We signed a deal with Spotify!

For over 5-years we have been producing content with our previous podcast host in Australia. They have been absolutely brilliant to us, but over the last year or two we started to explore new ways to socialise our content. We had meetings with many of the top podcast providers around the world including Megaphone/Spotify.

We signed a deal with Spotify!
September 2022
We signed a deal with Spotify!
Gerry Scullion
We signed a deal with Spotify!

For over 5-years we have been producing content with our previous podcast host in Australia. They have been absolutely brilliant to us, but over the last year or two we started to explore new ways to socialise our content. We had meetings with many of the top podcast providers around the world including Megaphone/Spotify.

Understanding This is HCD a little more

We are 100% independent and entirely funded by my business, Humana Design. I'm not a big consultancy or practice, in fact, it's always just been me. But as the network has grown, so too have the costs. I have always tried to keep the podcast free and position it as a way to get the messages out as wide as possible. But in order to keep doing that, I really had to explore the business model behind everything.

'Free' is a really tricky thing. Someone along the way needs to pay, and up until now, it's been me and my business. People may have noticed a few years ago I started to introduce pre-roll adverts for courses that we were running when I was running This is Doing. This worked nicely, as it was related content and it didn't affect the overall listening experience too much.

In order to keep This is HCD from producing content into the future, I explore paid podcasts, a payment gateway etc, but none of this really resonated as it would split the audience into two groups - people who can afford to pay and people who cannot afford to pay. It didn't feel right.

After speaking with many providers, I was blown away by what Megaphone at Spotify presented to me. It's a basic advertisement revenue model that allows me to cover the editing and hosting costs moving forward - so adverts will be played at the start of every episode.

Do I need a Spotify account to listen to This is HCD?

Absolutely not! It basically means the source of the audio comes from Spotify and pushes out to Apple, Google and everywhere else. That is all!

What does this mean for our listeners?

It means very little in terms of what you need to do to remain listeners. The feeds are all in the process of migrating across onto their servers and over the next week there might be a little downtime, but it should be seamless. I believe this is a step forward in the right direction for the future of what I have been building for quite some time.

You will notice potentially new variants of advertisements from Spotify happening at the pre-roll of episodes and if you hear anything you really don't feel is appropriate, you can flag to us on support@thisishcd.com.

We will still be using pre-roll adverts to promote the courses that we run on This is HCD and any events that we plan on running.

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