TOPP - The Open Podcast Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Looking back at 6 months of Open Podcast in the final episode for this season.

Time flies. It’s been six months since we started our Open Podcast project. What have we achieved? What went well? What didn’t?

We take an honest look at the project and also look into the future. Thanks to everyone who has been part of this journey!

Open Podcast (https://openpodcast.dev)

What if we told you that you could get realtime feedback from your podcast listeners today? This and more is possible thanks to Podcasting 2.0

Podcast development is stuck in the past. There’s a severe lack of features like being able to monetize content or get feedback from listeners. There hasn’t been any update to RSS since 2006, even though we’ve seen astounding technological advancement like the advent of broadband internet, the adoption of smartphones, or social networks like Facebook).

But there is hope: Podcasting 2.0. It’s a new standard created by the original authors of RSS and supported by many Podcast hosters, players, and indexers. Over 400.000 podcasts use the new format already, to provide better functionality for listeners and creators.

We will talk about the new standard, the market, the players, and how you can start using that today. And about the relationship between the Podcasting 2.0 ecosystem and Open Podcast.

• Podcasting 2.0 talk at FOSDEM: https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/podcasting20/ 
• Castopod https://castopod.org/ 
• What si Podcasting 2.0? https://origin.fm/blog/podcasting-2point0/ 

• Matthias Endler (https://mastodon.social/@mre) 
• Wolfgang Gassler (https://twitter.com/schafele)

• Email: echo@openpodcast.dev 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenPodcastDev 

The theme music is U.S. Army Blues - Kelly’s Number and is licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0 License. 

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We talk about the different business models for open source projects and how we could apply them to our podcast analytics project.

There are many trade-offs to consider when choosing a business model for an open source project. We discuss the pros and cons of the different models like open core, consulting, and contracting. Along the way we look at some examples of successful open source projects and how they monetize their work.

We also explain the open core model, which describes business models where the core of the project is open source, but some features are only available in a paid version. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of this model and how we could apply it to our podcast analytics project.

• Elasticsearch license change: https://www.elastic.co/pricing/faq/licensing 
• Plausible: “How we made it to 1 million MRR: https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-saas 
• Cal.com open business data: https://cal.com/open

• Matthias Endler (https://twitter.com/matthiasendler) 
• Wolfgang Gassler (https://twitter.com/schafele)

• Email: echo@openpodcast.dev 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenPodcastDev 

The theme music is U.S. Army Blues - Kelly’s Number and is licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0 License. 

We have to move away from PlanetScale, our database layer because of a lack of functionality. Here's why.

The main database is at the core of every data-driven product. It's the place where all the data is stored and where all the data is processed.

For a long time, we've been using PlanetScale as our database layer and we have been very happy with it.

Unfortunately, we have to move away from PlanetScale because of a lack of functionality.

In this episode, we'll talk about why we have to move away from PlanetScale and what we're going to do instead.

• Planetscale: https://planetscale.com/
• PostHog: https://posthog.com/ 
• Vitess: https://vitess.io/ 

• Matthias Endler (https://twitter.com/matthiasendler) 
• Wolfgang Gassler (https://twitter.com/schafele)

• Email: echo@openpodcast.dev 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenPodcastDev 

The theme music is U.S. Army Blues - Kelly’s Number and is licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0 License. 

What Podcasters can learn from Spotify’s data

Spotify’s data is a goldmine for podcasters. It can help you understand your audience, improve your content, and grow your audience. Here are some of the most important things you can learn from Spotify’s data.

In the last episode, we talked about the Spotify API and how we access and store the data.

This time we pick up where we left off and talk about what you can do with the data and why it's important to own your data.

We expose the data in a SQL database and use metabase to visualize the data. (See also episode #8 for more on metabase, redash, grafana, and superset.)

With the data in a SQL database, we can do more powerful things like calculating averages and comparing episodes through SQL custom queries.

It's even more powerful when you store historical data. You can then correlate the data with other data sources (e.g. from different podcasts or hosts). It’s hard to retrieve historical data after the fact.

Users want to know if they have improved over time and compare between episodes. All of this is possible with historical data and graphs that are easy to understand.

• Our Open Podcast documentation: https://openpodcast.dev
• Open Podcast on Github: github.com/openpodcast

• Matthias Endler (https://twitter.com/matthiasendler) 
• Wolfgang Gassler (https://twitter.com/schafele)

• Email: echo@openpodcast.dev 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenPodcastDev 

The theme music is U.S. Army Blues - Kelly’s Number and is licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0 License. 

In this episode, we talked about the Spotify for Podcasters API and how to use it to extract data from Spotify. We also talked about the different data types that can be extracted and how to store the data in a MySQL database.

The API consists of internal endpoints for fetching metadata, episodes, and detailed streams, listeners, followers, and aggregate data. To use the API we need to fetch the authentication token for a user. Notably this is not the user's Spotify account.

The data can be stored in a MySQL database. We can then use the data to answer complex questions such as "What topics perform the best?" and "What are the preferences of specific age groups?" This is much more flexible than using official Spotify for Podcasters dashboard. Furthermore the data will be available for further analysis for an arbitrary time period and can be used to create a custom dashboard.

• Explanation on how to retrieve the Spotify cookie for fetching data: https://den.dev/blog/unlocking-spotify-podcast-data/ 
• An OSS library for fetching Spotify Podcast data and more: https://github.com/wdr-data/wdr-okr/ 
• Our code: https://github.com/openpodcast 

• Matthias Endler (https://twitter.com/matthiasendler) 
• Wolfgang Gassler (https://twitter.com/schafele)

• Email: echo@openpodcast.dev 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenPodcastDev 

The theme music is U.S. Army Blues - Kelly’s Number and is licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0 License.

We talk about our visit at Medientage München and the future of the audio industry.

Last week we visited the Medientage München, one of the biggest media events in Germany. (Thanks Media Tech Lab for sponsoring our visit!)

Attending the event is a great opportunity to get in touch with the industry and to get a lot of insights into the future of the audio industry.

What we found was that the audio industry is going through a massive transformation and that the future of audio is no longer linear.

For us this group of people is very interesting, because we want to position Open Podcast as the best tool for gathering analytics for podcasters and podcast studios to help them make this transition.

• Medientage: conference about media in Munich https://medientage.de/ 
• German summary of the conference Medientage https://blog.medientage.de/das-waren-besondere-momente-der-mtm22
• Our sponsor Media Tech Lab Bayern https://www.media-lab.de/de/media-tech-lab 

• Matthias Endler (https://twitter.com/matthiasendler) 
• Wolfgang Gassler (https://twitter.com/schafele)

• Email: echo@openpodcast.dev 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenPodcastDev 

The theme music is U.S. Army Blues - Kelly’s Number and is licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0 License. 

The final part of our tech stack description. This time we discuss the visualization part based on Metabase.

For any analytics platform, the decision on how data gets visualized is a crucial one. It is what users will interact with first and has an important impact on how the quality of a data product is perceived. We discuss the pros and cons of the most popular visualization tools and how they compare to Metabase, which is the tool we settled on for Open Podcast.

Metabase is a popular open source data visualization tool that integrates well with SQL databases. For our hosted variant of Open Podcast, we use Metabase to visualize the data stored on Planetscale.

Before Metabase we used Posthog, which is also great, but doesn't now allow writing custom SQL queries. We also tried Grafana, which is a great tool for time series data, but it also doesn't integrate well with SQL databases and is primarily meant for monitoring solutions.

Other competitors we discuss are Superset, Redash, and Grafana. We also briefly touch on the topic of self-hosted vs. cloud-based solutions.

• How to create dashboards with metabase https://www.metabase.com/docs/latest/dashboards/introduction 
• https://superset.apache.org/
• https://posthog.com/
• https://grafana.com/ 
• https://redash.io/ 

• Matthias Endler (https://twitter.com/matthiasendler) 
• Wolfgang Gassler (https://twitter.com/schafele)

• Email: echo@openpodcast.dev 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenPodcastDev 

The theme music is U.S. Army Blues - Kelly’s Number and is licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0 License.

Another technical episode; this time about our realtime analytics forwarder/proxy written in Rust.

Podcast creators want realtime data about the performance of each episode. The big platforms usually only provide aggregated data with some delay whereas the hosting platforms like Podbeans or Redcircle store the data in proprietary formats that oftentimes can’t be exported or gets filtered and put behind paywalls through pro-accounts.

In contrast, our proxy works with any major platform and stores the data in a machine-readable format that can easily be exported. It is written in Rust and runs as an edge-worker on Cloudflare Workers, but it can also be run on a standalone server.

We’ll talk about the architecture of the component and the tradeoffs we made while building it. 

• https://www.rust-lang.org 
• https://codilime.com/blog/why-is-rust-programming-language-so-popular/
• https://blog.cloudflare.com/workerd-open-source-workers-runtime/
• https://workers.cloudflare.com/ 

• Matthias Endler (https://twitter.com/matthiasendler) 
• Wolfgang Gassler (https://twitter.com/schafele)

• Email: echo@openpodcast.dev 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenPodcastDev 

The theme music is U.S. Army Blues - Kelly’s Number and is licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0 License. 

In this episode we talk about the tech stack of Open Podcast. We discuss the reasons why we chose the technologies we use and why we chose to use them. We also talk about the advantages and disadvantages of the technologies we use.

We require all tools to be open source and self-hostable. We also require that the tools are easy to set up and easy to use. We also require that the tools are scalable and have solid documentation.

Today we start with the database, which is based on SQL. We use MySQL because many devs have a lot of experience with MySQL.

We evaluated a few options and we'll explain why we chose Planetscale over other options.

• Planetscale MySQL Service https://planetscale.com 
• Event Storage and Analytics https://posthog.com 
• SQLite https://www.sqlite.org/index.html 
• Cloudflare D1 SQLite based DB https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-d1/

• Matthias Endler (https://twitter.com/matthiasendler) 
• Wolfgang Gassler (https://twitter.com/schafele)

• Email: echo@openpodcast.dev 
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OpenPodcastDev 

The theme music is U.S. Army Blues - Kelly’s Number and is licensed under Public Domain Mark 1.0 License.