V4V Music Podcast Crash Course

Running with Scissors ✂

Warning: This Might Not Work

If you become a V4V music podcast host you will welcomed among the ranks of the Podcasting 2.0 Value4Value revolution!

Don’t worry, we have cookies.

While Podcasting 2.0 enjoys a rebellious reputation connected with doing risky things with advanced podcast technologies, it also enjoys the problems that come with being first – sometimes things don’t work.

One of the secret handshakes you get to learn when you fully embrace Podcasting 2.0 is the concept of running with scissors. This is a popular idiom that tries to encapsulate the risk behind the possibility that what you’re doing might not work.

That is to say, if the edges of Podcasting 2.0 were sharp (like a pair of scissors), the risk to the speed it is going is like running with those scissors (which is always a bad idea). If you trip, you could stab yourself! Yikes! In technology terms, the risk highlights the fact that, unlike mainstream applications, there is no safety net to catch things when they fail – they just fail. Not unlike running with scissors, falling, and stabbing yourself. If any part of the V4V ecosystem fails, the listener experience gets it with the pointy end of the scissors. Ouch!

Warning: Hot – Do Not Touch! 🔥

As a V4V music podcaster, your goal is to arrange a meeting between your listeners and V4V music. To do that, all you need to do is find music with valid V4V RSS feeds and add those tracks to your final MP3 audio.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Unfortunately, there is a catch: joining the Valueverse – as a listener – comes with friction. Friction in the user experience (UX) world is bad! The term legitimately means user pain caused by making complicated software.

In Steve Krug’s book Don't Make Me Think, he strongly recommends that software developers go out of their way to make it as easy and direct as possible for users to accomplish a given task. Value4Value music is not there yet. It still requires your audience to jump through hoops to make it work.

The good news is that the process is not intractable. Thousands of listeners have already figured out how to do this with more discovering the benefits of Podcasting 2.0 every day. Additionally, software developers within the Valueverse are slowly removing some of these complication hoops making it easier for listeners to participate.

However, you need to go into this world with your eyes open to the fact that V4V Music podcasting is still experimental and that because the user experience required to enjoy V4V music comes with friction, you will have to teach your audience how to overcome that complexity.

Warning: Listener Experience Sold Separately

Before you can teach your audience how to interact with your V4V music podcast, you need to understand what friction they need to overcome.

To get a clear picture of the listener’s perspective you need to first explore how listeners interact with V4V music podcasts.

An ideal listener experience would require:

• A Podcasting 2.0 player application installed on their mobile device
• A Lightning Wallet with SATs
• That Lightning Wallet connected to their Podcasting 2.0 player app
• Your V4V music podcast episode downloaded to their Podcasting 2.0 player app
• The listener pressing PLAY on their Podcasting 2.0 player app
• The listener enjoying one of the songs being played
• The listener BOOSTING that song while it plays
• Having that BOOST be sent successfully

That is a lot of friction!

While each one of those hoops is a challenge, fortunately, a few of those steps are already ingrained as common practice for most people with smartphones. Most already know how to download and install applications and few have difficulty creating an account within an application is not difficult either. That gets some of the complexity out of the way right off the bat.

I think the real friction comes in when you need your listeners to do these three steps:

• Understand what a Lightning Wallet is and how it is used
• Connecting that Lightning Wallet to the Podcasting 2.0 player app
• How and what to BOOST during a song

If you can get your audience to understand only these three steps, you are well on your way to creating a better listener experience.

Warning: Fragile – Handle with Care!

While your listeners can overcome the friction of getting into the Valueverse, you need to understand that there are fragile parts to this process that you don’t have any control over. These fragile parts include:

• Network – You have no control over the connection and resilience of the Lightning Network
• User Experience – You have no control over how third-party Podcasting 2.0 applications work with V4V music
• Consistency – You have no control over what V4V information is put into an artist’s RSS feeds
• Ownership – You have no way of verifying who legally owns the music uploaded to the Podcast Index

Meanwhile, you get to enjoy all the normal problems beyond your control that come with podcasting too. These problems include:

• Discovery – Will anyone find my podcast?
• Application – What will they use to play it on when they do find it?
• Interaction – Will they ever press play?

Fun, right? I know. That is a ton of variables you have no control over.

So, let’s not worry about those right now! Instead, let’s focus on what you DO have control over.

Warning: Magic at Play!

When everything works as designed, V4V music is a kind of magic! And it’s a kind of magic that you can reproduce to provide listeners with an amazing music experience. The trick to this magic, however, is correctly weaving several different Podcasting 2.0 features together to form a complete listening experience.

During this course, you will learn how to accomplish this by:

• Correctly setting up your own Lightning Wallet to receive SATs
• Selecting songs that are V4V ready
• Correctly adding those songs to your RSS file
• Correctly adding those songs to your Chapter file
• Ensuring that your sound quality is “good enough”
• Ensuring the correct song plays at the correct time
• Ensuring the correct song receives the correct splits when boosted
• Testing your episodes in all the current Podcasting 2.0 apps

Yes! These are the main Podcasting 2.0 features that go into creating a V4V music podcast.

It might seem like a lot right now, but once you understand how each one fits together you will be well on your way to creating your first episode.