Graham Brown: Andrew, let's just jump straight in. Let's talk about cricket. Talk about first, maybe, who's going to win the Ashes. Second, let's talk about your journey with cricket and podcasts have been quite a number of years. So tell me about how you started that and then also, why do these two work well together?

Andrew Menczel: Yeah. Well, thanks very much for having me on your podcast, the Age of Audio. Great to talk about podcasting. I always love talking about an industry that I'm passionate about and obviously intimately involved with. How did I get into podcasting? It was back in 2013. It was eight years ago. I was listening to a lot of podcasts. It was just starting to emerge and I'm a huge cricket fan and I was really disappointed that it was just all these, not all, there was, the only cricket podcasts were coming from England, and as an Aussie, there's only so much [inaudible] English cricket team.

Graham Brown: It's more authoritative though for England. Don't you believe it?

Andrew Menczel: No, it's just the accent. When I started listening and actually went on an English cricket podcast and thought I can do this, there's a hole in the market. I was friends with a sports journalist at the time. So we thought let's just start a cricket podcast for Aussie fans. And that's what it is I love about podcasting is you don't have to be everything for everyone. You can settle on a nation, focus on a niche, and it's a great way of building an audience and connecting with people.

Graham Brown: Wait a minute, how did you qualify to start a podcast?

Andrew Menczel: I wasn't qualified at all. I just fell into it and I have had some experience with public speaking and that kind of thing, but I'm a big cricket fan. I consider myself quite knowledgeable about the game and it was back in 2013, it was the wild west of podcasting, anyone could, well, anyone still can start a show, but there was no one talking about Australian cricket. So, I came up from a fan's perspective as well so that sort of brought that side to it where I wasn't trying to be a journalist as much as a fan.

Graham Brown: Because you were a journalist for a number of years or freelancing for news calls.

Andrew Menczel: Well that came after the podcasting. So I actually owned a cafe. I still own a cafe, but I owned a cafe at the time and I had all this sort of free time and thought, when I closed the doors at four o'clock in the afternoon, I could record here and start a podcast. So I actually went the other way. I was a podcaster that then was brought into news limited because of the podcast. And that's how I got into writing and journalism.

Graham Brown: It's fascinating, isn't it, that your qualification for being a commentator, an analyst of sorts was the fact that you were passionate about the game that qualified you more than the quote-unquote experts, the editors of traditional media, and in a way that is really a shift, isn't it? Traditional media, if you think about cricket commentary, there's only a handful of people that can do it, obviously because of the bandwidth, because of the amount of seats available to be a commentator. And yet now what you've done is throw down the gauntlet to anybody who has the gumption to get up and cares enough about standing up and talking about what you really are passionate about. Was there any sort of doubts in your mind when you started off? Like who's going to listen to me or did you not really care when you got started?

Andrew Menczel: I just want to go back to something you said. I think though, that what you do get from doing a podcast is, actually doing something every week does end up bringing a lot of knowledge and qualifications. So actually every week recording a podcast, keeping up on the cricket news, interviewing players, all that stuff, it actually does give you qualifications for other stuff. It's just the simple fact that, if your podcast is unique, but if someone would have a TV show covering cricket every week, it would be the same thing. So I think, and I would tell this to anybody, just doing something is the first step. You just gain a lot of knowledge through preparing and then all the interviews, et cetera. And then I guess, did I have doubts about whether anyone would listen. Not really. I didn't think about it too much because I went into it, not expecting a lot of people to listen. It was a new medium and there was no competition. So I just thought, well, if you're an Australian cricket fan and especially if you were traveling or overseas and you wanted to keep in touch with the cricket action from back home, there's nothing better than a podcast for that.

Graham Brown: Well, what did you model the format on? Did you have in your idea, some sort of radio format that you liked and wanted to borrow from? Or was it a TV show? Where did the inspiration come from?

Andrew Menczel: I just messed around with the format over the first few years. So there was no real sort of a set format, but I guess, I listened to other shows and I listened to, like baseball podcasts and football podcasts. And I just borrowed from them sort of ideas about structuring. But I learned as I went along and especially the first three or four years there was no real formula, but I always wanted to make it quick, compelling, not a lot of chit-chat. Like, I don't like that notion of a podcast where people can just get on and chat about their week and people are gonna listen to that. So I always wanted to get straight into the news and make it worth someone's time. If they're going to listen to it, they're going to get something from it, which was, cricket news and knowledge. So yeah, I developed the format over time and it's now in a pretty set format, but in the first few years, it just changed depending on who was on the show. Sometimes one person, sometimes maybe two people. Sometimes there'd be an interview show. The format, just it was very fluid

Graham Brown: And the pros? Who have you had on your show?

Andrew Menczel: Who haven't I had, Graham? Well, I've been lucky enough to interview hundreds of cricketers now, from all levels. I guess the real highlight for me though, is when you interview a childhood hero and so I interviewed Ian Chappell one day and boy, was I nervous going into that Graham. I've been more nervous on one other occasion, but this one. I just knew that Chappelli did not suffer fools easily. It was a no-bullshit kind of guy. And the interview was scheduled for Sunday morning at 11:00 AM. I was calling him and I was like, okay, so it's going to be Sunday morning, but yeah, he was lovely. So interviewing him was a real thrill. Interviewing Alan Border was another massive thrill for me because he was my hero. So yeah, they're probably the two ones that really stand out to me, but I've been really fortunate to interview a lot of great cricketers, commentators, writers.

Graham Brown: Well, two of the best there Ian Chappell, Alan Border. These are great names. And what was it like in the sense that do you think that one of the things that I find is that when you speak to, or when one speaks to, like celebs, they get into that sort of standard PR mode. They're used to doing the rounds and therefore, they have their clipped answers. They know what people want to hear and they'll give you exactly enough and nevermore. How was it with you? Were you able to go beyond that veneer a little bit? Because I feel that with podcasts, audiences want that a little bit, they would want to get behind and understand a bit more about the man behind the mask, if you like. And some celebs are really good at that, they're good at opening up, being more human and yet others are always acting as if they were on TV or more mainstream radio. How was it with those guys? Did you manage to open them up a little bit? What was your experience?

Andrew Menczel: It's an interesting question. I love interviewing people and you're right. It is a challenge. And look, I don't think you can go into every interview thinking you're going to get some amazing revelation, especially from people that have done many, many interviews before. So I think when you go in setting yourself up for stuff like that, that's a problem because then you're just looking for sort of those sensational bits. But I find that the great thing about podcasting is it's a longer interview. So I've done a lot of press packs, and it's really easy for an athlete to have this sort of very stock standard answers in those press conferences. But when you get them in a podcast, it's just you and them. Hopefully, if you're lucky and you're speaking to them for longer, it's actually harder for someone to keep up their guard for that sort of length of time. So if you spend a bit of time and slowly sort of try and unpack stuff and lead them to a place, you can get some pretty great stuff. So that's, my strategy is trying to lead them to that place, but also, just be confident as well. Sometimes you've got to ask a tough question and if they don't like you afterward, bad luck.

Graham Brown: Yeah. Interesting. I wonder how your fans react to that? Because you said you set out at the beginning, Andrew, to create a podcast for fans. And one of the things I've noticed is that of all the podcasts starting these days, only a small percentage of them actually start thinking from the perspective of what do people want to listen to as opposed to, what do I want to talk about, which is often the case. And so they start almost as if you were on, like commercial radio where you have to start with that position of what does the audience want to hear? I've got their attention. That's the most valuable thing in the world. What do they want to hear about? So in your case, how do you get your fans involved? How do you interact with them and how does that work with the kind of guests that you have on the show as well?

Andrew Menczel: Social media is a big one for interacting with your fans. And in a way I've had a, I guess a classical kind of podcast journey where you start as an amateur in your living room and I've progressed to a more professional environment. So, it's been interesting to sort of speak to the fans that have been listening from the beginning and can see the evolution of the show and myself as the host. And they've seen the first trickle of guests start to come in. And then all of a sudden, the guests are getting bigger names and bigger names. So I think taking the audience on that journey with you is important. And that's been a great way of keeping engaged with the audience. And then when it comes to guests, I always think about every decision I make editorially. What would a cricket fan want to hear and not a casual cricket fan because I'm not generally talking to casual cricket fans, but what would a real cricket sort of tragic want to hear?

Graham Brown: Yeah. Having that clear avatar of who your audience is is very important, isn't it?

Andrew Menczel: Well, and I had that from the very beginning, so I never thought this podcast would be for someone who likes cricket, but just wants to listen to something to catch up on it. I thought, no, I want this to be for fans that come with an assumed amount of knowledge.

Graham Brown: In Podcasting, one of the real strengths is this idea of narrowcasting as opposed to broadcasting, in which you can target a specific group of people and not dilute the message down for a wider reach because it's small, but the concentrated fan base is a lot more powerful than a very broad and thin fan base as you would in traditional broadcast media. So to have, I see a lot of podcasters setting out without a clear understanding of who their audiences are. That is a problem because of who you are talking to specifically. You have to be very clear about who that audience is, that assumed level of knowledge, and also, what the ’in’ jokes are, what the inside knowledge is and what their sort of frustrations are with the conversations that you're talking about. That's a good starting point. How do you nurture that over time? What sort of interactions do you have with your fans in the long term? Do they contribute to the content? Do they comment? Do they submit questions? What works for you?

Andrew Menczel: Absolutely. It's changed from when I was an independent podcaster. It was a lot of interaction we had, giveaways for leaving reviews, we used to take listen-to questions. I even had a couple of listeners on the show then when I moved to news limited and it became more professional production, there was probably a little bit less of that. But now that the show is independent, again. The main thing the audience sends in is feedback. And if it's bad feedback, I'll just abuse them. And then questions, topics, that kind of thing. It's nice when I go to cricket grounds. And, recently I was doing ground denouncing at a cricket ground, and all of a sudden I've got all these messages from people that listened to my podcast and were like, “Oh, I just heard your voice at this ground denouncing.” So I got to meet a few fans, which was good in IRL, in real life.

Graham Brown: What was that like?

Andrew Menczel: That was really nice. And not this time, but the time before I met some fans, as I said, a few of them had been listening to the show since the beginning, and I find that quite nice that I could meet these fans. And, they heard me when it was just me and a mate and we were talking over one microphone and it was pretty rough to now. That was quite nice to be able to meet those people that have been there the whole time and put a face to the name and have a chat.

Graham Brown: They feel like they're part of the journey as well. I'm sure that they were there at the beginning.

Andrew Menczel: They are because if no one had listened, they probably would've stopped.

Graham Brown: Yeah. So let's say, we're going to start a podcast and the podcast is,

Andrew Menczel: You and I?

Graham Brown: Yeah. We'll have to find some mutual sport, which we can talk about. It's not going to be cricket for example. So let's put that aside, something England and Australia both play. That's sort of like at equal levels so we can put rugby aside as well. Let's get down to table tennis. So we're going to start a table tennis podcast. How do you then model what you did with the cricket podcast and make that work? If you had a playbook, let's say Andrew and Graham sit down to create this podcast. They've got an idea. What are the steps that you need to go through to accelerate those eight years of learning? So you don't have to make all the same mistakes.

Andrew Menczel: The first thing is what you mentioned. You just have to work out who you're talking to, so once you define your listener, you work backwards and you work out who they are, what they want, and what you're going to give them. And then you work back to deliver that. That's my overall advice. When it comes to things like launching a show now. It's very difficult because there are so many podcasts out there and discovery is a very real problem. I would suggest something like, say table tennis. Well, there's probably not a lot of table tennis podcasts out there, but if I were starting a cricket podcast, now I look on iTunes and there's maybe a hundred cricket podcasts, if not more. And you have to think about how you are going to be different from the ones that are out there. And how are you going to find an audience with your new show? Then you get to this nitty-gritty of show structure, and that kind of thing. And, you have to work out how you are going to keep your listeners engaged for the whole podcast episode?

Graham Brown: Yeah. I look at a podcast now, the real challenge is, like you say, supply versus demand for attention effectively. Data has become so easy for anybody to step up to the mic. Has meant this sort of flood of podcasts, which is great. The flip side of that is it's easier to produce, but harder to promote. So the competition is really shifting in store. Think about the strategies people have had for podcast growth over the last three to five years, which have been shared with guests. You get to guests, you get the guests to share with them that work, the guest’s fans come and check out your podcast. But very little of that actually convert to subscribers at least now. It's very different now than it was five years ago. So, what's happening is that it's now shifting in stores. So if you're up against a hundred podcasts in the same niche in cricket. How do you ensure that you grow the audience episode to episode? And that's really interesting because you've had eight years' experience of this, you know how to keep people coming back. What's the secret there? How do you get what is missing in most podcasts today that repeats listeners?

Andrew Menczel: It's about what someone's getting in return. From my point of view, I know that if you're a cricket fan and you want a podcast that wraps up the cricket news tightly in about under an hour as a podcast to go to. But I do feel that there's a lot of podcasts now that don't really service a need. They're just a nice listen. Oh, that was a nice interview or that was a nice story, which is why something like True Crime is doing so well because it's so compelling. You like, you want to listen to the next episode to find out what happened. So I think it's about, as I said, valuing the listener's time, and then you need things like good hosts and fun and unfiltered personality and things that are going to make people want to listen. But generally, if it's just a nice listen, that's not good enough anymore. And it's because, one thing I've noticed is that a few years ago, getting a relatively famous or well-known media personality on a podcast was a big thing because they weren't doing them. So that was a great thing. You'd get someone well known and that would promote your show. But now, everyone gets good people on their podcast. And if they're not getting them on their podcasts, those people are doing podcasts themselves. So there's no point thinking I'm just going to get a big name and people are going to listen because that's not enough anymore. And I think there's too much of that in the podcasting sphere. Let's interview famous people and let's do this and get people that are well known and that's going to boost my podcasts. Whereas the thing now, actually it's oversaturated with that and you probably better off going the other way and finding your own unique voice.

Graham Brown: It's almost like running a cafe or a restaurant, isn't it? That you could get a celebrity chef running out from the kitchen and paying him celebrity wages. And you could probably bring in the media and the PR and yet these restaurants turnover so fast, don't they, the ones that really survive are the ones slowly out of town. That's really good food and they can pack people in on a Wednesday afternoon. Well, they can pack people in on an off night and anybody can get a full house on a Friday night or Saturday night in a restaurant or cafe, at least they did in the pre-COVID days. But that sort of model is similar to podcasts. Isn't it? It's that you can get in the big names and they can bring in the crowds, but the challenge is doing that. We can work out the consistency and that's your sort of organic fan base, isn't it? And I wonder as well, moving forward, the challenge that what's going to happen in the stores is that over time you're going to see this polarization just as you see in any media landscape. The guys who were there first, like yourself or those that have consolidated resources. So the networks or the larger agencies, or those that have access to Spotify and Apple in some preferred way, will get more. And those, everybody else will get less because that's just how it's going to be, how it's just like with Amazon, it wants to make sure that when you're searching it's going to serve you up the products you're most likely to buy, so those were the history effectively. It's the same with Apple and Spotify, they're going to serve up your search results based on the content that is the most engaging. So it's going to get harder. Isn't it. It's going to get harder for people to build fan bases. It’s going to get harder for people to rely on celebrities as a hack if you like to get up the audience curve. Where do we go from here in the next two to five years? What do you see in this space? It's going to be interesting in terms of how the rules of the game are evolving and changing for success in podcasts.

Andrew Menczel: Yeah, it's an interesting question. The fragmentation of the industry has been quite interesting. I've found it fascinating to watch the way different apps are developing and Spotify's entrance into the podcasting sphere has made a huge difference to the industry. And I didn't probably twig on onto how big of a difference it would make by simply the fact that millions of people have the Spotify app and use it. So you're not driving people to a new app. I always used to tell people about podcasting a few years ago, and you'd have to show them the purple app on their iPhone. And now that sort of change people are using on-demand audio. And that's already what you talk about with the discovery. That's already there. There's, it's pretty hard to stick out, but what you do need to do is a really good show because really good shows will rise to the top. And then over the next three to five years, I actually think it's a really positive outlook because one thing that's happening is people are really used to the subscription model. And they're happy to pay for on-demand content that they want. So, the big challenge of podcasts is how you monetize and how you make them a viable business. And I think now in the next three to five years, there's going to be a multitude of ways to do that. And whether that's advertising, if you're one of those bigger platforms with a big audience, or whether that's a smaller subscription type thing, if you say a niche podcast on table tennis. You might just find a thousand people that love table tennis, and we'll pay a certain amount each week for the show and apple, as we record this, are due to make huge changes to the apple store. And I think the whole industry could be turned on its head where it's just click, okay, I'll buy this bonus episode for 50 cents or whatever, however it's going to play out. But I actually think the future is subscription models. And I think on-demand, content is just growing and growing. So I only see it as a positive growth industry.

Graham Brown: Apple and Spotify. Interesting aren't they? They both have subscription payment mechanisms built into the platform and apple more so obviously Spotify has one subscription mechanism and that's it. But Apple has a lot more, a lot more capability and scope for subscription, even just buying as you would on iTunes and individual tracks. What people used to do in the day. So that makes some micropayments a lot easier. I can see that happening a lot more easily on Apple than on Spotify because Apple could easily activate that Spotify would have to make some quite fundamental changes to allow that. And it would probably be, if anything, for Spotify, a lot more centralized, I, these are our subscriber models and in the same way, you would have something like. Offering a premium subscription package, right on the TV with an apple, however, because of their experience with the app store, that they have a lot more scope to introduce something like that for micropayments, that's going to be fascinating how that plays out. And also, if you think about it, that Spotify is already geared towards advertising more than it is to subscription compared to Apple, for example, I know it has in-app purchases, but the actual technology side of things makes apple a much more likely player to have a go at the subscription model.

Andrew Menczel: Yeah, definitely. And the micropayments thing will be a big, big change when it happens a lot of free content, but then say you get a feature interview with somebody who's people who people want are going to pay to hear that. Then that's where you might charge for that bonus episode.

Graham Brown: Yeah, it hasn't really taken off yet though. Has it? We had like the Patreon models with subscribed subscription content, and that seems to gravitate a lot towards politics and music as well. I, if you're a band, could build up your fan base and get money out of them through premium content, through Patriot on, and then also politics as well. But like they have a certain political bent and therefore you would subscribe to that to support that viewpoint if you like, but haven't really seen it going outside of that. I'm just wondering what we need to make those subscription models really fly because sport would be ideally placed for this. That would be a great way to get people to help build a community.

Andrew Menczel: Yeah. Well, people are just lazy. That's my feeling. So you just gotta make it easy for people. And the technology just keeps on getting better. I think Patreon is really good and now it's much easier than it was a year or two ago. And it's if you look at its net value, it's in the billions now. So I think. Those models are just going to get better and better and easier to use. And that'll propel growth because people don't want barriers to entry. I'll go and sign up for this and put this RSS feed in your app and do this. So I think as the technology gets better, that'll open up sort of different options.

Graham Brown: Okay, so let's round up one last question for you, Andrew. And as an opinionated Hosey, this is a setter. What is it that you believe about podcasts that other people don't, what is it that you see that others aren't seeing yet? What are you, what's your conviction about podcasts that the world disagrees with you on?

Andrew Menczel: I don't know if there is one actually. I don't think I can give myself enough credit when I've got some unique view on podcasting, but I guess my overall philosophy is just to be fearless. It's still one of those industries where there are no rules and you should just have a fucking crack.