V4V Music Podcast Crash Course

The Path of Value

Buried Treasure

To be a V4V music podcaster is to be the one who decides what music will be included in your show. Your song choices, segues, rants, and mood will all have to agree with your tastes and your own personal style.

Or will it?

To be a V4V music podcaster is to decide on what kind of listener you want. Will it be a music podcast that appeals to everyone? Will it be a show that appeals to people like you? Or will it highlight a specific genre?

In this way, your new V4V music podcast is like your personal V4V radio station. You are both the programmer and host making the creative choice that will determine what your show will be about.

In a lot of ways, this is the same creative choice all podcasters have: what will your show be about?

When you start building your personal radio station you have all the power to make it anything you want. You can have it be about a specific music genre (e.g. country, rock, classical, hip-hop), you can mix it up, you can talk and do music – there are no rules!

However, the main goal of a V4V music podcast is to support the artists making the music. It’s great that you want to highlight their music but it is still their music, not yours! If you are going to feature songs on your podcast then you need to do everything in your power to provide them a path to value.

Remember how Value4Value means time, talent, and treasure? Your V4V music podcast will need to hit all three of these principles to be successful. The first two – time and talent – are what you are bringing to the table to provide value to the artists you feature in each of your episodes.

The treasure part is the tricky one because it requires three elements that most podcasters struggle with:

• Marketing
• Splits
• Technology

Let’s tackle each of these head-on!

Marketers Ruin Everything

Marketing will always be a challenge in both radio and podcasting because they both have one challenge in common: discovery. If nobody knows you exist then nobody will ever listen to you.

Radio has a few advantages. First, it’s already in every car ever made. One point for radio. Second, there are fewer radio stations than podcasts creating markets where there is less competition.

The problem with radio, however, is how they pay for their songs. They have to advertise – and I mean advertise! None stop. Day in and day out. Radio stations are full of ads. Ads at the top and bottom of the hour, ads in-between, and ads even during the show that are read by the DJ. It is an endless ad-heavy industry.

Which goes to show you that marketers do ruin everything!

Conversely, V4V music podcasts do not need to pay for songs. Adding a song to their playlist is what most V4V artists are looking for in the first place. They want the exposure you provide them when you select their song to be in your next episode’s playlist.

But exposure doesn’t pay the rent.

This is why V4V music podcasts have something over radio stations: additional pathways to value.

Radio does not have time, talent, and treasure options like a V4V music podcast. There is no way for a radio listener to send the radio station any value. And why would they? A radio station has never asked for value! Most people expect to be Caller Number Nine on the weekly giveaway to win tickets to the latest concert. Nobody ever gave a radio station anything unless they were looking to sell something. Radio doesn’t have the luxury of removing ads. If they don’t run ads, they go out of business.

V4V music podcasts have access to the treasure principle of V4V that gives the audience – the listener – the tools to give back to the artist without limits. Yes, there is the possibility that a listener will give nothing back. However, there is also the possibility that a listener will give something back. They may even give a large amount back. The pathway is open for the listener to decide how much value that song or your podcast gave them.

Radio can’t do that. V4V music podcasts can when the path to the Valueverse is open.

Introduction to Splits

Let’s face it – people can be greedy. In the world of music, it’s the people who control the production of music that make all the money.

A V4V music podcast breaks this monopoly by doing something no record label would ever do: they give the majority of the value to the artists who recorded the music! The point of a V4V music podcaster is to select music and introduce that music to their audience. Your job is to arrange the meeting between the artist and the listener and then get out of the way!

Unfortunately, this is where new podcasters to the V4V lifestyle can get confused. When you first start producing a V4V music podcast you quickly discover that arranging that meeting between listener and artist is very taxing and time-consuming job.

This is when new podcasters ask a reasonable question: “When all the value goes to the artist, when do I get rewarded for doing all this work?”

You do. It’s called a split.

You see, when you become a V4V music podcasters you have to unlearn the record label monetization model. You do not collect value on behalf of the artists you play like a middleman. Nor do you take their cut from that value (usually a secret amount) and then pass on what remains to the artists themselves. That’s how record labels and recording companies do it.

Instead, as a V4V music podcaster, you showcase songs on your shows and when listeners decide to give value, they give both the artist AND the podcaster (you) the value directly.

This happens all in real-time, in the open, with complete transparency. No middlemen, no secrets, no hidden amounts, and no waiting!

Splits in Action

Here’s a quick example of how this works:

Let’s say Bob likes a song you are playing on your V4V music podcast and sends that song 100 SATs.

If the V4V music podcaster sets the split up so that 90 percent of the value goes to the artist, and 10 percent goes to the podcast, then the V4V music podcaster will get 10 SATs while the artist of that song will get 90 SATs from a 100 SAT boost.

That means you get a 10 percent split of the value each time that artist is sent value, for that song, on your show.

That’s not a bad deal.

Abusing Splits

Now, could you reverse that equation? Could you make it so you receive the majority and the artist receives a tiny split instead?

Yes, you could, but if you remember what you learned in Lesson 01: Intro to V4V, the point of a V4V music podcast is to promote Valueverse music, not you. You are providing your value to the artist in the form of time and talent. To reverse that would be to abuse that relationship.

When you respect the Valueverse relationship between podcast host, artist, and listener, the V4V model rewards you with your split of that value for making it all happen.

Now that you understand how value is measured in splits, we'll explore how the technologies involved all fit together to make this work in the next lesson!

That's what we'll do next!