TOPP - The Open Podcast Podcast

Welcome to “The Open Podcast Podcast”, a weekly show about the Podcast Ecosystem and our attempt to build an open source analytics platform for podcast hosts.

In this episode we introduce the Open Podcast project and explain why we think it’s important to have open alternatives to existing podcast hosting platforms.

We believe that the Podcast ecosystem needs to remain open. Contrary to what some proprietary platforms believe, we think people value choice and freedom...

Let's answer the question "Does The Spotify Client Cache Episode Requests?"

Careful when picking your podcast hoster

Why it is important to have open standards

Why we are still in “Podcast Analytics Stone Age”?

Looking at the current state of web monitoring, one might be surprised when setting up a Podcast: many of the standard metrics are hard to get for podcasts and the ones that are are not standardized.

There is a zoo of different measurements for podcast analytics out there and everyone is trying to push their own agenda. We think these issues can be fixed with standardization...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...