What Shane Hawkins Can Teach Us About Podcasting

Did you see 16 year old Shane Hawkins play tribute to his dad at the recent Foo Fighters tribute to Taylor Hawkins? Well, turns out how you heard about it and how you watched and reacted to it can teach us a lot about podcasting.

If you're not familiar. Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins died suddenly at the age of 50. Now I never had a strong opinion either way on the Foo Fighters as a band, but there's no denying they are one of the biggest acts in the world, and with a huge following. And it goes without saying that anyone dying suddenly at 50, no matter what the cause, is always a really tough thing to get your head around.

Well, the Foo Fighters recently did an all star tribute show to Taylor at London's Wembley stadium. They brought out Sir Paul McCartney, Wolfgang van Halen, Rush, The Pretenders and more, but the real show stopping moment, that quickly went viral worldwide, was when Dave Grohl brought out Taylor's 16 year old son, Shane, to play his dad's drums on a performance of the Foo Fighters song, "My Hero." Not a dry eye in the house and deservedly.

So now chances are, you've heard about this, but how did you hear about it? For me, it was a combination of social media post after social media post, and hearing some friends talk about it. Was it the same for you? Did you run to YouTube to see it? Or did you actually pull up the Paramount Plus app to watch the one hour highlight reel? Or the whole show?

There are so many lessons here when it comes to podcast discoverability. As we heard over and over again at Podcast Movement, make your show shareable. And that doesn't mean just putting a Facebook link on it. Start with creating content that's compelling enough to make someone talk about and share it.

Now, chances are, you're not gonna have the power of one of the world's biggest bands honoring their fallen brother with a performance by his son, but have some kind of hook. Have content that folks will wanna tell others about. Make it so that they'll post about it. And they'll tell their friends. Also, and I mentioned this last week, getting folks to change platforms is hard. When I watched this show, it was probably the second time in months that I've used the Paramount app.

The first was to watch the new Beavis and Butt-head movie and channel the inner 15 year old in my head. I said... ah, nevermind. Anyway, this content was worth opening a different app for. If you're promoting your show on TikTok or Instagram, that's the criteria you need to get someone to open Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's gotta be worth changing apps.

Okay. Onto this week's podcasting news. Meghan Markle has paused her podcast in observance of the Queen's death. OK Magazine says that King Charles has asked her not to do the podcast, but it's OK Magazine, so who really knows. We'll find out in the next coming weeks if she picks back up.

Twitter making more strides in podcasting. They are opening up podcasts to their Twitter Blue paid members. We'll see what happens. If it rolls out to the rest of the world yet. Cuz I dunno about you, but I ain't paying for Twitter.

Research from Amplifi Media and Podnews recently showed there are only 155,000 regularly updated podcasts. That's out of 4 million shows.

Now, previously I told you there's only 400,000 active shows out of the 4 million. Well, it turns out that number's even smaller when you're talking about putting out content recently. Only 155,000 regularly updated shows out of 4 million. That's less than 5%. The competition is not as strict as you would think..

A new list of the biggest publishers by audience reach in terms of podcasting out. Spotify, the new number one, Sirius XM number two. IHeart number three. That's in terms of total audience of shows produced.

And finally, if you'll allow me to geek out on equipment for just a moment, I've always mentioned my microphone, the SM7B by Shure. It's expensive. If you have it in your budget, I highly recommend it. It's a $400 microphone.

It's also the microphone that Michael Jackson recorded the Thriller album on, which for music geeks, is a cool piece of trivia. But if you wanna go for a more contemporary or even a more Detroit reference, Eminem and his daughter, Hailey Mathers, use this microphone right here, the Shure SM7B.

If you have any questions about podcasting, feel free to find me online. My website is JAGinDetroit.com. Until next week, stay healthy and stay safe. Lata!