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You're listening to Up an Octave, a podcast by Sonivia, the podcasting agency that believes that women and non binary people deserve to take up space in the podcasting industry because our thoughts, voices, and stories matter. Here you'll learn how to make dope podcasts that inspire, educate, convert, and most importantly, make your voice shine.
I'm your host, Rue Spence, and I'm here to take podcasting up an octave. Let's get into it.
Welcome back to Up an Octave. If you are anything like me, you wait until the end of the year, every year, for your Spotify wrapped. Well, this gets even more exciting when you are a content creator. And if this is your first year of making content, make sure that you are checking out the Spotify Wrapped for Creators.
Which has a lot of really exciting and helpful insights. They can teach you about the content you're making and how to make next year even better. So let's dive in with what we can learn from Spotify wrapped both for ourselves as creators, but also. What trends we're seeing and what I am staring into my crystal ball to predict for next year.
By the end of this episode, you're going to have 10 things to watch for to make sure that your podcast is primed for success in 2025. Without feeling like you have to reinvent the wheel and without having to feel like you've got to figure it out by yourself. That's what I'm here for, babe. Alright, so the first thing that we're going to talk about is what are people listening to?
What are people consuming on Spotify? And the asterisk that goes with this entire episode is that this is data only for Spotify. If you are not sure where the majority of your listeners are coming from, it's worth checking into that. Because, like, so for example, my show, Spotify's only about 25 percent of my listeners.
I reign supreme on Apple, but also I direct so much traffic through my website that that embedded player is where most of my traction comes from. So Spotify's not necessarily the most indicative of what's working. who my listeners are, et cetera, et cetera. But that may not be the case for you. So I think it's still a super valuable tool and it's a good way to kind of check the temperature of podcasting as a whole.
So the top podcasters on Spotify this year were the Joe Rogan experience. Of course, while I have a lot of feelings about Joe Rogan as a whole, and since you're here hanging out with me, you probably do too. There are things that we can learn from him, because the man runs a successful podcasting empire and is a lot of people's first thought when they think of a podcaster.
Some of the things that we can learn from him are the power of leveraging a guest on your podcast, and most of the people who are listening to Joe Rogan's show are not there necessarily because they love Joe Rogan himself, but they are there because He is having conversations with a lot of really interesting people.
And so with, in his last, what, five episodes, he Interviewed Derek from MorePlatesMoreDates, I don't know what that is, but I looked at it, I think he's like a fitness guy. And he has almost a million followers on Instagram. He has recently spoken with Mike Rowe, who had the TV show Dirty Jobs. Yeah, he's got people who are like TV hosts.
The thing that he's doing well is he's getting people who have a big following of their own and pulling them in. Going, hey, if you like this guy who has a million Instagram followers, he's posting about I was just on the Joe Rogan experience. And so new people are always coming in there. I would be so curious to see how many of his listeners are listening week over week or how many are flooding in, flooding out, flooding in, flooding out.
That is something that I would be so curious to see. Something else he does really well is he has mastered his marketing. And that is because, do not mistake this, do not compare yourself against Joe Rogan. He has a team. He has a studio. Which is, I'm guessing, probably in some kind of a soundstage or something.
Uh, that he's getting really high quality audio. He and his guests are both using Shure SM7Bs. Um, so they've got 400 microphones. This is not who you need to be comparing yourself against. The other thing that I think is really interesting is that if you go on to IMDb, I'm just seeing, so I'm on Joe Rogan's IMDb right now.
The Joe Rogan experience is listed as having 1133 episodes between 2009 and 2022. So, in just playing the numbers game, he's gonna be one of the biggest. Because, say, that, you know, Each episode gets one listen per week. That's still over a thousand downloads just by accident. Something that we can learn from that is that having a wide and deep breadth of content available is just going to boost your numbers.
If people find you and fall in love with you, they're going to binge your show. That's one of my favorite things I can always see when I get new listeners who are really into me because I see that I have a spike. In every single episode, there's like X amount of listens on this, this, this, this, this, this, this episode.
It's not just, oh, here's the boost for the week on this one new episode. So, say someone discovers Joe Rogan for the first time, they fall in love with him for whatever reason, and they listen to 25 of his episodes. If you don't have 25 episodes, you're not going to get those listens. So continue to put out content so that people can mass consume it.
Uh, that's going to help you get those numbers up and it's also going to boost the algorithm, which is going to then get you more discoverable. So that's something to know about Joe Rogan. The other thing I'm spending way more time, uh, probably messing up all of the future ads on my phone and web browser.
So. This is the sacrifice that I make for you. I didn't know he has, this is Spotify branded, a Spotify video podcast that's just called JRE Clips. So Joe Rogan Experience Clips, also hosted by Joe Rogan. He's listed as the publisher. But this is a Spotify video podcast. It's specifically on Spotify. So he's got 15, 14, 15 minute clips, eight minute clips of him talking to these guests.
And I think that that is brilliant. Because, let me, let me click on one, ooooh, because he's got, here's a six and a half minute clip that then is sending you to the full episode. So that's brilliant, because this is a shorter form content that he's pulled from the long form content, so he's not having to reinvent the wheel, or excuse me, I'll speak correctly, his team is not having to reinvent the wheel.
And it's getting this longer one, more hits, more downloads, more views, however you want to qualify that by just republishing it somewhere else. That's really smart because then it's a short form and a long form. He also has transcripts on everything, which is super helpful for SEO and accessibility. I have to give him that.
And then he also reigns really supreme on YouTube. His YouTube shorts are Major, let's go over to YouTube as well. I cannot believe that I'm polluting my history like this. Ah! Okay. So yeah, when you just Google Joe Rogan, his name on here is Powerful JRE, excuse me. I see he's got the full episodes on here.
Yep. Let's see, where are his shorts though? So yeah, shorts are The thing, too, is that he is getting reposted by other people. Um, and so that's not necessarily going to be indicative on his own views, but that does help to just get his name spread more far and wide. So he's got JRE Highlights is an account that I'm not even sure if that's him.
These are getting 16, 000 views, 45, 000 views. 21, 000 views and So yeah, I mean he's he's a master of short form content. His Instagram is not dissimilar from that Let's go over there now. So yeah, he's got 19. 5 million followers over there So with those kind of numbers, he's a tough one to beat and so he's not at all Who who you should be comparing yourself to it looks like his Instagram is mostly Mostly Like things that he is posting and not so much about the show, but he has a direct link to his Spotify for the Joe Rogan experience.
Um, I also think it's really funny that, um, I just saw a story from Hope Walls, Tim Walls daughter, and she said that she has a rule that she's made, that if she starts talking to a guy on like Tinder or whatever, and sees that he follows Joe Rogan on Instagram, she unmatches. And she said that she regrets it every time that she doesn't.
And I think that that, It's pretty indicative. Anyways, let's move right the frick on. So, next up in the second most popular is Call Her Daddy. I know that you have seen Call Her Daddy clips on TikTok, even if you have not listened to a whole episode or watched a whole episode. So this is hosted by Alex Cooper.
It's also the most listened to podcast by women. So this is somewhere else that we kind of see that disparity. Uh, Joe Rogan has a huge male following, but Alex Cooper with Call Her Daddy is kind of freaking crushing it for women. Let's go ahead and take a look at what her stats are looking like. So on listen notes, uh, we've got 428 episodes, even just right there.
Then what's listed on listen notes for Joe Rogan? Okay, so she's so on. Listen notes. Joe Rogan's got 2,412 episodes. The fact that they're both top 0.01% ranking and she's got. Like, less than a quarter of the same amount of episodes. That's also something indicative, but again, 428 episodes is huge. Just by having that amount of content, she's going to be getting out there more.
Something that we can learn with Call Her Daddy is that really candid conversations are working super well. That's what all of the clips that we're seeing are when you're on TikTok and you see a call her daddy clip come up They all feel very personable very candid and I think especially as we're talking about for female audience This is going to continue being what resonates is these personable, intimate feeling conversations.
So the feelings that you are sitting on the couch together, hi, we're really on my couch right now, uh, that you're sitting on the couch together that you are just girl talking, even if you are in a niche that is a little bit more serious, like she had Kamala Harris on, right? But it's still felt personable.
So that's something that I definitely think is valuable to consider is how you're positioning the type of content that you're making. Next up, we've got the Huberman lab, which is a sciency, intellectual type of podcast, um, which shows that we're always going to be interested in kind of like the self help, self improvement genre, the life hacking almost, that that's going to continue to be something that's important.
Crime Junkie still reigns supreme over true crime and, and yeah, they've got 449. So part of it too, it's not just how many that they've, how many episodes they have. It's, it's the stick with it ness. Uh, I think I just definitely made that name up, but they've been at it since like 2017. When you are comparing yourself against different podcasts, try and consider what, what is the apples to apples comparison you should be making.
If you are like, cool, I got this many downloads, but I started in June. Look at other shows that started in June and compare yourself against that. Don't compare yourself to somebody who's been in it for almost 10 years. Uh, but I also predict that true crime is not going anywhere. To, to kind of piggyback off of what we're seeing with true crime, with Crime Junkie, we've got coming in at number five is Noche, which is a Spanish language supernatural storytelling podcast.
I am So freaking jazzed to see a Spanish language podcast clenching number five. That's so exciting to me. English language podcasts tend to dominate, but it is so thrilling to see a, especially a spooky paranormal podcast that is Ah, on the top five. So if we go to their ListenNotes, we see that they have a ListenNotes score of 66, um, which that's an episode of its own, but if that means something to you, it means something to you.
And their global rank is 05. So that's 04 points below the other two that we've looked into. They've been at it since 2020 with 475 episodes. I listened to a little bit. My Spanish skills are not sufficient enough anymore to truly enjoy and be the target audience of this podcast, but it's really exciting and it's incredibly well produced.
The production value is juicy. So they've got, yeah, 63 percent of their listeners are in Mexico and right behind is 14 percent from the US. Yeah, that's super exciting. And you know, make the content that feels good to you. Don't let, you know, what you think you need to do and what you think you need to be as a podcaster, interrupt the content that feels right for you.
If that means making content in a different language, absolutely, because that is where your listeners are. Uh, so that's super exciting. Now that we've kind of broken down where we're at, what 2024 has looked like, these are the trends to watch in 2025. So this is where I'm going to give you tips, thoughts, predictions.
Uh, let's rock and roll because this is already a long episode because I got a little nerdy on it. Number one is that long form conversations are going to continue to thrive. People tend to like long episodes. That's really what we're seeing. Because if we go back through, Crime Junkie has been 37 minutes, 57 minutes, 46 minutes, 3 hours and 23 minutes, an hour and 8 minutes, 53 minutes, so these trend longer.
So call her daddy's 46 minutes, 43 minutes, an hour 7, 45, an hour 3, 51. So again, averaging kind of in that hour space, and then I know Joe Rogan's are long, let's see. Yeah, three and a half hours, three hours and four minutes, four and a half hours. So his are A, a workday to listen to. We're really seeing that long form content and, and long, long form content is really thriving right now.
There's a lot of talk about like what length of an episode makes sense. And truly if you are not Conversational style podcast. The get in, get out is still incredibly valuable. If you are here to teach people a thing, unactionable, grow your business with this, help people do that. Fix your morning habits this way.
Kind of the get in, get out is still valuable, but if you are really just like, Hey, I have this guest on, we're going to have a conversation about an hour ish is kind of what I'm seeing. And that's where I would make. So make sure that, you know, in your guest pitch, you say this conversation is going to be about an hour long, set that expectation for people.
And yeah, that's really important. What I think we're going to see for next year as well. Something that didn't surprise me at all is that just relatability and humor matter. So again, you know, I'm really capitalizing on call her daddy, because with that being like the biggest female audience, that's really who I'm speaking to.
And it's kind of what my audience also resonates with. So again, feeling personable, feeling like we're just hanging out, that's going to continue to really resonate. Number three is providing education that's actionable. So that's something else that I was just talking about that, you know, break the thing down, whatever the topic that you're talking about is.
Simplify it into something that has practical takeaways that your audience can implement. Give people a road map. Don't just talk for the sake of talking and podcast for the sake of podcasting, but give people real actionable steps that they can implement into their lives. Number four and five are kind of similar because these two genres get lumped in so much, but number four is that true crime is not going anywhere.
Uh, there are so many people who are like, you know, that's, uh, really saturated and, and the fact is that it's not. There are so many other voices that we really need in the true crime space. And there are different ways that I would love to see true crime talked about. Uh, this is me out loud on the show manifesting that I would love to bring on a new true crime podcaster as a client in 2025.
If that's you, if that's been you, if that's been something that you're thinking about, this is your sign. Ding, ding, ding. I'm right here and I am manifesting the heck out of that. Uh, as I mentioned, kind of piggybacking, number five is that horror and other really niche y kind of fringe topic genres are thriving.
I feel like there was this like awakening that happened for a lot of people in 2020 of getting back in touch with like folklore and different beliefs and kind of exploring a little bit more of that. There was a lot of, I feel like, unpacking of like, this is what we're supposed to be. That's a whole different topic, but I have seen that type of genre grow and, you know, urban legends, all of that, those are really growing and continuing to thrive as well.
And as we saw from Relatos as that we are going to just have more global growth. Podcasting is not just for the English speaking world, not by a long shot. So, you know, explore how you could connect with your audience in whatever language feels right to you and meet people where they are. Like that's, uh, that's so exciting to me.
Huberman Lab kind of points this out, but that the spiritual and mental health and like life hacking kind of stuff, that's not going anywhere either. So anytime that you can like. Blend practical advice with meaningful insights that resonate. That's going to stay popular as well. I do see that for 2025 as well.
And I think that people are, as we're in this like, and state capitalist hellscape, that people are going to continue to want to control what they can control. And make their lives better. Number eight is that accessibility is just non negotiable. Providing captions or transcripts and offering diverse topics and viewpoints is gonna just continue to become the gold standard for podcasting.
If you are not putting out your transcript, A, you are limiting the people who it can reach and also B, you are limiting your SEO. So not only is it great for people who have hearing impairments or neurodivergences that, you know, they're visual learners, but not having a transcript also is just going to eat your SEO for breakfast.
Number nine is short form potential. So something I mentioned about like, Joe Rogan being really good with YouTube shorts and the call her daddy TikTok clips. Having bite sized content that your audience can engage with and kind of sample, that's only going to continue to grow as well. I don't see our attention spans getting any longer in 2025, so mastering your short form content It's also going to be super helpful and the kind of bullet point I'll put on that is that if shorter episodes make sense for you, try like mini sodes.
See what you can accomplish in five or ten minutes for people, especially if your audience is overworked, burned out, neurodivergent. Overstimulated moms, whomever that doesn't have enough time to listen to a full episode. That's like something I'm really excited to see in 2025 is I think we're going to see more people who maybe have a full episode on Tuesdays and then like a mini episode that's just 5 or 10 minutes coming out on like Thursdays.
Keep an eye out for that. I'm excited to see what that might look like. And then number 10, community is going to continue to be so huge. so much. That's where you're cultivating this community that isn't just listeners, but they are your fans. They are the people who are showing up for you. It's going to continue in 2025 to be even more relevant, to give them a space to connect.
So whether that's a Facebook group, a Patreon community, a Discord server, Having somewhere online that your fans can connect and chat and talk is going to be super relevant as it already has been, but especially in moving forward. So now I talked about it earlier for your show, I'm going to do it for mine.
Here are some actionable strategies for you as we start to head into 2025. I, it, like, did you hear me almost say 2024? Because 2025 just feels made up. I turned 30 this year, so excited. Um, know your niche, know who your podcast is for and why it exists. The clearer that you are in this, the easier it's going to be for you to grow.
I know that if you have been in the small business space, you have probably created a Ideal customer avatar, and I won't make you go through that again, but I do think that it is helpful to have an idea of who you are speaking with when you sit down to podcast. I think it can be helpful to create like that mental avatar because then it lets you have this mental picture of like, this is who's on the other end of the phone right now.
This is who I'm talking with, you know, whether you have to formally do that exercise, whether you use chat GPT to help you, that's definitely a thing that I've used AI for, but having that really clear idea of what your show is, who it's for, and how it helps is really important. incredibly important. So don't go into 2025 without having that really dialed in.
Number two, something that I think is helpful to do is to experiment with formats. Try the longer deep dives. Try the shorter, higher impact. Explore what your audience seems to resonate with. What can you track to see, oh, this type of episode does really well. This type doesn't. This time of year is a great time to start experimenting with what resonates with your audience, but especially because December and, eh, kind of January, depending on the show, can be quiet for engagement.
Explore what feels good for you to make. So practice. If you've never sat down at your microphone for longer than 20 minutes, Try and make a 45 minute episode. Do you hate it? Is it boring? Do you not know what to talk about? Or on the inverse, if your episodes are always an hour and a half long, what could you get done in 20 minutes?
Could you make something that feels like really delicious and condensed, high, high value? Start building your community. This could look like starting a newsletter, you know, like I mentioned a Facebook group, Discord server, Patreon community, and try and foster that connection with your audience. Next up is to invest in accessibility.
And the first place that I would start that is a no brainer and is pretty easy and low investment is to start with captions and transcripts. That can be literally as simple as when you are uploading like reels, You can automatically generate captions. You do sometimes have to babysit it and, you know, make sure that it's gotten it correct.
But on Instagram, the auto generate captions will work for your podcast clips. That one is for free. Uh, and then also you can use services like Descript. I don't edit in Descript, but I do use them for transcription. And that also helps me build out my show notes. I've got some exciting stuff coming in 2025 to tell you more about how I kind of automate all of that.
And I'm super excited for you to have that information as well. But just having those transcripts up is huge for accessibility. And as I've mentioned, you do it for accessibility, but the bonus is that you get it back in SEO. The other tip that I'm going to give you for 2025 is to focus on quality over quantity.
I know that I spent so much time at the top of this episode talking about how, you know, these people have 2000 episodes and you can't compete if you don't have that much content available, but making sure that you are producing the highest quality content that you can is mega. So if you spent the first half of this episode going, oh my god.
I want to catch up, I feel like I started too late, I'm freaking out right now that I've only got 40 episodes out, or 20 episodes out, or zero episodes out. I have to release an episode every other day. Slow down. Take a deep breath. You will catch up. I promise. It is not a race, and continue generating content that feels good, repurpose it how it feels good, and you'll get there eventually.
So, don't feel like you have to release an episode every other day, continue with the pace that feels good, make the content that feels good. And then the last thing I want to mention, um, as you can hear, my little is, uh, very excited for me to get back in action with her. But the last thing I want to mention is what your own personal Spotify rapt is telling you.
So I was super excited to see on my own rapt that I have gained 20 percent of my listeners this year. I have increased my streams by 45%. And I've gotten 66 percent new followers, which is really exciting data. So you know, as you're maybe feeling a little bit like, Oh my gosh, I'm never going to make it to the top 0.01 percent of all podcasts. That is the data that is more exciting to me. How have you grown this year with your own show as your only competition? Because to me, the fact that I have increased 66 percent of my followership this year, that's a is way more exciting to me than whatever the heck is happening over at the Joe Rogan Experience.
Use yourself as your own competition, and please, please, please share those wins with me. I want to hear all about how you have grown your own show, what you're excited about for 2025, and, you know, just tell me, like, what's on the horizon for you. I do still have the forum open for people who are excited to start working with me in 2025, With getting editing off your plate.
So please make sure you check the show notes for that because I've got some exciting extras that are available if you sign up before the end of 2024. So let's make 2025. Your best, easiest, breeziest year of making your podcast yet. Super excited to see you there. But in the meantime, you can come hang out with me over on Instagram or more accurately on threads at Sonivia Studios and I'll see you next week.
Thank you so much for being here and helping me take podcasting up an octave.
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