You Oughta Know: YouTube Music, Amazon AI, & Apple Updates [Ep. 166]

 
 

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Here’s what to expect from this episode:

This episode is the first in a new series that I'm going to be doing from time to time, and I'm calling it the "You Oughta Know" series. (And if that instantly makes you think of the Alanis Morissette song, then we should be friends.)

Inside this series, I'm going to be sharing some updates that have been going on recently in the podcast industry and just some things that I think you oughta know about. Things are constantly changing in the podcasting space, and it can be hard to keep up with and sift through the information to decide what you should (or shouldn't) be paying attention to. So that's the goal: to keep you updated on the latest changes and what to know about them to help you save some time and energy!

So today, for our first episode in this series, I'm running through some important updates about YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and Apple Podcasts that I think are relevant to all podcasters.

And if you like this style of episode with podcast industry updates and want me to do more of them, let me know! You can send me a message on Instagram @podcastingforeducators, write it in a review on Apple podcasts, or whatever method works for you.

Topics covered:

  • An intro to my new "You Oughta Know" series and what you can expect

  • Google Podcasts is out, YouTube Music is in (but it's not automatic!)

  • Amazon Music's new AI feature and what to know about it

  • Apple Podcasts transcripts and web browser updates

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

favorite podcasting resources:

  • Sara Whittaker 0:01

    Sarah, your podcast is a powerful tool that serves your audience and your business, but how do you manage it all bring in new listeners and convert those listeners into customers. That's what the show is all about. Welcome to podcasting for educators. I'm Sara Whittaker, classroom teacher turned podcast manager, and I'm here to help you get the most out of your show, all while making an impact on other educators. Hey there, and welcome back to another episode of podcasting for educators. Thank you so much for being here with me today. If you are new here, my name is Sarah, and I'm your host, and you have picked a great day to start listening to this podcast, because this is the first episode in a new series that I'm going to be doing from time to time, and I'm calling it the you ought to know series. And if that instantly makes you think of the Alanis Morissette song you ought to know, then we should be friends. And if you do know that song, then I apologize in advance, because it's probably now going to be stuck in your head for the next few days, at least. That's what happened to me when I decided to name this series anyway. Inside of this series, I am going to be just sharing some updates that have been going on recently in the podcast industry, and just some things that I think you ought to know about. Things are just constantly changing, and it can be kind of hard to keep up with and it can be hard to sift through the information and decide what you should be paying attention to and what you really don't need to be paying attention to. So that's kind of my job. Here is, I want to just keep you updated on the latest changes that are going on. So today, for our first episode in this series. I'm going to be running through some updates that have to do with YouTube music, Amazon music and Apple podcasts. So let's go ahead and get into it. Let's first talk about YouTube music. So this update has come because of the changes going on with Google podcasts. So if you didn't already know, Google podcasts is shutting down, and I believe they already technically have shut down, they kept pushing back the date, so I've kind of lost track here, but I'm pretty sure that by the end of I'm recording this at the end of August, and I'm pretty sure the latest was that by the end of August, it would be completely shut down. And in its place, they're kind of shifting people over to YouTube music. So not regular YouTube, but YouTube music. So what you need to know is, as a podcaster, you need to be sure that your podcast is now on YouTube music. And if you're not already on there, you can go ahead and get your show on there ASAP. This is something that you can do really quickly this week. And I just want to be clear that if you were on Google podcasts, you're not going to be automatically shifted over to YouTube music. You need to submit your show manually. Like I said, it will only take a few minutes, but you do need to sit down and do that, and I highly recommend that you do that, because it is another platform that people can listen in on. And Google podcasts wasn't the most popular platform, for sure, but people listen on there, and they might be using YouTube music as the alternative for that now that Google podcast is gone, so you definitely want to be available on there, and it's really just a matter of submitting your RSS feed. Your RSS feed can be found inside of your podcast. Host. I'm going to go ahead and link an article in the show notes for this episode that will walk you through the process of submitting to YouTube music. But that is definitely an action step that I recommend you take this week and again, just to be clear, this is YouTube music. There's no video involved. This is just an audio platform that you're going to get your podcast on. Okay, second update is something that recently came out about Amazon music, and this is some new AI technology that is now on Amazon music that's pretty cool. Unfortunately, like in this moment, it's not going to probably apply to most podcasts, but I think that it will in the future, and it's kind of exciting. So Amazon Music has launched something called topics on Amazon music, and it's supposed to be an AI powered feature that's going to make it easier for discoverability. So discoverability for all podcasts, not just the most popular podcasts out there. And the idea is that when people listen to a podcast on Amazon music, when they look at the show description, I'm sorry, the episode description, so kind of like the show notes for that episode within the Amazon music app, at the bottom, there will be different topics listed out that have to do with that episode. Okay? And then you'll be able to click on those topics, and it will take you to other episodes and other. Cast related to that topic, which is really cool, and something that I have been hoping that listening apps would start integrating, because it really will help with searchability as a listener, and it will help you as a podcast host, because it's just going to allow that many more people to discover your show and find what they're looking for. If you want to try this out yourself, I just did this. I've actually never listened on Amazon music before, but it's a really it's a really cool app. So I checked it out. You have to have the latest version of Amazon music. You can have it regardless of what kind of phone you have, Android or iPhone. Go ahead and download that. And then on Amazon music, you can listen to music, or you can listen to podcasts. So you want to make sure that you tap on the podcasts tab on the home screen. And then, for now, like I said, this is not available on all podcasts yet, so they're clearly just kind of testing it out. So we're only going to see this on, like, the really big, popular podcasts. I'll link an article in the show notes that that walks you through everything, but it says in the article, like right now, they list, for examples, the daily smart list, or This American Life, they all have these topics feature available, but you're going to go to one of those podcasts if you want to kind of try this out and see it for yourself, and tap on a specific episode, and then you're going to look like I said in that episode description, there will be topics tag buttons below the episode description. If you tap on one of those, you're going to be able to explore a bunch of related podcast episodes on the same topic. So Amazon music, you know, it's not a huge percentage of your listenership, most likely, but I think it's still worth checking out. And I think that as they test this more and as they fine tune it, it's going to hopefully become available on all podcasts. And I'm hoping that this will be a feature that other listening apps begin integrating as well, because if you use Apple podcasts, then you probably know when you're listening to a show and you scroll to the bottom, they've got the if you like this show, you might enjoy these shows, and half of them, sometimes are shows that aren't even active anymore. And so I'm hoping that updates like this might offer better suggestions for listeners, and it's specifically said in this update that this is great for all podcasters. It's not only going to suggest podcasts that have huge listenership. So this could be a really cool feature for all kinds of podcasters, regardless of how big or small your audience is. And this article, I just kind of wanted to read this little blurb for you, because it kind of explains how it works so it says to suggest relevant topic tags, podcast transcripts and descriptions are analyzed by AI alongside human review to identify key points that are discussed in a particular episode. As we continue to expand the coverage of topics to more podcast content, the number of topics and the quality of related episodes will continue to improve. So that's important, because it's telling us, okay, we are taking your episode descriptions to create these tags and your transcripts. So episode descriptions definitely do matter. This, this has kind of been like a back and forth thing, like our episode description searchable? Are they not and the it's kind of been said that episode descriptions are not taken into account for SEO and searchability within apps, but this is clearly telling us that they do play a role. So you do want to make sure that you know you're including those keywords in your episode descriptions, because that could have a ripple effect on your searchability, on your visibility within these listening apps. All right. Third update is some changes that have been made with Apple podcasts. Now, I will first say that there was a huge change in download reporting for Apple podcasts, the way that they measure downloads. That happened back in I believe it was last September 2023

    I talked all about this in last week's episode and went into detail about it. That was episode 165 so I'm not going to go into detail about it again here, but if you want to listen, and if you haven't, I highly suggest that you do, because it it is a big change, and it did have a big impact, and it's still having a big impact on a lot of shows. So definitely head back and listen to last week's episode 165 if you have not already done that, but another apple update that happened several months ago that you may or may not know about is that there are now transcripts on Apple podcasts. So when you are in the Apple podcast app and you are listening to an episode, a transcript is now available, which is awesome for accessibility and so a big point that I wanted to make today. Is to make sure that you're letting your listeners know about this feature. This would be a cool thing to announce on your podcast and just say, Hey, I just wanted to let you know. I know a lot of you, you like to sometimes take notes, or you like to read certain information versus listening to it. Well, now there are transcripts available, and that could even be an opportunity to encourage them to share with their friends. Maybe they have friends who don't necessarily listen to podcasts all the time, but now they have this written content that they can check out. So far from what I've seen, I've actually been really impressed with the transcripts. I think that they have been fairly accurate, and that's really, really cool to see. If you are a podcaster and you're not seeing your transcripts show up, you may need to log into your apple podcast Connect account, because you might not have agreed to the terms and change your settings within Apple podcast connect so if you're not seeing transcripts pop up, you're going to want to log into your apple podcast Connect account. Go to availability on the left go to transcripts, and then there you'll choose whether you want apple to generate your transcripts for you, or if you want to provide your own. You can choose that option, and then, in that case, you would upload the transcript to your host when you go to schedule your episodes, and also the first time that you log in. If you haven't done this already, there's like a little agreement that you just have to read through and agree to before Apple will generate transcripts for you. And then if you want to view your transcripts for your specific episodes again, you would log into Apple podcast, connect, click on your show, and then there's going to be a purple tab at the top, top right of your screen that you can toggle to episodes, and then you can click on your episodes there, and you can edit or download the transcripts by episode. So if you see, like, some big mistakes in your transcripts, I think this could especially occur, like, if you have a guest name or or something like that, that's that's really misspelled, you can and you wanted to edit them, you can go in and edit the transcript. Apple does say that the transcripts will be the most accurate if your audio quality is good. And you can include the host and guest names in the show and episode descriptions to ensure accurate spelling of these names in the Apple transcript. And then one more quick Apple update that just recently came out is that Apple podcast is now available on web browsers on any device, so before only Apple users could access Apple podcasts, and now anybody can have the full Apple podcast experience. So on any browser, you can sign in with your Apple account, and you can access your library of podcasts, get recommendations and notifications and all of that. And even if you don't have an Apple account, you can still listen to all of the free podcasts, browse the top charts and all of that good stuff. I was hoping that with this update, they would allow people who don't have an Apple account to leave reviews on Apple podcasts. I don't think that's the case yet. Maybe that will be something that they add in the future, but as of right now, you do need an apple login to be able to review a podcast. I'll be interested to see if this change really makes people who are usually not Apple users listen on Apple podcasts. My gut tells me that if people don't listen on Apple podcasts, they probably have their preferred app that they listen in on, but I don't know. Time will tell. We'll see All right. So there you have it. Our first episode in this new you ought to know series. If you do like this style of episode and you like getting these updates and you want me to do more of these ongoing you have to let me know. So you can send me a message on Instagram. You can write it in a review on Apple podcasts, whatever method works for you, but definitely let me know if you'd like to hear more of this style of episodes. And then, of course, before we go, let's do a quick what I'm loving and what I'm listening to. This is where I share something that I'm loving and something that I'm listening to. Sometimes it's related to business and podcasting, and sometimes it's not so something that I am loving right now, and honestly, that I've always loved since I started using it, is click up, especially with being out on maternity leave. I don't think I could have done it without clickup. It's where my team and I keep track of all of the details of producing our clients episodes every single week, all of the little tasks that go with that, being able to set due dates for everything. So many automations I'm learning about, and I've now implementing that save. Me so much time every single week, and of course, also for the production of my own show, from brainstorming episodes to booking guests to producing the episode, keeping track of all of my ideas. I mean, I honestly don't know where I would be without clickup. If you have been thinking about using clickup, or you maybe have clickup, but you feel like you're not really using it to its full potential. I highly recommend getting Casey ackerman's confidence and clickup. Course, I bought this when I first started using clickup. The great thing about this is that it comes with access to her Facebook group. Well, there's lots of great things about it, like the fact that it's going to teach you how to use your clickup. But an added bonus is her Facebook group. She's super active in there and great at answering your questions, like, if you're trying to figure out how to set up an automation, or you're trying to figure out how to best set something up and click up, you can post it in the group, and you'll get some really great feedback. Casey's also been on the podcast before. I will link her course as well as the episode that she was on, so that you can take a listen to that, and you can check out everything that clickup has to offer. And then something that I'm listening to right now is part of your world. By Abby Jimenez, I read one of her other books called just for the summer earlier this summer, and I really loved it. I don't know, especially in the summertime, I just like some kind of, you know, light hearted kind of books, and these have been really great. So I read just for the summer. It was the first book that I read by Abby Jimenez, I think. And I was listening to a Q A with her after the story was over, and learned that some of the characters in that book were actually overlapping characters from a previous book that she had written, called part of your world. And so I decided to check that out. I'm almost done with it, and I've really enjoyed it. So if you like those kind of cheesy romance, lighthearted, fun books, definitely check out just for the summer and part of your world, I would read part of your world first, since that's the book that actually came first, and then you can follow it up with just for the summer. And I've actually listened to these on Spotify. I usually listen to my books on audible, but I was out of credits, and so before my renewal came up, I decided to check out Spotify, because you can listen to books on there. Now I don't, I don't know if you guys know that or not. It's something that I just learned about a couple months ago, and it's been great. I've really enjoyed listening on there. So now I'm kind of listening on Audible and Spotify all the places. But definitely check that out if you haven't already. When I signed up for I was on the free Spotify account. At first, you have to be on the paid version, so I signed up for the paid version, but they give you, I think it was like three months free that you get to kind of try it out. So I will put those titles in the show notes as well. But as always, thanks so much for being here, and I'll catch you here next week. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. To keep this conversation going, connect with me on Instagram at podcasting for educators. I'm always looking for an excuse to talk about podcasting. If you're looking for support in launching, managing or growing your podcast, check out my online course, the podcasting for educators prep school. At podcasting for educators.com/prep school. I'll see you here next time you.

More about Podcasting for Educators:

Podcasting for Educators is the podcast for TpT authors and other online educators. It's a show that will help you get your podcast in front of those who need it most - teachers, counselors, literacy specialists, SLPs, parents, and more! Each week, Sara Whittaker and her guests will share top tips and actionable strategies that you will need in order to launch, manage, and grow your podcast. You’ll learn how to leverage your show to build long-lasting relationships with your audience and promote your TpT resources, courses, and memberships, all while providing valuable and accessible content!

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Sara Whittaker