Is It Chocolate for Breakfast?
Merry Christmas!
Too early? Not at all. It’s really, really cold outside, Swindon’s lights have been turned on, and today is officially ‘chocolate for breakfast’ day when all rules go out of the window.
It’s also the first day of ‘The A-Pogue-Colypse’ – Fresh Air’s 2023 version of ‘Whamageddon’. The whole team is challenged to go as long as possible in December without hearing ‘A Fairytale of New York’ in order to win a coveted certificate in the office toilet. Admittedly, the sad death of Shane McGowan yesterday made the game a little more difficult, but I stress that the choice of song was made last week.
As regular readers will know, a certificate in the Fresh Air lavatory is the highest honour that we can bestow, and so the team take the game extremely seriously every year. If you do come and see us, please remember to visit the little boy’s/girl’s room and admire the previous achievements that have been immortalised all around you. From sourcing a car with 18 hours’ notice, to admirable use of passive aggression on a zoom call, it really does showcase the talent across the team.
In one of my previous workplaces, we had a lavatory right in the middle of the office with strict instructions that, due to being adjacent to people’s desks, it was for Number 1’s only. This was genuinely included in every new-joiner’s onboarding talk. The only person ever to break the rule was England’s World Cup hat-trick hero Geoff Hurst, who came in for a recording and so hadn’t been fully briefed. Winning the World Cup means you can do whatever business you like wherever you like, and we all forgave him, but he should probably try to drink more water.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, the newsletter.
Top Podcasts of 2023
The other reason you know it’s nearly Christmas is that Apple and Spotify have published their Top Podcasts of 2023. Apple tells us that their biggest shows in the UK are:
1. Diary of a CEO
2. The Rest Is Politics
3. Off Menu
4. The News Agents
5. The Rest is History
6. Zoe Science & Nutrition
7. Feel Better, Live more
8. The Therapy Couch
9. Sh*gged Married Annoyed
10. Desert Island Discs
Of course, this leaves room for lots of bias and discrepancies. Podcasts exclusive to Spotify don’t feature on Apple’s chart, and the Apple audience tends to be older and more affluent than the general podcast audience. Hence Desert Island Discs.
Meanwhile, Spotify’s list of top UK podcasts in 2023 looks like this:
1. The Joe Rogan Experience*
2. The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
3. Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster
4. Call Her Daddy*
5. The Fellas*
6. Times News Briefing
7. Rob Beckett and Josh Widdicombe’s Parenting Hell*
8. Sh**ged Married Annoyed
9. JaackMaate’s Happy Hour*
10.?Saving Grace
*Exclusive to Spotify
So, Steven Bartlett reigns supreme as the highest ranking non alleged-racist and anti-vax conspiracy theorist in both charts, but there’s a surprising lack of any shows starting with ‘The Rest Is’ in Spotify’s list. The main conclusion is that Spotify’s strategy and audience is much more about entertainment than the pointy-headed Apple listenership. As a general rule, when planning where to spend your promotional budget, it’s a handy guide. There’s more great analysis by Adam Bowie on this link
Further into the Apple list are the UK’s most shared shows of 2023, which is a really fascinating insight. Five out of the ten are health-based, including the top two:
1. The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett: “E209: Doctor Tim Spector: The Shocking New Truth About Weight Loss, Calories & Diets!”
2. Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee: “Fasting, Hormones & Menopause: Why Women Need A Different Approach To Men with Dr Mindy Pelz”
3. “Israel At War”
4. ZOE Science & Nutrition: “How ultra-processed foods wreak havoc on your body”
5. Leading: “Kate Raworth: Doughnut economics and thriving in balance”
6. Huberman Lab: “What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health”
7. The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling: “Plotted In Darkness”
8. The Rest Is History: “Oppenheimer: The Father of the Atom Bomb”
9. Just One Thing - with Michael Mosley: “Food Special with Tim Spector”
10.? The High Performance Podcast: “Eddie Howe: Turnaround: how to improve a culture”
I think it’s fair to say that if someone sends you a Whatsapp sharing the “What alcohol does to your body, brain and health” episode, they’re probably trying to tell you something. But Apple listeners in particular are listening to podcasts to learn things and improve themselves. People aren’t sharing comedy or sport episodes as much as shows that will make you a better person. When we work with brands, we’re always stressing this angle – if you can create a piece of valuable content that will leave people feeling better informed and grateful to you for having created it, you’re onto a really valuable winner. And the best way to do that is podcasting.
BBC Podcasts
The British podcast industry owes a lot to the BBC, as we all do. They kept the concept alive in the UK during the dark years of the early 2010s when podcasting was really just a radio-on-demand channel where my dad could catch up with The Archers. The number of wins and nominations at the recent British Podcast Awards also shows that they’re still at least partly responsible for setting and raising the quality bar in audio storytelling. It can also be argued, as it is here, that the BBC is one of the reasons why the UK podcast market is much smaller than it should be, so it’s swings and roundabouts.
Anyway, as it quietly plans for a potential licence fee-less future, audio is one of the BBC’s major potential sources of commercial funding. BBC Studios recently announced that they’re expanding their operations to make audio for the external commercial market, and subsequently hired the head of Wondery UK to run the team. This has not been universally popular with the independent production community who can see an aggressive, highly resourced, publicly funded and oven-ready competitor landing squarely on its lawn.
With BBC Sounds having such a wealth of content, Acast have long been selling ads on their podcasts in overseas markets. If you’re a brand looking to reach English-speaking anglophiles in foreign countries, you could do a lot worse than placing ads around Desert Island Discs or Newscast. In fact, this year Fresh Air made a series of mini-podcasts for the Department of International Trade encouraging overseas investors to bring their money to the UK.
Now the BBC has decided that subscriptions are at least partly the way forward. Listeners outside the UK can sign up to ‘BBC Podcasts Premium’ on Apple for a curated selection of ad-free audio shows in exchange for a monthly fee. The service is now available across the world, except in the UK where the BBC would prefer you to use BBC Sounds, for reasons I’ve whinged about in previous newsletters. For now at least, shows will be available outside the UK both on subscription and free with ads, and the beeb will be closely watching to see which route brings in the most cash.
?Here are this week's recommends...
Richard Blake goes to Gary Lineker again...?
The 'Rest is (insert subject here)' has found a winning format that is hard to break and this, the latest version, is an absolute cracker. I wish I could say was getting stale, but I loved it. A few things they get right that sound easy but are really really hard - the chemistry and knowledge of the two hosts. You feel like you're round the table with two smart, kind, funny people. They come at the same subject from different angles that add to each other, they sound like they know and like each other, and each other's voice balances each other out nicely. Marina Hyde is posh, acerbic, insightful and?funny; Richard Osman is a gentle, TV , entertainment geek. Second, it feels like an insider expert view of today's cultural moments to be able to blag your way into any conversation about I'm a Celeb, Jeff Bezos and Squid Game without having to make the effort to actually watch anything.? Third, the sponsorship (with ITVX) is entirely relevant, additive to the show (they talk about great shows they've watched and like) and delivered naturally and without sounding scripted.? Annoyingly, I'm going to listen again. And enjoy it. And it'll be in the top ten for weeks.?
?
Martin Poyntz-Roberts saves the day with some comedy true-crime...
I’ll put this put this out there right now: I am a massive fan of James Acaster. So much so that I listened to his ‘James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes’ with my eldest son, who was hooked after the opening line: When I was a baby, I urinated into my own mouth. He makes me cry with laughter. I hadn’t heard about Springleaf until I noticed it was already number one in the Spotify charts. So off I went on my morning dog walk with this new series playing in my ears.
So, being an Acaster fan, I am aware of his amazing double-life: part comedian, part undercover cop. This has surfaced in previous stand-up routines and so now this is a full-on story with him in character, but what’s real and what’s true? Who knows?
It’s early days, obviously, but personally I prefer his straight story telling rather than a sitcom style. But as I said, it’s early days and so I think it could be more me, than him. So, I will persevere. I’m sure I will end up crying with laughter once again. Fingers crossed.
What we've been listening to this week
The Pogues of course.
Not Fairy Tale of New York, as that’s now against the rules, but this piece of insane, joyful genius. It’s difficult to count the total number of WTF moments, but it’s a lot, and surely counts as the most fun anyone’s ever had making a music video. RIP Shane.
What we've been doing?this week
Packing.
On Wednesday afternoon, Fresh Air Towers became a factory for card writing, box-making and labelling, as Christmas presents were assembled and packed. Richard – Director of Pressing Send on the Email – became our temporary Head Elf, organising us into teams, monitoring productivity and adjusting the system when bottle necks occurred. We put the Christmas music on, ate mince pies and drank the mulled wine that Richard had made in his own slow cooker (brought into the office specially for the day).
Oli and Nik – Fresh Air’s two youngest staff members - stopped halfway through to build themselves a castle out of the boxes, and the only reason it didn’t become a den was the lack of a duvet to go over the top. Beckie – Head of Organising Everything Everywhere all at Once – was in charge of printing the postage labels and then cutting them out with scissors. Only after she’d done this for about 140 parcels did we remember that we’d got a guillotine in the drawer. She took it very well, largely thanks to the mulled wine.
By the end of the day, everyone was somewhat delirious, and so the standard of handwriting in the cards or straight-ness of the boxes is directly related to what time of day they were written / packed.