Sounds Profitable goes deep into the Stack – part 4

Portrait of Scott Klass Scott Klass , CMO

With Spotify’s recent foray into “broadcast to podcast” technology, the capability is obviously getting more attention than ever. The broad value for audio publishers is clear: you create amazing content that you want as many people as possible to hear, so having an easy way to accommodate both linear and non-linear listeners makes sense. To date, that capability has mostly been going in one direction, taking radio streams (linear listening) and turning them into podcasts (non-linear listening) as the latter format continues to gain popularity, especially with younger consumers. Technology like SoundStack Splice has been enabling it for a while.

But what about the inverse? A huge portion of the population values a more “lean back” experience forged in radio, where all the listener has to do is tune in. Podcasters need those audiences too.

That capability is here. SoundStack CRO Rockie Thomas walks Bryan Barletta through its myriad benefits in the latest Sounds Profitable Deepdive.

Transcript

[00:00:05] Bryan Barletta

Hey everyone, and welcome to another Sounds Profitable product Deepdive. I’m back here again with SoundStack CEO Rockie Thomas Rockie. Welcome back to the Deepdive.

[00:00:15] Rockie Thomas

I thank you so much for having me, Bryan. It’s always so fun to do this. And I have to thank you and sounds profitable and you and Tom for providing this platform to really educate the industry in a very transparent way. It’s something that No other company or partner has ever done, and I really appreciate what you do for the industry.

[00:00:34] Bryan Barletta

Thank you, it’s really fun. It’s really great because I’m passionate about these tools and I like playing around with them and seeing them and demoing them. And partners like yourself have great products that more people need to learn about, especially as we explore and grow this space. So thank you as well. We got a chance to do a few Deepdives so far and they’ve been all really great. We’ll link to all of them. You can click the card above to check that out. But we’re going to dig into something new today.  Rockie was telling me a little bit about it beforehand and I assumed it was the inverse or Rockie. I’m going to kick it over to you.

[00:01:05] Rockie Thomas

Yeah. So a little bit about SoundStack. We are an audio as a service company, so we work with lots of podcasters, but we also have, we also work with a lot of over the air broadcasters. We love all audio and we’re constantly trying to look at different ways of how we can use the different elements of our stack to really help out creators. So today we’re going to be talking about recall that leaning into the lean back listener, and it’s actually different than what a lot of people usually think. But we’re going to go ahead and go forward with this. But you know me, I always have a mission statement here, Bryan.  But we believe every podcast publisher should be using every distribution channel possible to promote their incredible content. And with that is, you know, this is how we’re able to go ahead and help out just a little bit of a reminder or an audio at this service company. Just to give a little bit of a background that people have not heard about sounds that we really play in three distinct pillars in the industry for podcasts as well as linear audio, which is distribution. We have a very large C-band network that distributes this audio only. We also provide insights including podcasts certified insights, as well as monetization tools from programmatic marketplaces to connectors between those as well as ad serving as well and dynamic ad insertion. So a little bit there. I always like to do a quick historical primer because you know, I have been around for a while. Not going to get too much into these little do these little squares here. But a lot of people don’t understand that podcast has actually been around for a while. I think the first stab into the, into the universe was, you know, back in two thousand, but really it was January two thousand and six. I remember when it first started coming out, I caught our eye roll because there was an on demand file. And we’re already starting to play around with these in the early two thousand. But really I have to give Apple credit by putting a consumer electronic device called an iPad, an iPad iPod, around it. It really transformed the entire industry. But what I look at is that, you know, elements of Podcasting have changed it in twenty twelve. I was lucky enough to start doing the first podcast, dynamic ad insertion was that ads was actually with WNYC. And it was really exciting to start seeing podcast Publishers really start to monetize in areas that they couldn’t like on iTunes and other areas where in the past was always dependent on a client. Whether that was an app or a web player or something like that. And then in twenty sixteen I’d launched the first programmatic podcast ad exchange called pod wave. I would say still to this day, probably five years a little bit too soon, but we are already starting to see these type of ad exchanges happening. And then in twenty seventeen, we got into the podcast measurement and guidelines. And what’s really interesting is I get asked sometimes why, why, why the IAB was so focused on measurement. And it’s really because of the elements of embedded ads. It was a way to have some sort of parity between measurement between embedded as, as well as dynamic ad insertion. Then all of a sudden I would say in twenty twenty two we’ve been seeing some huge innovations around the content, transcriptions, and brand suitability and safety. And then also we’re starting to see over the air broadcasters as are, as we call OTA or amp and broadcasters. Repurposing their content to broadcast the podcast. And we have our own product that we launched two years ago called Splice. That really allows the linear guys to put this into a non-linear consumable time shifted way.

[00:04:52] Bryan Barletta

And we did a Deepdive on Splice before we walked through that before. And it’s very cool broadcaster podcast makes a lot of sense because the, the like one and done nature of a broadcast and not being able to do anything with it. Whether it catch up listening or Repurposing into a podcast, or just keeping for like to do a recap, show sometime in the future. Like there’s so many reasons why you should be storing these things are doing more with them. So broadcasts of, I guess, has been a huge hit. It’s led to a lot of acquisitions recently, but I’m really excited here. First off. Thank you for the history lesson on there. A lot of a lot of great points on there and we’ll get a link to this, this entire PowerPoint in the episode description. But I’m really excited to hear what you want to talk about, say, with the podcast to broadcast. Yeah. Yeah,

[00:05:38] Rockie Thomas

absolutely. So, you know, we, we feel the value proposition for audio Publishers is really clear. You create amazing audio content and you want as many people possible to hear. So having an easy way to accommodate both linear and non-linear listeners makes sense. Today a lot of podcast is living in the RSS feed and this is definitely not a pitch to leave that RSS is the IP, the intellectual property of a podcaster. It’s our house. Yeah, I totally understand this, but where we’re looking forward to is really trying to change the direction that’s been happening. So today we’ve been going in only really one direction. We’ve been taking broadcast and splicing it into a podcast where we believe and how SoundStack is. We always try to think of iterate and think of ways of utilizing content in different ways. We started thinking about like, well, what about the inverse? What if we started making podcasters more into a broadcast philosophy? You know, a huge portion of the population and I am one of those. I value a lean back experience and when I say a lean back experiences, I really don’t want to touch my. When I’m driving, yes, there are queuing, you know, elements within Google podcasts within Spotify, where I’m actually curating my playlists. But I’ll be honest with you, Bryan. I’m inherently lazy, I want to be fed, I want to have curation coming towards me. I want to hear great content, but I really don’t want to have to work for it. And this is where we started thinking how we could use some of our other elements within SoundStack to really make this possible.

[00:07:21] Bryan Barletta

Well, real quick on that, I want to, I want to just say you’re so right on that like the flow and the feel of it like I have two young kids. So when I play a podcast that’s a podcast I like and then it’s done and I’m riding my bike or I’m out in the car and I can’t touch my phone. It might drop, jump to from like a kids podcast to a industry podcast to a Dungeons and dragons podcast. And it’s like, no, like you can’t, even when you do set up the flow, it takes so much effort to curate for each environment. You’re in exactly what you want to listen to.

[00:07:55] Rockie Thomas

It is and you know, and so we start, we, after, within SoundStack, we love asking what if questions what you know it’s, it’s, it’s what if and why, you know, why should we be doing this? But we start saying to yourself, what if podcasters created a lean back experience? What if podcasters started to curate their content? And you brought this up about a year ago, Bryan and I’ve always thought about this because I think about some challenges we have with implementing programmatic, you know, type of trading within some podcast organizations. It’s really that a lot of podcast organizations are missing a operations manager or a program director or what we used to call that in radio. Where the program director was really in charge of you know, how the overall content is being presented. How many ad breaks you have within that content, really owning the, the total sound of the content that can even be the static branding. And it’s, I’m glad to, I see that we’re starting to see some of those positions start to happen within podcast networks or agencies as they’re called.  But you know, we want to start thinking of how can we get podcasters start thinking about how they can start curating their content. I’ll tell you my number one pain point with podcasts and I’ve been a podcast listener for so many years. I don’t want to have to go to read it to find out the best episodes of a podcast show.

[00:09:18] Bryan Barletta

It’s

[00:09:19] Rockie Thomas

so true, it drives me crazy. I like I hear a really cool podcast show. It’s like, wow, I would like that because I’m an Econ girl. So I’m like, I really like that Econ show or the economics show, and I Google best best episodes of whatever, right? It comes right up and I’m saying then, so now what I have to do is I have to go through all the Reddit threads, find a toggle between all of the little Chrome tabs to basically load my stuff up and then, but then I’m only taking the best episodes from what other people think and I think that the, you know, the podcast networks probably know their most popular thing that they do well.

[00:09:57] Bryan Barletta

They definitely do because they republish them. Yes, they

[00:10:01] Rockie Thomas

do, but yeah, I

[00:10:02] Bryan Barletta

appreciate it, but we don’t have it. And you’re right. There’s no concept of that. Like I would kill to not only have like a trailer and Apple podcasts and Spotify, but also like new to sounds probable. Here’s five podcasts to start with, right in order I would absolutely be over the moon to be able to do something like this. And it sounds like this is what you’re talking about here, that a publisher can really curate that experience.

[00:10:26] Rockie Thomas

It is, and then we, then we also think start thinking about different ways to start packaging the content. You know, so where it’s a, you are a large podcast network that has different genres.  It’s like, all right, let’s go ahead and make a finance channel. Let’s go ahead and make a true crime channel. Let’s go ahead. Let’s start thinking about how we, we call it a clock or clock wheel. How can we basically put together a clock or how can we make this content that’s going to be consumable for people who really want to go ahead and be interested in certain type of genres within podcasts. Yeah, and that’s a whole and then I’ll tell you a lot of buyers are going to like to buy into those types of vertical content. Because they know the type of they know the type of listener. They’re most likely going to get by the content that they’re listening to. And then there’s also the notion of mixing music and podcasts. What’s a little bit unique about us is that we’re, we have the ability to cover royalties and copyrights on our three sixty five platform. But also I think that when I say mix music and podcast, I feel like, well, it’s not just radio. Well, it is kind of, I mean, so

[00:11:35] Bryan Barletta

people are still spending on radio and people are still listening to radio or they want a bad

[00:11:39] Rockie Thomas

thing. And I think really, the thing that I came across is I started thinking about RSS and I’m like, wow, you know, I feel that the podcast Publishers were kind of forgetting the true value of the last hours, which is syndication. Yes. RSS is a way to basically, you know, have a system fetch something for me and deliver it to me whether it’s, you know, podcast or any other type of content. But really what that syndication side of our business, and I have to give norm over our podcast. One a little bit of a, you know, like he was on to something. I mean, he built Westwood one on a syndication model of Repurposing audio content across an entire national network. And I think that as podcasters, they need to start thinking about their content in something that’s valuable and repurpose, you can repurpose in many different places. There’s also some additional benefits to this. The post role now becomes individual and you know, there’s

[00:12:35] Bryan Barletta

no on when it never ends. There’s no end.

[00:12:39] Rockie Thomas

And that’s why, for I know I’ve always been the fan of the post roll because I do know that there’s a future space where this is going to have its extreme value. And it just becomes a mid role and we all are so continuously making money then obviously there’s no concept of the end of the podcast that keeps on going.  So so podcast the broadcast is here now. And this is through live three, sixty five, eighty three, sixty five. It’s funny, Bryan, because it’s like a full circle of my life here. They’re one of my very first clients with my very first ad insertion company back in nineteen ninety nine live three. Sixty five has been around since ninety nine soundtrack acquired the assets in twenty seventeen. It’s a network of online radio broadcasters. We have over four thousand broadcasters a day ranging from everything from college stations to lpfm to people who want to do a station on VOC marry an opera. I mean you name it. It’s like it’s great because you know, you can never really support those type of very niche type of audio formats in on an FM dial in online radio, actual provides that type of audience for them and it’s a quite large network. So I’m going to go ahead and show what we did, where I was here.

[00:13:56] Bryan Barletta

Well, I have a question for you, so radio is so foreign to me. Okay. I’m a, I’m digital first. That’s our, I cut my teeth on this and mobile rich media and moved into Podcasting and all of that. When you say broadcast, what do you mean? I mean like is this, are we talking? I can listen to this on my am FM radio in my car, is it a digital signal? Is it like a web radio? Like how does what is broadcast mean to sound? I can live through sixty five.

[00:14:25] Rockie Thomas

Absolutely. I think that’s actually a really good and just industry question. I. We look at broadcast as one to many or linear. So that means that when I’m listening, if I’m listening to a piece of podcast content, and I decide to go ahead and listen to a station, it’s what we call drop a needle. It doesn’t start from the beginning. It’s just like listening to an FM station, the only difference is, is that you’re only going to be hearing the broadcast online. It’s a, it’s an, it’s an online broadcast. What’s exciting is that live three, sixty five has a lot of distribution partners including iHeart, radio and tune in and why that’s important is that it’s another way because they have such a great inroads with the smart speaker

[00:15:13] Bryan Barletta

elements and the car man, you’ve got those apps are on my cars,

[00:15:17] Rockie Thomas

you got it and so we already have those partnerships through library, sixty five already done. So this is another great way for podcasters to really extend their, their reach and the discoverability of their content. And really the end of that, do I think, do I think what we’re proposing here going to replace the RSS feed? Is it going to replace anything? No, but I think it’s a great way of expanding your brand, increasing discovery and getting people who are going to subscribe either to, you know, to like listen to your station more often or are going to actually subscribe to your RSS feed. So they can go ahead and receive that content in the way they want to. It’s really moving, it’s Repurposing the broadcast cons into the podcast content in many different ways. So this is our first and it’s

[00:16:05] Bryan Barletta

smart. Yeah, but I think like today we’re talking about taking a podcast and turn it into a YouTube video. Right. Like so you had to add an asset and just go over there. Like that’s a lot of left.  The seems kind of like less left. I’m creating like a playlist, like everybody made a mixtape before you know exactly how to, how to accomplish that. And you know, and the same thing, like, if I post assets on social media and all of those things, I’m putting assets out there that I’m hoping somebody comes across when you think about it. Like being in a car, let’s say I’m in a rental car and I see it as tune in. And as I hired a Spotify it has all of those things on there and as the radio. Well, now that means that like I could be in three out of the four options that someone could listen to. Now granted, a lot of those interfaces aren’t always the best people who have access to them on their app are probably going to be more bought into them. But still it’s audio content with no additional work needed, other than organizing your order available in another place where people listen audio content. So instead of trying to push it into YouTube, where people do listen sometime, they definitely listen and tune in in iHeart and maybe streaming on your

[00:17:15] Rockie Thomas

website. Exactly, and that’s will work. And so this is our first iteration of this. We’ll go ahead and get into the actual dashboard. Are you able to see that

[00:17:25] Bryan Barletta

Bryan? I am, I am. And now Soundcheck is like an amalgamation of so many different pieces, right? There’s a live three, sixty five there is, you know, other aspects of the company that have all come together and you guys have done a really great job here. If I were to be a client, is live three sixty five, a separate product or process that I go through, or if I’m just a Soundcheck client, is this available to me?

[00:17:50] Rockie Thomas

Yeah, so if we do have some SoundStack Publishers who are we call the sounds, the enterprise side where we have a lot of our, you know, more of our enterprise services. And we also have our marketplace as you know. And so sometimes they start out on site on our enterprise solution, and then they want to go ahead and put a relay, or they want to go ahead and work within like three sixty five again. So Goliath versus vibe is run as a kind of a separate company within SoundStack. We do share some of the team members within the team, but it’s we do a lot of what we build. We try to make sure works across all of our different elements of our stack. So there is integration and a lot of our Publishers do work in both different environments. So yes,

[00:18:32] Bryan Barletta

very cool.

[00:18:33] Rockie Thomas

Yeah. So this is the live three sixty five dashboard. We were very fortunate the pantheon podcast, which is an awesome music network about podcasts. If you guys have, listen, you got to check it out. It’s for if you’re a music geek like I am, it’s by far one of my favorite group, a clustering of a podcast. And we started talking to them actually at evolutions. And we’re trying to figure out this whole notion of how we can extend out and increase discovery. And they’ve been really nice. We’ve been working through a couple concepts with them and they’re allowed me to go ahead and play around with their content today, which I’m. Thanks Peter, over there. I’m really fortunate for this. So this is the dashboard. It gives you an overview of it. And of course, you’re not going to be seeing a whole lot of Tesla, which I just went ahead and put this up. But this allows a broader, you know, a podcast where you want to start broadcasting to go ahead and put this in. But this is how

[00:19:24] Bryan Barletta

it is large,

[00:19:25] Rockie Thomas

total listening hours. I am so sorry. You’re right. I’m speaking, I’m speaking linear language to a podcast person.

[00:19:33] Bryan Barletta

So this is a demo playlist that you’ve created on here to walk through all apps and I’m seeing it right there. It’s live, it’s playing an episode of forty four minute long episode, and then after it says, it looks, it says thirty minutes ago showing what’s last played. Yeah, there was a two minute ad break. Yeah. As I’m obsessed with ads, I have to ask you something. Maybe be jumping ahead here. Is that a streaming ad? How do we measure? How is that ad measured

[00:19:57] Rockie Thomas

that the ad? It’s dynamic ad insertion. So we’re able to go and Right. If you don’t have any ads, which is we’re running that through our marketplace.  And then we do share the revenue back with the publisher, so it’s another way for them to monetize in

[00:20:14] Bryan Barletta

that that’s sold as a streaming ad or like a podcast downloaded

[00:20:17] Rockie Thomas

that would be sold as a streaming ad. Yes.

[00:20:20] Bryan Barletta

And if, let’s say I put this playlist together here, and my episode is this, do I upload a new media asset to this or can it pull from my RSS feed, the specific media file

[00:20:31] Rockie Thomas

that’s I knew you were going to ask that today we’re doing an upload of it so you won’t have to just upload it like an MP three. But in, in our product roadmap for this summer, we’re going to be pulling where you can automatically pull in your entire RSS feed. So our pre-populated is as well as well as providing if there say there’s metadata markers for advertising, we’ll be able to pull those in as well. So that means that it’s open, so that means it’s so it’s a little bit like inception. It’s kind of like an assertion within search that we’re able to go ahead and do it. So we’re pulling in the RSS and then we’re going to be able to keep the, you know, the mid row markers in there, and then also be able to insert with an additional add additional to that as well as around it as well.

[00:21:18] Bryan Barletta

. So all those ads are streaming, and so to really sell this, we will look, getting the audience behind. This is not easy, it’s not trivial. We’re like, I want to be clear here, getting people to like tune in to your station on tune in on iHeart, on your website or any of the other digital services. It’s not like just upload it and hope that it happens. You do have to put into effort to cultivate that audience there, but even single digit percentage of your inventory being served on here and using Soundcheck to serve both dynamically inserted ads that are built in to the download of a podcast and streaming ads here.  Blending that between a campaign, the immense amount of knowledge and information and additional data you can give to your buyers is fantastic. You can have two percent of your campaigns executed through streaming. And the knowledge you can gain from that on how to optimize your podcast campaigns. Would be absolutely worth it.

[00:22:15] Rockie Thomas

Yes, absolutely. And then as it is, and then we and so right now we’re utilizing the notion of tracks, but actually that we’re working on making that and we’re looking for partners that’s why pantheon is coming on with the perfect proof of concept with us. Because we, we are doing something new here and we want to make sure that we’re, we’re building something that we think is going to be valuable for the podcast industry, as well as the industry as a whole. So yeah, if one wants to go ahead and play around with us as well, please reach out because we’re, we, as you know, Bryan reiterate all the time. We don’t say that we know everything. We just try and keep on trying to do new things in the industry. And so this is kind of like our latest take on this. So the whole idea is that you upload these, which is really simple, just like anything else. And then also that I’m going to, I’m going to show you a little bit of how the scheduling works. So you can go ahead and create playlist. So here is a, I’m calling it the pantheon podcast top episodes. So here I was able to go ahead and create a playlist over here to the right, where I have their top episodes, I’m able to drag and drop spot breaks that I want to. And then I’m basically creating a radio station. We also have the notion of where you can actually schedule out an entire schedule for the whole week with a bunch of podcast playlist. Or you can just do what I’m doing right now, which is just auto DJ. Meaning that I just want to go ahead and just randomly grab all my tracks, are in there and create it so I don’t have to do anything. So I guess what I’m saying is that you can be as, as Micro, as you want to or you can be as macro. If you don’t want to go ahead and do anything with it as well. Then also that’s what I think it’s pretty cool. Is that we also provide ways for you to embed these players into your websites or social media or anything else. And there’s a lot of different ways we have small ones. It automatically makes it a small player. If you want to put it into the right rail, we can go as big as extra large if you want to. So there’s a lot of different ways we can do that. Then we also have a last played widget that’s also embeddable into sites. We want to utilize that too. So let’s actually add like everything else, you know, how we basically roll. We always have analytics. We have real time analytics, historical analytics here for, for your station, as well as when advertising is running through here, you can start seeing the impressions that you’re starting to receive and be able to see real time revenue as well. All within here. One thing that’s really interesting that we’re also, it’s kind of the speak towards a little bit of what’s interesting about pantheon because they are a little bit unique, is they are a music focused podcast network. And so, you know, they’re right now they’ve been utilizing small snippets of the music because, you know, within the creative commons license. Because as we all know, there’s been tons of panels that shows about utilizing copyrighted music within podcast in a download fashion. We’re actually, we’re working with them as they’re, we call it a mixtape. So what this means is that we’re able to incorporate a cue sheet, and now they’re starting to reproduce some of their podcasts with four pieces of music. So that means that and granted this is only, it’s probably more specific for a pantheon type of podcaster that has, you know, music within the podcast, that’s what they’re speaking about. But now we can actually allow pantheon to put in the large, full blown pieces of music to go ahead and listen to. And then we’re able to go ahead through this teamsheet sheet. We’re able to cover the royalties and copyright obligations to the professional rights organizations like SoundExchange ascap’s BMI, C sack . We’re also licensed in Canada as well as the U.K., so you’re fully covered from a copyright royalty obligation standpoint as well.

[00:26:14] Bryan Barletta

Hi. This is so cool and it’s the type of thing that I’d be excited to play around with. First off, I want to ask, and I think I know the answer already.  If let’s say this is a new idea for so many people. If I was interested in just getting a playground environment to play around with it and find comfort with it and see if it’s for me, is that something that sounds like

[00:26:32] Rockie Thomas

offers? Yes, we offer a full seven day free trial of library, sixty five. So anybody can go in there and, and try this out for what we call non copyright packages. So say for instance, you don’t have any music, I guess the Pantheon’s a little bit unique because they do, they’re such a music focused, you know, podcast network. But if

[00:26:53] Bryan Barletta

you, but there’s a lot of those there and I think that’s such a killer thing. And there’s a lot of licensed content. There’s comedy content that’s licensed by these music directories too. And, and all of these things, there’s so much value with all of this.

[00:27:04] Rockie Thomas

And we actually just got coverage for those people as well. That’s actually, that means that’s a different rights organization than your normal, you know, SoundExchange folks. And we, and we also have gmr. So we actually are, we’re very well versed in copyright licensing. I always say that we have three of the top five guys besides David Oxenford, who work for us who really no rights and when it comes to music. Because and then we also provide copyright royalty reporting for our Publishers on the other side of the business. So we know, Yeah, we know, we know music rights really, really well. So this is kind of like the first and so then when you go ahead and come over here. So this is what you know.  Like you can go ahead and hit play and it can go ahead and start listening to it.  And this is what somebody would be hearing on the other side and they be able to go ahead and start listening to listen to the podcast content in a different way.

[00:28:00] Bryan Barletta

Very cool. Yes.

[00:28:03] Rockie Thomas

So it, it is different. It’s new. I’m really hoping that people in the podcast industry, I will say it one more time. I know you  guys love your RSS. I keep it. It’s

[00:28:16] Bryan Barletta

got to be a mixture. He said youtube’s not giving us any RSS, and this is talking. This isn’t less data like, oh becomes, this is more data, you still own it, you still own the distribution you . And in fact, this is, I mean, look, if, if all the Podcasting could agree to move to streaming where we are today, I think it might be a healthy part for the industry and I’m sure make your life easier on so many things I know on, on mine the standards and specifications of video lend themselves to streaming audio incredibly well and terribly yes to Podcasting. Podcasting is a silo on that and so exploring this is really exciting and it gives people the opportunity to try something new. Yeah, the cost structure like I don’t want you to have to go too in the weeds on this here, but like, I don’t understand how something like this works. I create a twenty four hour playlist. I scheduled all my content for a month without licensing. What does something like that cost? And then let’s say that every show or I want to add music in like I have no concept of how music licensing works. Yes.

[00:29:20] Rockie Thomas

So you get it. So what’s really interesting is that you could create an entire radio station that’s a mixture of podcast content as well as music, if you wanted to, to really create an entire brand if you wanted to, for your podcast network. And so also what’s really interesting is that when you see all these tracks here, like the story of Fleetwood Mac, normally that’s a music track and we count every single performance on line three, sixty five, because we have a royalty obligation to make sure creators are paid are compensated where we’re very, a lot of people in the industry, they try to get around not paying, SoundExchange, or they try to get around this. We’re the only company that live three sixty five that actually still provides this type of licensing because we truly believe that we have got to make sure whether it’s podcasts, whether it’s musicians that we compensate creators.  Because if we don’t subsidize the creators, the creators go away, the creators go away, we no longer have an industry. So it’s, and it’s expensive, but we believe truly in that. So what’s interesting is that we will know like how many times the story of Fleetwood Mac was actually listen to somebody because to us it’s a performance. So we are, we have sat not only on the, the total listening hours, side of consumption of your actual station. We actually also know how many times the story of Fleetwood Mac was actually consumed by a person. So it’s a different way of looking at, you know, it’s not really pocket, it’s really content analytics. But we have two different ways that we can actually look at consumption and that we know we’re really looking forward to providing that type of feedback for the podcast. Publishers, so that’s what I have today. You know, it’s , I thank you for allowing me, Bryan, and thank you for having that. We love the fact that we have a platform to kind of fill a safe space within the industry where we can share some of the the, what we call, the beer drinking kind of ideas that we have that we’re able to really start to make into fruition just because we have a lot of these elements already in how we can go and do this, but if I can do one message to the podcast people is that please understand that your content has value and that the value of your content needs to be shared and not just in iTunes and not just in Spotify or any other place that you’re going to put it. But really start thinking about ways that you can repackage your content in a way that’s going to help discovery. And then hopefully also help you with revenue generation I

[00:31:55] Bryan Barletta

it’s, it’s such a smart idea. And the last thing I want to just touch on real quick is I bet you tune in iHeart and all the other places that can receive this type of feed. Yep. Get less pitches from New feeds, looking for promotion of their content. Then they do get pitches for podcasts, looking to promote their content. I would say this is an opportunity to take advantage of buying into somebody else’s infrastructure in a way that is low lift for you and get something immense out of it. Whether it’s new audience that could convert or even just listen to you there with Better analytics than Podcasting, killer and thank you guys for innovating on their site.

[00:32:35] Rockie Thomas

And we provide all the lists and links down here. So whenever you create a station, you can, there’s multiple formats, you can go and share it. So it does work with all the aggregation and distribution platforms are what we used to call yellow pages or wipes back in the day. So yeah it’s, it’s very easy to go and utilize and share. So if anybody is interested please go to, you can reach out to me. I’m pretty easy to  find. But also you can go to Live365.com,  and start your seven day trial and see if this is something that you want to do, just seeing it from a pricing standpoint. So I’m a big fan of pricing is. So if you don’t have any music in there, we call it a non copyright package. It’s really affordable. It’s nineteen dollars a month. Are our lowest package for if you do have music and there is some copyrights in there is fifty nine dollars a month. So and this just because we do pay a good actually almost all of that is going to the creators and the music folks on the actual royalties and copyrights. So that’s the major reason because of the largest jump on that, but yeah, so it’s

[00:33:37] Bryan Barletta

good, incredibly cool. Rockie, thank you so much for joining me on this Deepdive. If you want to learn more, check out SoundStack.com. There’ll be more links in the descriptions, of course. Check out all of the other product Deepdives. We’ve done with SoundStack and see tune because we have more coming up soon with a special live one episode podcast movement. So if you’re there, definitely check it out. Thank you so much. Thank you, Bryan.

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