is that you can actually change the clips if you don't like the clip on Spotify. Because we were just talking about. Video. I was wondering if you could walk us through that a little bit. Yes. So this is great. So when I say I don't upload video and I tell other people not to, there is an exception to that, which is that video clips actually I think are quite useful. So if you do upload a full video version of your episode, then overrides the RSS, if you are already publishing vertical social clips from your podcast recording, you can upload a video clip to Spotify as a vertical video and that will sit in various kind of discovery surfaces within the platform. So that I think is quite helpful in terms of the stuff that you were talking about, about selecting like different previews and things.

16:30 So they're two separate things, right? So you can upload a video clip to an episode separately. But then the other cool thing that I am quite a fan of is that if you go into your feed settings and you turn all the automations on, then Spotify will automatically transcribe your episode. And from that transcript, it will choose, it will choose an episode preview, which is an audio preview that it'll use when you know on sort of various kind of discovery surfaces around the platform. It'll choose some topics that it thinks your episode is about and it'll choose some guests that it thinks feature on your episode.

17:13 And that takes all that from the transcript. And although it does that automatically, it then provides you an element of customization. So per episode, if you go into your episode settings, you can then you can then go and customize those automated choices. So the episode previews you can go into and you can actually, if you don't like, you can just choose a completely different preview, set your own in and out points and tell it what you want to select as the episode preview with the topics and the guests. You actually can't add any more, but you can reorder them so they show up in a different order. And if there are ones that are incorrect, then you can delete them.

17:55 So it just it gives you that little bit of control, which I think is quite helpful. I don't actually know. I don't have any data on like how. And something I would love to do actually is to do like a deeper dive into kind of getting some of the data on my how effective some of these things are. But like, the options are there to play with and since they are there, I think it's worth exploring them to kind of see which levers you can pull to make the most difference to your listenership to Spotify. Because I haven't played with the clips too much in Spotify. Do they give you any kind of analytics or engagement metrics to go by to see how many people are actually watching those short clips? Or I'm thinking kind of like, I took that and see if people watch it all the way through or how many people watched it. Do you get any of that with Spotify? Yeah, annoyingly not actually.

18:50 It's one of those things where if it wasn't so easy because there isn't the data, I wouldn't bother with it. But because it's just so unbelievably easy. Like if I'm already uploading a vertical clip to TikTok and Facebook and Instagram and YouTube Shorts, then it's like the matter of like 3 clicks to also add it to Spotify. And I sort of think it can't hurt. When I browse podcasts, I see those video clips sometimes and that helps me make a decision. So that's probably a good thing to do. But if it was like, oh, it's going to take me another 15 minutes to do this, I wouldn't, I would have to, it would give me pause if I'm not getting any data. And I think one of the things it feels to me like Spotify is kind of product team of like created a bunch of features, but they're still quite early and maybe the analytics haven't caught up with it yet.

19:44 I do quite like in Spotify's analytics. I don't know whether you've played with this at all, but it gives you like this nice little funnel that shows you how many impressions you're getting, how many of those impressions are converting to interest, and then how many of those kind of views of your podcast are converting into listens, which is sort of a nice. It's a nice way of seeing it, but I do think the data could be more granular and would be more useful if it was, I think. Have you, have you played with that at all? I've looked into and I got like taking a look at the impressions and plays and listens, kind of like what you were talking about, but I hadn't gotten too deep into it. I think it was because of the confusion of I understand impressions and I know we've covered it in this podcast, the difference between plays and listens on Spotify and that, that.

20:33 Whole deal still excuses me for this day. Absolutely, but there is a difference. Oh yeah, so that is confusing. So a listen, as far as I understand it is an individual, whereas a play is when the play button is clicked on your episode. So an individual might listen to 1 episode all the way through, but they might do it in five sittings and every time they hit play and pause and play and pause and whatever, skip and things, then I think it counts. I'm not sure about skip, but like every time they hit play, it counts as a play. So that's why the play number is so much larger.

21:13 I do like that Spotify gives you unique listeners and in fact, one of the metrics that I use, so I aggregate, I take the data from Apple Podcasts and from Spotify and I put it all together and get a sort of a total uniques her episode, which is quite a useful metric to track because that shows actual people listening to your show. Yeah, some of these analytics feel just redundant, you know what I mean? There are some that are needed that I don't see that are that they're touching on yet. And then there are others that feel kind of redundant. So now, Chris, you had already said that you are not on Spotify and your clients are not on Spotify. And that is the same with me.

22:00 So for all of those people who are not share, do not have the platform of Spotify, are any of these gems and marketing things, how many of them are for us that are maybe being hosted on other platforms? All of the things that I've mentioned so far are things that you can access even if your podcast is hosted on other platforms. So you can you need to claim your podcast in, you need to log into Spotify for Creators. It used to be Spotify for Podcasters, but now they call it Spotify for Creators. And I think it's creators dot, Spotify dot from or something.

22:40 And yeah, you log into that, you claim your podcast by putting in the RSS feed, and then you have access to all of these tools. So Spotify for Creators is the platform, the back end platform that you're using to manage all of this stuff. And yeah, anybody can access it. Any any podcast can access it wherever they're hosted. That's great. And just a reminder to our listeners, this interview is based on his issue. He has a podcasting newsletter on Sub Stack called Podcast Strategy. And there was an enormous amount of research that went into this issue all about Spotify. How long did it take you to research all of this? Well, the actual issue like is like a day's worth of work, but all of the like, but most of it comes from like actively managing a podcast every day.

23:34 So I don't know. I mean, I've been doing it for 13 or so years. Does that count? I. Guess so. I guess so. The one that I'm really like gravitating towards is the comment section that people can actually do comments, do polls. That is just a piece of gold. So what's the wildest, most unexpected poll or comment that you have seen on the show? Can you pick one? I mean, the thing that has amazed me actually about the comments that we get on our podcast on Spotify and also on YouTube as well is how good faith they generally are. I'm sort of used to seeing a lot of quite negative comments.

24:18 If you spend any time on the Internet, then you are going to you put anything out in the in on the Internet, you're going to get some negative comments. And you know, I've had some doozies in my time, but like most of the comments that we get are actually in really good faith. We have had some we've had some spam, you know, we've had people kind of leaving the same comment over and over because they're we're a political podcast. So you know, they want to make that political point or something and you just have to moderate for those sorts of things. Most of the comments are actually like responding to what people have heard in the episode, contributing their thoughts, starting a conversation or, you know, asking us a question for our listeners questions episode.

25:01 And I can't think of one that kind of stands out. But like, the overriding feeling that I get from the comments is that people, they're, they're genuine listeners who are actively engaged and interested in what we're talking about. So of all the gems that Spotify has for us to use them for marketing, where's the one that you think that maybe they they're not meeting the bar they need a little bit of help on, or maybe something's missing entirely? I've talked about video. I think that's that's a really hot topic and really don't like how they do it right now. I'm sort of quite disappointed that you can't customize the topics and the guests more. I think it would be really helpful to be able to specify because actually the guest selector is not brilliant. I put in the newsletter actually that I found that episodes where somebody said my guest today is so and so tended to pick up the guest names better.

26:01 But I, somebody from Spotify got in touch after the after I published the e-mail and they said actually that kind of shouldn't make a difference. It should just pick it up from the transcript. But to my mind, it would be, it would be quite helpful to be able to tag a guest and for guests to have a page in Spotify. So you could like go to a guest page and see all the podcasts that they have appeared on. There's like different ways that you can do the kind of recommendations and things based on like if I like, there's a, there's a business creator that I really like called Daniel Priestley. And I listen to a lot of the podcasts that he's on.

26:43 Actually, I've listened to so many that I've reached the point where he's just saying the same thing over and over now. But getting into him and his content, He doesn't have his own podcast, but he appears on a lot of other podcasts. I would quite enjoy a guest feed of all of his content on different people shows and then I would discover lots of different people shows through doing that. So I think that's something that would be cool but doesn't exist at the moment. What would your like wish list be? If you could get Spotify on the phone and tell them a feature request, what do you think it would be? Well, you know what? That's the thing though, I try and steer away from. Why is that? It's just, it has this reputation of not being the best when it comes to customer service. And I, and again, I think that maybe I, maybe I'm going on antiquated information.

27:36 Maybe I need to update my, my feelings on that. Have you had a chance to experience their customer service and they're going through such a metamorphic that it's you? Know well, I suppose technically we're not a Spotify customer, we're a Spotify user, right? So I have had relationships with people who work at Spotify in the same way that I've had relationships that work with people that work at Apple in the sense of you might sometimes get on different shows, a, you know, a partner success manager or something. He can like give you tips on how to use the platform and that sort of thing. But I haven't, as I said, we don't host on Spotify, so we're not paying any money and they're not paying us any money.

28:19 So we're just, we're just a user at the moment. But you know, these platforms that like, there are people that run them and half the time it's just like trying to figure out how to get in touch with the right people. Yes, I understand. It's it's who you know. Hey, Nick, you have a question? Go ahead, Nick. Say you were going to be starting a new podcast or someone wants to kind of start putting more of their eggs in the Spotify basket and kind of shift away from Apple or YouTube, wherever they're at. What would be like the top three things that someone should focus on to get the most out of the platform and really be able to expand their reach on Spotify specifically? So the first thing I think is getting your titles and descriptions right, both on a show level and on a feed level. And, and this of course has the benefit that if you get that right, this isn't just about Spotify, This is about every player that you appear on.

29:19 But different players will have different character limits for titles and, and for descriptions. And I actually had another newsletter issue where I went into a bit more detail about this, but because they all have like different character limits and stuff, if we're saying like I'm going to, Spotify is my primary discovery platform, so I'm going to optimize all of my content from that. And then everything else will follow. Then Spotify's title gives you maximum 2 lines, I think it's like 8 to 12 words depending on how long the words are. And then the description gives you a maximum of two lines as the preview. For me, I would make sure that I'm optimizing my title and description for that character count so that what really important information surfaces first. Then I would do the video clips because they're the easiest lift, I think.

30:19 And the other thing that I should say about titles and descriptions in Spotify is that it appears that Spotify uses show title, show description, episode title, and episode description to inform search results. It says that it doesn't just use keywords, it uses natural language processing. So you don't just have to like stuff all your primary keywords in your titles and descriptions, but making sure that you are referencing the topics that you're discussing using a good kind of SEO and keyword strategy. And you know, you can vary kind of how the keywords is displayed, but making sure that the relevant topics are talked about in your description will give you the best chance of kind of surfacing on search.

31:12 So I'd say like, that's the that's the starting point. Then I would go to the video clips because if you're doing video already, they're so easy. If you're not doing video already and you just skip over that bit. And then I would go to polls and comments and do as much as I can to encourage those. Because that, I think, is the feature that ties most neatly into what podcasting is brilliant at, which is helping people feel part of a gang. Yes, I really go back and unpack the title description SEO thing. So for our listeners, can you give us like a good example of a title versus an example that's not so good?

31:59 I can take one from the podcasts that we've published recently. We've gone through various kind of iterations with titles at the New Statesman where I currently work. And when I started, they were like super big on puns and they would use these puns to like give a two or three word title that were very clever and very witty, but absolutely useless for search, right? Because like a pun is not an actual word of half the time or, or it makes it makes the robot who's responsible for crawling the thing think it's something it's not, you know. So actually I think being quite sort of huge utilitarian with titles can help to surface you in search. We've got to balance that with clickability and presenting the right information in the preview window so that when somebody sees your episode, they know kind of what it is. So the way that we have started doing it now is to do a title that is maybe 4 to 6 words, but then we put a break in, you know, a vertical line break.

33:12 And then we do like a subtitle that's like another few words. If I get cut off in the preview, it doesn't matter so much. But like, for example, the latest episode is labor students revolt over Gaza, right? It's quite utilitarian. It's got some good keywords in there. It's got a bit of conflict. I feel like that's quite a strong title. But then we have a break and then we say politics with a new Shakelian who is our host. So then we're getting the politics keyword in and we're getting the host name. And then for the description, because you get like a two line preview in the episode appearance on the feed that you see in Spotify.

33:55 I like to try and start the description with a hook a bit like if you're writing a post on LinkedIn or you know, whatever, like put your like 12 to 15 word single sentence hook at the very top of your description and that might have a few more kind of useful keywords. Actually, I didn't do this one, so I don't know if the producer did it on this one or not. And if not, he's going to tell them off. So there we go. That sort of hook. Here was youth membership for the Labour Party has collapsed, right? And then you can go into that more kind of detail. So like if you've done journalism or if you're like writing articles for the web and stuff, then you might think of it as your like your headline and your stand first. That's how I think of it.

34:42 So like the title is the headline and the hook is like the subhead or the stand first web article. So do you change up titles after so long to try and optimize for search engines, or do you just, you know, decide to go on, just move on? Well, it's funny, isn't it? Like I do this on YouTube sometimes. On YouTube, we change the titles from time to time to see if that helps the algorithm. I change the titles. If one of my producers has written a title I don't like, I'll go in. There's one here. There's one here they published while I was away. The title is Wasp Movie, so I'm going to change that because that doesn't mean anything. Yeah, but no, but they're very good. The producers I work with are absolutely brilliant and I really don't have to do that very much. So like, yeah, I mean, we, we haven't done, but then we're producing daily content.

35:34 And honestly, we don't really have the bandwidth to sort of go back and change stuff too much. But if I was producing a weekly show, then I probably would pay quite close attention to how The Reach is doing and then think about maybe going back in and changing if it wasn't working. Excellent. I know I originally brought you on here to talk about Spotify, but I also want to talk about having a newsletter on Substack. Can you talk about Substack as opposed to any other of the millions of platforms that there are for newsletters? Why did you decide on Spotify and how has your growth been from the time that you started? OK, cool.

36:16 So this is like my other new passions, like my hobby passion, which I'm very excited about. I launched the newsletter because I'm in a day job and I thought there might come a time when I want to launch a business. Don't know what that's going to be yet, but everybody says that having an e-mail list is a really sensible thing to do. So I'm going to launch a newsletter to Create an e-mail list so that I've got some owned audience that I can go to if I launch a business. And that's kind of what's happened, right? So I'm doing podcast crew now, and the Sub Stack newsletter is helping to kind of market that business. But the reason I chose Sub Stack was primarily because it was free and had a lot of kind of useful tools and it allows you to monetize and that sort of thing. I know that it's not perfect for things like audience segmentation.

37:13 It is not an e-mail marketing platform, so it's not like Convertkit or MailChimp or any of the others way you can do that. Chris, this surprises me because I was under the impression and by the way, I don't have a newsletter yet, but Substack is one of them that I've been looking at. So I was told that Substack is really primarily for newsletters, primarily for newsletters. Now over the years they have evolved into having videos kind of TikTok kind of videos. Can you, can you talk about that? So I went into Substat because I wanted to launch an e-mail newsletter and that seemed to me the most frictionless way of doing it. And it has been very frictionless and I've really enjoyed it.

37:58 It does also have like a social surface as well. So it's got notes, which is a bit like Twitter, and it's sign it can be a good way of attracting new subscribers. It also has a video vertical video function and things. So there's like a social bit of it, which frankly I use less than the newsletter function. Most of the listenership, most of the readership for the newsletter comes through e-mail. So people receiving it and then opening the e-mail like 95% or more comes that way and then a small amount reads it on the app or comes via search or comes via notes or whatever.

38:41 But notes have been quite useful when I have tried them and occasionally had a had one that's done reasonably well. They can be quite good at attracting new subscribers. I do wonder how valuable those subscribers are and how high quality those subscribers are though, because they're sort of in browsing in the app and it's very easy to subscribe. I feel like the two biggest other routes to subscriber acquisition that I found have been LinkedIn. So I'm very active on LinkedIn. That's my main discovery surface and then I then ID platform people to Sub Stack through various kind of calls to action. And the other one is recommendations, which is something else that Sub Stack is really good at is if you recommend a newsletter, then people who subscribe to your newsletter are more likely to then subscribe to the newsletter that you've recommended.

39:35 And actually Sub Stack has kind of ways of making sure that happens. And I've had perceived quite a lot of subscribers through other newsletters who write on a similar topic. Absolutely. Can you, before we go to Jeff, because I know Jeff has a question, can you briefly talk about your growth from where you started to where you are now? Yeah, so I started with 0 obviously, because I started from nothing when I. So I had a little bit of a following on LinkedIn, like a tiny bit like 1500 followers or something. And I put a thing out and I said I'm going to do a sub stack and 50 people very kindly subscribed on the off chance that it was going to be interesting. And now I'm at 14150 after about a year. And a large chunk of that, probably 30% came in one day when I had a LinkedIn post that went absolutely gangbusters, mega viral for me anyway.

40:39 And I used like a sub stack post as a, so I housed a lead magnet within a sub stack post. But I promoted on LinkedIn, the LinkedIn thing went viral and then it attracted a whole bunch of subscribers. So that's something I want to try and do more of. Awesome, awesome. Hey, Jeff, welcome to the stage. I appreciate you. Coming up. Do you have a question for Chris? Yeah, I think I'm understanding part of what you're referencing, Chris, but it there are pieces of it that feel a little nuanced, so I just wanted to ask it explicitly. I'm not familiar with Substack, so that may be my underlying problem. But when you say you choose, you choose to do your. Your newsletter on Substack. Can your newsletter not be?

41:22 And it it may be your newsletter is, isn't it the same kind of thing like a podcast lock? You can focus on Spotify or focus on Substack, but you can still take that same newsletter and run it through Medium and run it through other ways of circulating it. Are you saying it's exclusively on sub stack? Or that's just where you kind of focus. Hello, Jeff. That's a really good question. And you're right, there's some nuance there. So one of the things that I like about Sub Stack is that it also gives you a website. You publish your newsletter through Sub Stack and it delivers it to people's e-mail addresses.

42:04 It also gives you your own URL. So mine is podcast strategy.substack.com, although you can also create a custom URL. So I'm in the process of doing that as well. And then all of your articles are housed on that URL and within your profile on the Sub Stack app. So like it becomes like from 1 publish, you've got those three like different platforms that it goes out to e-mail, website and the app. I have experimented with repurposing the stuff that I've written on sub Stack as LinkedIn articles, which is good, I think. I think that's fine.

42:48 I haven't put it on like Medium or on a personal blog or anything like that, partly because I'm a bit nervous about duplicate content affecting the SEO. So obviously SEO takes a long time to build. I've only just started to see traffic, small and really small amounts of traffic coming to the Substack website via search. And I'm a bit nervous about kind of whether SEO would get punished. I mean, to be honest, it's probably academic because the amount of traffic is so small right now, but that's why I haven't published it elsewhere. But yeah, I mean like absolutely you could like if you wanted to put it on different platforms, there's nothing to stop you.

43:31 So one more question just because you just said it and it baffled me what you just said. You said that you have experimented with posting some of the articles on LinkedIn and you think it's good? But you just told us a story about getting a 30% jump on your subscriptions, which I thought was from an article on LinkedIn. Is that not right? Ah, right, no. So that was from a post. So LinkedIn allows you to publish articles as a separate media type and then you can post a link to that LinkedIn article.

44:13 So it's just a different media type. No. So, So what I found very good has been posting on LinkedIn. The LinkedIn articles I have had some traffic from. I haven't experimented with them for a while simply because of kind of bandwidth really. But yeah, I'm, I'm talking about two different media types on LinkedIn. Does that make sense? It does now. I was, I was like you just said LinkedIn was a huge win. Well, the other thing is that LinkedIn also has newsletters, what they call newsletters. And so there's this live sort of conversation in my head going, hey, just also put it on LinkedIn as a newsletter. And then no, don't do that because what you want to do is de platform people to get them onto the sub stack.

44:57 So you get their e-mail address. But then if you just put it on LinkedIn, then more people will see it. But no, I want the e-mail address. So I'm constantly debating that in my head. Right, exactly, very good. So we only have a couple minutes left, Chris. I wanted to touch a little bit on the podcast crew, explain it and and you know that I am at I, I should be at the top of your list, Chris, because as soon as I saw it, I went, yes, I'm signing up for this. So it's something that has not happened yet, but it's on the verge. And so give us some inside scoop. What is it and when is it happening? Podcast Crew is a recruitment platform for the podcast industry, connecting top tier podcast professionals with the clients who need their services.

45:47 So the target client is really kind of, you know, production companies and businesses that want podcasts. The reason I'm doing it is because I have hired a lot of podcast producers over the course of my career and I've always been amazed at how analog and fragmented the processes, right? So LinkedIn and Indeed or any of the other like general job sites are super broad and nonspecific. I don't know what it's like in the US, but at least here in the UK, there are a couple of kind of podcast specific networks that people post jobs on, but they tend to get flooded with inappropriate candidate. So people that don't have the relevant experience or, you know, whatever.

46:35 And at the same time, I got to a point where a lot of people were asking me, do you know a good podcast producer? And that's the main way that people find people to make their podcast, right? It's word of mouth. And So what I want to do is try and systematize that and provide a service that makes that whole process a lot easier for people. So Podcast crew is going to be a web platform. It's it's a sort of a marketplace business. So it's a web platform where podcast professionals can build their profile, apply for jobs and connect with clients and clients can find an easy way to get good podcast people.

47:15 And the important kind of layer of that is a level of sort of minimum barrier to entry. So we only want kind of actual trusted, proven professionals who've got like professional podcast experience. And then there's a sort of a level of kind of vetting and verification that goes on as well to make sure that clients are getting access to the best talent. And then it will come also with a bespoke matching service. So clients can either go on the platform and self-serve and contact podcast professionals directly or to the clients that we that we are already working with. Often they're time pressed, they've got a Commission that's come through and they need a producer right now. They don't really have time to go in self-serve, so we'll do a white glove experience for them so that so we can do a bespoke matching process where we find basically a head hunting process using the database on the platform to service them with the podcast producers that they need. That is awesome.

48:12 Now, Chris, I'm going to ask you to provide us with a link that we can put on for the replays and so everyone can get access to maybe signing up for this, OK? Yeah, that'd be great. So I should say we're going to. So I'm building the platform now. It's nearly done. I keep saying that and then I find another bug that need to iron out and it's going to launch first in the UK because that's where I am and I need to make sure that I'm getting. So I'm going to launch it first with like a very private beta with maybe just 20 people that I've already vetted who I know are good and they're in the UK and that's going to work. So then I'm going to yet make make sure that I'm servicing them with the right support that they need. Then I'm going to open it out within the UK. But I've also got somebody in Sweden who wants to help me launch it over there because the Nordics have a good kind of podcasting community as well.

49:05 And I would love to bring it into the US because obviously the podcast industry in the US is is much larger. And I think, I mean you tell me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there is anything like this for the podcast industry in the US at the moment either. Is that right? I can't think of of any Ashley, Jonathan, Jeff, can you think of anything like that off the top of your head? No. So I think that would be a really. Welcome thing to have over here. I'll try and try and do that quickly then before anyone else does, please do. Well, Chris, thank you so much for taking out the time to talk with us today. I will tell you that I you may have changed my mind completely on Spotify. It might be something that I have to take a closer look at. So I appreciate that.

49:52 And I know you didn't have to wake up early for this, right? This is midday for. You. No, I mean, this is my lunchtime. I'm honored to be with you while you're making eggs. Thank. You that's that happens every morning, by the way, so join us anytime you want to. So everyone, thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it and be with us tomorrow for Newsday. Tomorrow is all full of news and until next time, thank you so much. Have a great day. Thanks, Chris. Thank you.