The BBC’s ‘new shows’ and the bio-duck

The Rest is The BBC

For a good while now, the podcast industry has been justifiably concerned about the BBC’s entry into the advertising market, after they announced they would soon like to add ads to their podcasts when carried on third party platforms. The worry is that they’ll cannibalise the existing market, in which there’s already loads of spare inventory. In a world where only around 25% of the possible ad spots are bought, suddenly adding on thousands of hours of publicly funded content added to the pot might not be a great idea.

As part of the response, some ad-funded production houses proposed that they might get access to BBC Sounds in return for a fee, giving them a bit of extra income and exposure on another mainstream platform. The BBC seems to be moving down this road a little, and so the latest shows to be ‘acquired’ for BBC Sounds in this way are the little known ‘The Rest is History’ and ‘The Rest is Football’. What the Beeb taketh from Gary Lineker through losing MOTD, the BBC giveth through a commission fee for his podcasts. They’ve done similar deals with Tortoise Media and ‘Weird in the Wade’ which won Best History Podcast at this year’s British Podcast Awards.

So there’s a bit of give and take here, and the BBC says the deal demonstrates how it’s committed to growing the British podcast industry, with over 3 million listens per month for acquisitions. Er yeah I suppose so. I’ll buy that in the case of ‘Weird in the Wade’, which will be exposed to a whole new audience, but in the case of ‘The Rest Is..’, the obvious attraction is to pull some of their already massive audience into the BBC Sounds app and keep them there. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – it helps people to discover the content they’ve paid for through the TV licence, but let’s not pretend that adding ‘The Rest is..’ to the BBC’s stable is some sort of benevolent act to support a fledgling industry.

Podcast Bros in the White House

There’s more great news from Donald Trump’s world, where leading podcasters are going to be invited to the press briefing room. Rejoice! The best of the podcast world are being given access to the seat of power to ask their questions and challenge the President through their sharp incite and original perspective.

Oh, hang on. The podcasters to be invited will be people like Joe Rogan, and Michael Knowles who co-hosts a show with someone called Donald Trump Junior. And they’ll be taking the place of actual trained journalists in the press room. It was all going so well.

I tell you what though, podcasting has become so powerful that a top podcaster is even being considered as America’s next head of the Secret Service. Former agent Dan Bongino, who owns one of the world’s squarest shaped heads and hosts The Dan Bongino Show, is an obvious candidate for the job as he’s an ardent Trump supporter and said that the security service didn’t do a good job when someone shot part of his ear off.

At this rate, podcasters will soon be running the world, which can only be a good thing, right?

Daniel Ek in depth

If you really want to understand where Spotify is heading and the strategy behind their recent move into video, founder Daniel Ek sat down with two of the world’s biggest podcasters – Colin and Samir, for a long and multi-layered chat. They’ve covered the future of podcast monetisation, Spotify’s ‘battle’ with YouTube, and reflected on whether paying huge money to people like Harry and Meghan was a good idea. Spoiler alert – it was a terrible idea. But despite being a terrible idea, Daniel felt he had to make a big noise and inject some energy into the medium. So we should all be grateful. And when I say ‘all of us’, I mean Harry and Meghan should be very grateful. He doesn’t regret it.

What we’ve been listening to this week

This week saw the annual meeting of the eminent Acoustical Society of America. This is a major date in the calendar for scientists in the field of sound, with sexy sounding reports called things like ‘The Sound power of NASA’s lunar rockets’ and groundbreaking advances in therapy and voice recognition. At the same time, their website works hard at making the whole thing look as boring as possible.

Well, the big news from this year’s conference is that they still don’t know what the bio-duck is. What? You don’t know either? The bio-duck is a noise that washeard deep under the ocean in 1982 off New Zealand and has never been explained. It sounds a bit like a duck (but not a lot) and is very regular in its pattern. Could it be whales? Aliens? A whole new previously undiscovered mega-species?

For a while now, most people have decided it was from minke whales. The ASA says that they’re still not sure, but that the sound has now been detected multiple times from different ‘speakers’ across both New Zealand and Australia. Hang on, I’ve now written three paragraphs to tell you that a noise you hadn’t heard before and which doesn’t really sound like a duck might be from whales but might not. This could be a new low for the ‘What have we been listening to this week’ section of the newsletter. We’ve learnt nothing here. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.

What we’ve been doing this week

Celebrating Tunnocks.

At Fresh Air Towers, we’re massive fans of everything Tunnocks make. From tea cakes to Caramel biscuits. Nik – Head of Darts – once consumed a whole packet of twelve Tunnocks Tea Cakes after a stressful client meeting and earned himself a certificate in the toilet. Michaela – Director of Content and Head of Loud Nose Blows – recently stopped an important client meeting because they’d put a whole plate of Caramel biscuits in front of her and she couldn’t concentrate until she ate one. So we’re thrilled that they’ve quadrupled their profits.

Thank you Tunnocks for everything you do. Apart from the Caramel Log which just feels wrong.