Apple Podcasts will shortly open to the public but for podcasters like me, we’ve been having fun with Apple’s first major update to their podcasting backend in several years, and it hasn’t really been that much fun. Before talking about why I’m putting so much time and effort into this at all, I’ll go through the highlights of my experiences to date.

Fun Times at the Podcasts Connect Mk2

Previously I’d used the Patreon/Breaker integration but that fell apart when Breaker was acquired by Twitter and the truth was that very, very few Patrons utilised the feature and the Breaker app was never big enough to attract any new subscribers. The Breaker audio integration and content has since been removed even though the company had the service taken over (to an extent) as it was one less thing for me to upload content to. In a way…this has been a bit déjà-vu and “here we go again…” ¹

The back-catalogue of ad-free episodes as well as bonus content between Sleep, Pragmatic, Analytical and Causality adds up to 144 individual episodes.

For practically every one I had the original project files which I restored and re-exported in WAV format then uploaded them via the Apple Podcasts updated interface. (The format must be WAV or FLAC and Stereo, which is funny for a Mono podcast like mine and added up to about 50GB of audio) It’s straight-forward enough although there were a few annoying glitches that after using it for 10 days were still unresolved. Each of the key issues I encountered: (there were others but some were resolved at time of writing this so I’ve excluded those)

1. Ratings and Reviews made a brief appearance then disappeared and still haven’t come back (I’m sure they will at some point)
2. Not all show analytics time spans work (Past 60 days still doesn’t work, everything is blank)
3. Archived shows in the Podcast-drop-down list appear but don’t in the main overview even when displaying ‘All’
4. The order you save and upload audio files, changes the episode date such that if you create the episode meta-data, set the date, then upload the audio the episode date defaults to todays date. It does this AFTER you leave the page though, so it’s not obvious, but if you upload the audio THEN set the date it’s fine.
5. The audio upload hit/miss ratio for me was about 8 out of 10, meaning for every 10 episodes I uploaded, 2 got stuck. What do I mean? The episode WAV file uploads, completes and then the page shows the following:

…and the “Processing Audio” never actually finishes. Hoping this was just a back-log issue with high end user demand I uploaded everything and came back minutes, hours then days later and finally after waiting five days I set about to try to unstick it.

Five Days of Waiting and seeing this I gave up waiting for it to resolve itself…

The obvious thing to try: select “Edit” and delete then re-upload the audio. Simple enough, keeps the meta-data intact (except the date I had to re-save after every audio re-upload) then I waited another few days. Same result. Okay, so that didn’t work at all.

Next thing to try, re-create the entire episode again from scratch! So I did that for the 30 episodes that were stuck. Finally I see this (in some cases up to an hour later):

And sure enough…

Of course, that only worked for 25 episodes out of the 30 I uploaded a second time. I then had to wash-rinse-repeat for the 5 that had failed for a second time and repeated until they all worked. I’d hate to think about doing this on a low-bandwidth connection like I had a decade ago. Even at 40Mbps up it took a long time for the 2GB+ episodes of Pragmatic. The entire exercise has probably taken me 4 work-days of effort end to end, or about 32 hours of my life. There’s no way to delete the stuck episodes either so I now have a small collection of “Archived” non-episodes. Oh well…

Why John…Why?

I’ve read a lot of differing opinions from podcasters about Apples latest move and frankly I think the people most dismissive are those with significant existing revenue streams for their shows, or those that have already made their money and don’t need/want income for their show(s). Saying that you can reduce fees by using Stripe and your own website integration, by using Memberful, Patreon, or more recently by streaming Satoshis (very cool BTW), all have barriers to entry for the Podcast creator that can not be ignored.

For me, I’m a geek and I love that stuff so sure, I’ll have a crack at that (looks over at the Raspberry Pi Lightning Node on desk with a nod) but not everyone is like me (probably a good thing on balance).

So far as I can tell, Apple Podcasts is currently the most fee-expensive way for podcasters to get support from listeners. It’s also a walled garden², but then so is Patreon, Spotify/Anchor (if you’re eligible and I’m not…for now), Breaker, and building your own system with Memberful or Stripe website integration requires developer chops most don’t have so isn’t an option. By far the easiest (once you figure out BitCoin/Lightning and set up your own Node) is actually streaming Sats, but that knowledge ramp is tough and lots of people HATE BitCoin. (That’s another, more controversial story).

Apple Podcasts has one thing going for it: It’s going to be the quickest, easiest way for someone to support your show coupled with the biggest audience in a single Podcasting ecosystem. You can’t and shouldn’t ignore that, and that’s why I’m giving this a chance. The same risks apply to Apple as to all the other walled gardens (Patreon, Breaker, Spotify/Anchor etc): you could be kicked-off the platform, they could stop supporting their platform slowly, sell it off or shut it down entirely and if any of that happens, your supporters will mostly disappear with it. That’s why no-one should rely on it as the sole pathway for support.

It’s about being present and assessing after 6-12 months. If you’re not in it, then you might miss out on supporters that love your work and want to support it and this is the only way they’re comfortable doing that. So I’m giving this a shot and when it launches for Beta testing will be looking for any fans that want to give it a try so I can tweak anything that needs tweaking, and will post publicly when it goes live for all. Hopefully all of my efforts (and Apples) are worth it for all concerned.

Time will tell. (It always does)