Podcasts are Coming to YouTube Music

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Over the past several months, maybe year or so, I’ve covered YouTube a few times. And over on the podcast host, I have made arguments for being on YouTube. And if you are in the…I don’t want to add video to my podcast camp, there’s good news that came out of Hot Pod Summit ‘23 in Brooklyn, New York.

The head of YouTube podcasting, Kai Chuck was in attendance and announced that podcasts are coming to YouTube music. But that’s not all he announced. 

And so in today’s quick news related episode, I am going to tell you everything that Kai Chuck announced at Hot Pod Summit ‘23 and what that means for you  At the end, I will give you a little information on a new program I have out,  as well as the direction of this podcast moving forward. 

Having a profitable podcast is like having any other profitable business. You need to make money. Sure, but you also need to grow. You need to spend your time wisely, and you need predictability. A couple of sponsors won’t make you a profitable podcaster, but having systems to stay consistent, create steady growth, and generate predictable income will. That’s what you’ll get with this show.

Hi. I’m your host, Joe Casabona. And my podcasts have been profitable from Day 1. I’ll share everything I know with you here on the Profitable Podcaster.

Okay. So first, let’s get to the big announcement. They have the full text over on Pod News, which I will link to in the show notes for this episode. The show notes will be over at [profitablepodcaster.fm/310]. That’s 310, but the gist is that both audio and video podcasts are coming to YouTube music in the near future, allowing for more discoverability and accessibility. 

However, this feature will be only available in the US app first. So, that’s an important note. Another important note is that people will be able to listen even if their phones are locked or they aren’t in the app. This is notable because both for YouTube and YouTube music, that is a premium feature. You need to be part of YouTube premium in order to continue to listen to videos or music without having the app open. 

To make this work financially, some are reporting that this feature will actually be ad supported, which means if you’re listening from the lock screen of your phone, for example, you will hear probably dynamically inserted ads.

Now, this is definitely exciting news ss Google Podcast’s, death feels imminent. but as Pod News also  points out, YouTube music is not YouTube. There are only about 80 million premium subscribers on YouTube music. That sounds like a lot, but that’s versus the 2.5 billion active users on YouTube. 

Now for reference, right? Cuz that’s a tough compare. It’s a paid feature versus just active users. But,  Spotify has 489 million active users and 205 million premium subscribers. So you can see those numbers are a lot closer together, and the premium subscribers is double that of YouTube music.  

Podnews also expresses frustration with the US only rollout. Now, I am US based and therefore biased, but I can see both sides. YouTube likely wants to test their largest, most stable market before rolling it out in other places. But this is a limiting growth factor, right? Especially if you’re not a US-Centric podcast,  you’re gonna have a hard time using or getting people to use the app.

Still, this is a big step forward for YouTube and podcasting. YouTube music might serve as a testing ground for a wider YouTube rollout later, or if YouTube music becomes the defacto place to listen to music and podcast for YouTube, they may see a rapidly growing user base, right? 

So, that’s important to note that most people probably aren’t using YouTube music right now. They’re probably just listening in YouTube. But if YouTube music becomes the place for audio only content, YouTube will likely push users in that direction. 

But that’s not the only announcement that they made at the summit. There are also more podcasting tools coming to Creator Studio. Creator Studio, if you don’t know, is the place where you go to upload videos and set up live streams and make posts to your YouTube channel. 

So, shortly before the summit and confirmed by YouTube, there’s also a new podcasting tool rolling out in YouTube’s Creator Studio. Podcasters will be able to add a new podcast to their channel, which makes it clearer to YouTube that the content should be included in the podcast’s section of YouTube. And in YouTube music, if you’ve been to the podcast section of YouTube, you’ll know that it’s a little bit confused, right? Sometimes it has, just like the morning show or whatever, not the morning show. That’s the Apple TV show, Good Morning America, or like NBC News clips, which are decidedly not podcasts.

There will also be a badge specifically for podcasters. And this is a great step forward, but it still requires podcasters to upload their episodes separately in the studio. But that might not be the case for very long because the last note in the announcement is this, “Later this year, we’ll offer support for creators to upload their audio podcasts via RSS feeds directly to YouTube.”

Now, there are some questions around this. Will it pull in the full back catalog or will it just kind of pull in episodes from that point forward? But, in my humble opinion, this is the most important step YouTube can make towards being a true podcast platform and directory.

RSS is at the core of how podcasting works, and while Spotify has decided to break that mold, it’s good to see that YouTube at this point has plans to incorporate podcast RSS. This is absolutely the easiest path. This is absolutely the easiest path for most podcasters to get on YouTube, and it makes YouTube’s job of identifying podcasts easier. Plus, with explicit support for non-video content hosted outside of YouTube, it shows that they want to play with podcasters and not own podcasters.

All in all, these announcements are the most exciting ones to come out of YouTube since the leak of that PDF around this time last year. It’s great to see YouTube push podcasting forward. And it will mean better discoverability for podcasters and hopefully easier monetization. 

If you wanna read that article and get some more links, I will link that in the show notes. Well, that was a written to be read article.  

Now, as far as your episode idea of the week, you could like I did here, do a news story, a related news story for your niche. If, especially if you’re doing a mini-podcast, you wanna make sure that you are showing people that you are an authority in this space, in this niche. And part of that is showing them that you are staying up to date on the latest news so that they don’t have to because you’re relaying that news to them. So you wanna make your listeners the source for news in your niche. So pick a news story. Read it, summarize it, and release it as an episode. 

The last thing I wanna talk about is  my new program, my Podcast Liftoff coaching program. it was the Podcast Liftoff Playbook. You may have heard me talk about it here on the show. But it’s moving. And actually today, as this episode comes out, March 9th, 2023, it has new pricing. So it’s currently,  $1097. you get 90 minutes of coaching with me, and then you get access to workshops every month for a year. You also get access to the hundred or so videos in the video library. These are pre-recorded videos for everything from like picking the right gear to submitting your show to Apple podcasts, to how to monetize and things like that. 

I haven’t done a very good job of talking about that on this show. I really wanted to focus on building the audience, but I think this is a really valuable  product for me. And so I’ve been emailing the My list over the last few days. So if you’re on the mailing list, you’ve seen this pricing change. But moving forward, I wanna try to talk about it a little bit more, and give you previews of some of the content in it. 

And so I just wanna make really clear. I think it’s a really valuable program. I think especially if you are a coach, an author, or a course creator where building your authority is something that you can use your podcast for, I think this will be super valuable for you. 

So if you are interested, you can head over to [podcastliftoff.com/playbook]  to learn more about that. So there you go. [podcastliftoff.com/playbook] 

But, thanks so much for listening to the Profitable Podcaster. 

If you have any questions or you wanna submit feedback, you can do that at [profitablepodcaster.fm/feedback]. For all the show notes, you can go to [profitable podcaster.fm/310].

And until next time. I can’t wait to see what you make.