So What? Platform Review – Amazon AMP

Well, hey there. Happy Thursday, everyone. Welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights live show. It is just myself and John today. Ooh, I actually got the side right.

Um Chris is traveling the world. He's uh speaking, he's doing a keynote at the Spark Me conference in Montenegro this weekend. Um so he is not joining us. So John and I are taking the reins today, and we will be talking about Amazon Amps. We're gonna be doing a platform review today.

So what is it? Uh so John, I have as you can imagine, I have a lot of questions. Um first and foremost, is it my understanding that Amazon AMP is only available on iOS at this time? Yes, that's correct. They did the same thing Clubhouse did where they put it out on iOS and uh you know, I can understand from a development side because it's just it's so much easier, you know.

You've got Apple's hardware as you know, to their specs, and you don't have to deal with just Android, which could be anything. So but yeah, from a marketing point of view, I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of people say that that was Clubhouse's biggest mistake. But you know, by the time it finally came around for Android, people were just like, yeah, whatever, we don't care. Uh well, as an Android user, I never got access to Clubhouse, so I can't really comment on it other than, you know, I was never given access.

And so I'm sort of at the same point with Amazon Amp right now. So for those of us, myself included, who don't know, what the heck is Amazon Amp? Yeah, yeah. Let's hear. Let's go uh fire up uh this is it.

We're rolling with all these different formats. John and I are just hitting buttons. There we go. We're both back in. We got the slide.

Okay, so yeah, to back up Amazon Amp, what is this thing? And so we mentioned Clubhouse. The idea with Clubhouse was it was an app that you know people could talk and present. It's basically a conferencing app. That was the whole idea with that.

And you know, there's some interesting stuff up there. There's a lot of spammy stuff up there, but it's just another place to kind of get in with your community. And we tested it, took it for a couple runs. And the thing that we always came back to was like, well, this is no different than a Zoom meeting without the video. You know, I mean, you could do the same thing, say, hey, let's meet up on Zoom.

Um, and with all these platforms, though, there's the hope that they reach that critical mass where there's so many people that you have to go there because you can get an audience that you don't have. Whereas if you already have your audience, it's it's a hard case to uh to jump in on this. So, you know, Clubhouse comes in, Amazon AMP is the next stage of this. And the interesting thing with AMP, which is what we can play around with a bit, is that you have Amazon's music library is attached to this. So you have the ability to it's kind of a be your own DJ service.

You can go in there and you can stack up songs you want to play. And so now you can talk and engage your community, but you have a way to play music. And you know, for the entire history of podcasting, this has been uh a gap in that you know, getting the rights to play music. And in fact, that's part of our our classic uh live without a net here today. Oh man, the slides are blowing by me already here.

The first of many failures we're gonna have. Well, I mean, so as you're pulling that back up, so it sounds like it's another version of conferencing, but this time with music included. And so it's so like I said, I was never given access to Clubhouse. But Clubhouse to me as an outsider sounded like it was sort of like everybody just kind of talking. So almost like one of those like party lines where anybody can jump in and there's no real conversation.

Like you could set up chat rooms or whatever they were called. Um, but it sounds like like there was no structure, there was no exclusivity, there was no planning. It's like people could just jump into it. Is that true of this service as well? Yeah, it can be used the same way, but that you know, I mean, that is another one of the you know, the amateur hour things that people complain about with Clubhouse.

I mean, it doesn't have to be that way. You could say, hey, you know, we're gonna let in these four speakers here, they're gonna be the ones that talk, and we're gonna have a you know, a program and show notes and we're gonna figure out what we're gonna do. But yeah, a lot of times it's just kind of like the hey, everybody shows up and let's just put the first eight or ten people on stage and see what happens. And yeah, free-for-all, I don't know. You know, I could uh get on the soapbox about this and talk for an hour complaining and ranting, but like that's the biggest mistake with a lot of audio is the people just think that, you know, because it's an interview, this is the first time that you're going through the topics and and you just kind of sit and talk and hope that something good happens.

But the reality is, you know, all the best stuff is scripted, right? People have already vetted the topics, they have a rough idea, at least a rough idea, if not a fully fleshed out idea of where they're gonna go and what they're gonna talk about and what they're gonna do. Um, I know having worked with you for a while, I know how much you know, time and effort and planning goes into a single marketing over coffee episode. It's definitely, you know, you and Chris are not winging it. You have your punch list of things that you want to cover.

So it's not just, hey, let's just get together and talk about what's going on marketing. The amount of planning that actually goes into it is fairly extensive. Um, you know, and so it's just it's not just okay, let's just show up and hope for the best. But yet your podcast has stant has stood the test of time. Yeah.

And so I've just thrown up here on the screen, this is the QR code to get the Amazon AMP app from the app store. So if you're on iOS, you can just pull out your phone and grab this and you can jump over there and install if you want to join along and see what's going on. Um, but yeah, to get back to what you're just saying, yeah, that's the the eye-opening thing for me on that was when I found out um how National Public Radio, this American life, how they work when they create their episodes. Because I've always said that you know, our competition is not other marketing podcasts. We compete against national public radio and all the other things out there that people can listen to.

And uh one day listening to Ira Glass talking about the fact that, well, they have a team and they pick 12 stories and they go out and they work those 12 stories and they bring them all back and they have some rough stuff that they grind through. And ultimately, maybe three of those actually get on air. You know, two thirds of the stuff that they chase or write about doesn't even make it to the public's ears, you know, it gets dumped or you know, thrown in a bin to be returned to later on months later. And yeah, and so many podcasts are just like, okay, we're gonna record this week, and whatever comes out, that's what's gonna go up. Um, you know, that's fine if it works for you.

And if, you know, if people are looking for free form comedy or you do improv or whatever, like that's fine. But yeah, you know, the problem is if you know, if you can tell some weeks you're faking it and it's not going right, like that's uh you know, gonna be in the long run, that's gonna bite you. People are just you know eventually gonna start listening to other stuff where they don't have to roll the dice where they they get you know interesting stuff. Well, and so you know, before we get into the demo, I feel like so. Clubhouse seemed pretty unstructured, and now there's Twitter has their own sort of version of you know what Clubhouse was.

I can't remember the name of it. It's I guess communities or what is it? There's something in Twitter now that you can sort of start up a you know audio listening piece too. Yeah, feed, you know, and to be honest, like I haven't even seen anything on that. I haven't played with that because it's I have yet to hear anybody say, like, hey, I'm doing the thing on Twitter this week.

Um so yeah, no, I because I mean it doesn't show up in their main interface, so you have to go dig to find out, you know, whatever the heck it is. Um so yeah, I got nothing on that to be honest. But I guess I guess the point is it's yet another unstructured. I mean, you can make a Zoom call structured, you can have an agenda. You can make a stream yard, you know, live stream structured, you can have an agenda.

I think the risk is it opens up all of this unstructured conversation, which can be beneficial, but probably ninety nine percent of it is just noise and junk. Yeah, and that's you know, it is kind of interesting because you see this with YouTube where you know it's just thrown out to the world, and then the world kind of determines what gets the plays and views. You know, like there's so much crazy content on YouTube that um, you know, if you told somebody you know 12 years ago that there would be a channel where people are making millions of dollars of people, you know, throwing rolls of toilet paper and you know, doing it 10,000 times and saving the one where it actually lands on the thing, you know, like the dude perfect thing that does survive and make it. So yeah, this kind of opening up to the world and seeing what sticks. Yeah, you know, if it survives, it's great, you get some amazing stuff.

But yeah, you totally nailed it that the reality is you know, 99.9% of it is garbage that's just horrible, and you know, you're gonna have to deal with it. Um so yeah, Twitter spaces. I had to look it up. Twitter spaces, thank you. Uh dig it up.

And so, yeah, the idea is like when you go into a tweet, you can name your space and start doing your space. But yeah, are you you know, throw us a comment or tweet to me at John J Wall if you're using spaces or have seen anything cool with that? Because we would love to hear if you've got anything that's working. Um well, even the you know, the the casual like I did this in one take TikTok videos or Instagram reels or whatever they are, what you don't see is how many takes it actually is to get the thing that looks super nonchalant and casual. And so to your point where we started is the best content is really structured and planned out.

So what's in the box, John? What do we got? What do we have to work with? All right, yeah, let's let's uh enough yakking. Let's get to the action here.

See if we can not break this, is going to be the big thing. All right. So here we go. This is the moment of truth. We're gonna fire this thing up.

Well, you know, if it does break, I think that that's helpful to know as well. Because part of the challenge with these new software packages, these new platforms is the ease of use, the usability, the ability for you know, users to just pick it up and start using it. Like what's the learning curve? And so if it's you know constantly breaking, um, you know, that's not great. And I love your background photo.

That's adorable. This is my child from like seven years ago. This, you know, this is what happens as a parent. You like put it up and you never change it. So at the top left here, we've got the AMP app.

We can go ahead and fire this up and get right in here so you can see what this thing looks like. Um, so this is yeah, this is the login screen. This is what happens when you get in there. And the idea with this is it's you know, you do the swipe, you know, you just keep swiping. Here's all the shows that are actually running today, and you've got on the top left there that red on air icon showing you who's actually in there, and you know, and you do even though this has this music functionality.

We've got talking baseball here, um music from Mexico. There was another there's another sports one that was actually up on here. So it actually seems a lot like Twitter Spaces and like Clubhouse in that it's sort of this, you know, people are putting together topics, conversations like specific. It's a podcast, basically. Yeah, absolutely.

And it will go through when you create the show. You can actually choose the topics that you want to put up on there. Um, and you can see on the top left, you there's six people actually in the session, four have delivered likes, and yeah, 90s to aughts music. Um, and now this is in beta, there's not a ton of users. Most of the time we'll go through, I don't know.

Yeah, okay. So here we go. Oh, and this is interesting. Here's a tip too. This is on Thursdays, the AMP support crew does their own show.

So if you're using it and you have problems, Thursdays at two is the time where you can go on and talk to people who actually work on the app and find out what's going on. That's actually that's super helpful. That's a newer thing that you know, I don't see a lot of other software platforms doing. Yeah, I think this is you know, it's definitely a beta thing, but yeah, this is huge. The fact that there's a bunch of humans that you could actually get to know and talk to, something you'd never see on, you know, Facebook or uh a Google platform.

Um, which does keep things interesting. Um so are these did you set up some like when you first log into the software to the app, like are you given choices to like what are you interested in? What are the things that you want to hear about? Or is this just like here's what's available, good luck. Yeah, you know, right now it's it's thin enough that it's just here's what's going on.

Uh this guy, Christian Hand, too. I have to give him a shout-out. He's a West Coast uh radio DJ and personality. This guy knows more about music than nearly anybody I know. And he does a lot of song exploder type things where you know he goes in and digs into music and tells you what's the the influences for stuff and where things have come from.

Um yeah, I'm trying to see if there's anything else. You know, here's my profile. Everybody gets their own profile. And this is another thing now. So I have as my link, I have my Twitter profile because as of right now, there's no chat function in this.

You know, when you're inside and you've got a show running, other people can talk, but there's no back channel for it. And so that's one thing as we roll. I always say, you know, if you want to talk back channel, my Twitter handle is John J. Wall. Come talk to me over there.

We can get in and and you know, at least have some kind of back channel. And the thing is, you're completely um unaware as far as what's going on. You've got followers, people can follow you, and you can follow others. And so yeah, this is interesting. I actually have a bunch of people who have started to follow me that I don't know.

You know, this is the classic early social media thing of just go in and follow everybody and have them follow you back and try and get some critical mass. Um, and my family hates me for this now because my Apple Watch goes off all the time. Anytime any one of these people starts a show, I actually get pinged, um, which is ridiculous because I you know listen to them about once or twice a week. Um and then they do have and this is a feature they just added up in the top right. This arrow, you can actually copy your profile link.

So at least you have a way now to share your profile on other channels. Um and so yeah, so part of us worrying about getting kicked off today, too. This is one thing is you know, any of this music, um when we actually play and you jump in, if this gets caught in our YouTube feed, it's gonna get we would get bounced. So you actually don't get to check this out. But yeah, hey, Mr.

DJ, this is classic 90s. Uh get your smooth jam on here. That's right. You play that song all night on yeah, I know that one. We've got now you can see there's two other people in the stream.

We can like it. This clap function is new. This was like the um, you know, on Instagram feeds there, you've got kind of the applause or hearts or whatever. You can throw a clap up there, we can throw our clap. She doesn't need to know that we don't actually hear her.

And uh and we can stop this thing if you want to now. You have the ability to stop the feed or restart it. And even if we go back out to the listings, the show will continue playing until we stop it, or we select another uh show or event. So can you go back into that show? Because I have a couple of questions for you.

Yeah, yeah so uh in the top left next to the on air when you click the that little arrow down what does it yeah that jumps back to the previous interface so we go back to the selection. See I looked at that as a user and I assumed like some sort of a menu was gonna drop yeah that you'd get a a bump. You do have the stack dots over here that give you basically you know the report the short guidelines. Yeah really nothing to it and now and we can show this when we cross over to the other side but uh Amber here can actually let people join her call she can open it up for calls and then people can request to talk. In fact we can we'll show that let's just um yeah we've done enough with play let's go ahead and act like we're DJ now here.

So we're gonna create a new show this of course kicks you out of whatever you're into and uh I have my mug up on there because I don't have a better graphic to use. I always like how they give you those little like prompts of like show title make it something catchy. I know because I would prefer a not catchy uh testing we'll call it probably crash and burn oh I'm not Joey Dollassign. All right testing crash and burn okay and then you have to select your topics this is where you you know I don't as far as I know you can't drive to these topics but they're still doing this categorizing right now. Okay.

So we can I don't know, we'll let life and culture, entertainment. I don't know. They're business is in, yeah. Here we go. Business and careers.

So we'll do that. Of course, tech and uh fighting sports. There we go. Yeah, I think that that's appropriate. That's totally who we are.

Show details. Um Katie and the morning zoo here. That's true. That's pretty much my life every day. Old school DJ style.

Um make oh, look at that. Oh, so that's interesting. Now we can go work safe, or we might as well leave the explicit tags on so we can do whatever we want. I mean, I've been known to swear every once in a while, so it makes sense. Occasionally, and now you can schedule for later.

That's you know, the better prepared content people are gonna do the classic appointment media of you know, it's the five o'clock Friday drive time show or the 8 a.m. morning thing, or you know, whatever your your gig is. But we'll just go right to the setup here. We're gonna go. Well, and I but I would imagine that the that the disadvantage of scheduling for later is that you can't then have the live people bring people into the call, right?

No, you can. It's but it's just you know, you're saying that okay, this is gonna start on Tuesday at five o'clock. Oh, I see. Sort of like scheduling some of these uh things in StreamYard, like so. I set up the link to the to the live stream earlier this morning, so it was all set.

I think. Yeah, exactly. You've got it scheduled, and then I you know, in theory, I mean, we don't know how this is gonna play. Excuse me, but if it's like old school DJ stuff, people just get used to hearing you at Sundays at noon, you know. That's Casey Caseum is always there on the weekend afternoons to Mulan kind of thing, but who knows if that's you know the way the thing is actually gonna work.

Um so we have a button to go live. We can you can go back and change the uh you know the descriptions and everything you want. But the big thing that is the bottom right here, the playlist. Okay, so we can go in and this is where you actually add music from their music library. And so what we can do is uh you go to add songs and this is where you're playing Russian roulette and you really want to do this ahead of time because you have no idea what's actually going to be there.

You know when you start searching you know certain bands don't have um don't have sharing rights for whatever reason. And uh today the Princess State is releasing the Purple Rain concert in Syracuse so we're gonna throw a little prints on our list. I mean I think every day is a good day for prints. This is true. You can never have too much prints.

But now and as see I'm rocking my Midnight City shirt here in spirit of old school hair metal and kitar as we were talking about for Kitar yes TikTok the the pre-show show we were talking about guitar. And yeah they don't have not this Midnight City. This is a different Midnight City. So you know this is one of those ones where you're out of luck you you're just not going to be able to play what they want to play. But I think that you know you're definitely uh giving the nod to why you want to you don't just want to wing it and I think that sort of as we're getting to sort of like the so what of why we're doing this product review is a lot of people in our space do create you know audio, video, other kinds of content and the amount of preparation that goes into creating that content to make it look effortless is you know quite extensive.

And so as you're pulling up these songs, you know, it definitely just sort of reinforces the you really need to be planning ahead if you are a content creator who's just going to wing it to create a podcast or a show on a platform like this. The chances of your the quality of your content being really good starts to drop because there are so many things that can go wrong. Yeah, and this is too. It's been funny. There's a lot of people that kind of talk about the old school radio DJ thing of you know, if you're gonna do an hour show, can you do it so that you've got the mix so that it ends right at the post at you know at 60 minutes to the dime the last song finishes and you sign off?

I mean, you don't have to do that, obviously, with this. You're it's just open-ended, you can go as long as you want. But yeah, there's a lot of that's kind of the old school DJ artistry of like making sure you've got you know enough songs at the right rate, you know when the breaks are, they're streaming together, you've got all that that you can go. So um we've got our playlist here. We go back to the show manager, and now this is interesting.

Now, last time I had fired this up, um, I was not able to go live without a listener. Let's see if that's changed. Okay, we're so ready to go live. We got a five-second countdown. We're gonna reject hate and do all the other things that we're supposed to do.

And oh, here we go. We got in the content. Oh, here we go. Three, two, one, and live in five. Here we go.

All right, so this is running now. Uh, and actually let me show you this. This is another thing too that I've done. Now you can go live without any listeners, which was different. Before to gate the beta, they had it set up that you would have to have one listener on to be able to go live.

And so the trick with that is I had a second iPhone, and we've got uh I actually just set up my wife with an account, and so she can go in there, and now we'll see. This is the again, this is where we're starting to get really wonky. All right, so we find it. Like, John, I don't want to have to listen to your show again. She's like, no, we don't want more.

Here we are. Okay, there's hey y'all. And now let's see if we've actually made the list here. So I can see it just bumped up to one listener. Did it really?

Oh, okay. And that's not us. So some poor soul is stumbling. Just listening to you test out this as we do the live. This is very meta of you have one iPhone as the listener to the show that you are broadcasting on the live stream where we're also broadcasting.

So it's it's oh, and someone just clapped. Someone clapped. How about that? I don't know if they can. So what we're gonna do, we'll do them a favor and we're gonna fire up some music.

You have three listeners now. I mean this is this is still one of those things where I like if I tell people not to listen, everybody's gonna come listen. Well, because they but I mean, this is really interesting. And so, you know, it definitely opens up a different kind of podcast opportunity, specifically if we think about, you know, our space, which is primarily B2B marketing and general marketing, digital marketing, there's not a lot of opportunity to incorporate music into it. And so by being able to incorporate music into it, it may be more compelling, you know, content.

Let's see. Yeah, we got a comment that tied just as Android. Yes, sorry, apologize for that. Amp just can't help you as of right now. Um but yeah, you nailed it that the big thing with this is this music library.

If you you know, we we kind of joke about these platforms as being Zoom without video, but the reality is if you do anything involved with music, if music is central to what you're doing, this could be really cool. You know, I could see sure microphones coming on. And hey, here's you know, 10 songs by famous artists that use our gear, and you know, things like that. Or if you're promoting new artists and you want to do, hey, here's the new uh, you know, electronica hour or whatever, like this could be a really interesting way to get in and and do some different kinds of things. So there's a lot that you could jump on there.

Or if you're a podcast like marketing over coffee and you tend to have tech sponsors that are around, you know, mixing boards and headphones. Aside from just you and Chris talking and using this equipment, it's a really good opportunity to demonstrate, you know, to users like, and this is what music sounds like, because music is always going to sound different than you know, just you and Chris talking. And so it's a really great opportunity to really demonstrate you're not only using the equipment, but here's what if you as the end user buys the thing that we're promoting, this is what you also get. Yeah, and that brings up another point to the kind of an insider thing that I you know learned playing around with this and through some experimentation. You know, by default now, the iPhone doesn't have a headphone jack.

So most people would be listening via Bluetooth. And I found actually that the audio quality is way better. You just get the Apple dongle so that you can go to a real set of headphones, and the sound quality is phenomenally better on wired headphones than it is on Bluetooth. And so I don't know, there's a lot of protocols with that where they might be, you know, there's differing levels of Bluetooth connections. And I think because this is a kind of a fully functional app, they may be handcuffed as far as not being able to send the highest quality audio down to the end stream.

So yeah, if you do if you're a listener, definitely get your dongle and some wired headphones because that makes a huge difference as far as what you're doing. And then, see, this is like classical radio DJ, we're like scrambling because the next song is queuing up and we we're like in the middle of our burrito or whatever here. Well, now, so as the host of the show, again, because it's through your phone, I would imagine that you would want to have some sort of a good microphone and headset connected to the phone somehow. And it's so if it iPhone using a dongle into you know some kind of a system. So, you know, one of the advantages we have doing this live stream uh is that we're doing it through our laptops, and so we can have better equipment, we get out better microphones, better headphones.

You know, it sounds like you're a little bit limited if you're doing it through your phone. Like what would you recommend there? Yeah, so that's where you know I really started to kind of audio geek out, and we start getting into crazy hardware questions because so you basically you have all you've got is either Bluetooth or the lightning port out, and so uh the what's worked best that I've been playing with is actually this rig here. This is a uh standard three-pole um microphone, uh three and a half millimeter jack. So the idea is it's a headset and a microphone on one single plug, which most you know Jabra headsets or any kind of quality zoom microphones that have the normal headphone jack.

Um, that's kind of the best way to go in because you'll be able to hear yourself well and you're you've got a decent quality microphone. Um I have been playing around and messing around with Rode actually makes uh a dongle where you connect via the lightning cable, and then you've got two microphones in and a headphone out. So I have been had some success with the idea, would be to have my normal headset in one of the microphones and then have the soundboard of my computer running into that second microphone. So now I could cue up other audio clips, and I'm sure they don't want to hear this, but you could even cue up other music, you know, and it would be coming through your mic instead of through their playing. So you'd be skipping their stats and probably violating a bunch of licensed stuff, but you could play a song that you otherwise can't get on there.

Um gotcha. So I haven't played around with that to get myself kicked off with yet. Um because I haven't found a really good reason to do that. But um, and this adapter, this is like 90 bucks this thing from road, but it it is top quality. And then the side benefit of that is if you do any podcasting, you can use this thing to get two mics into your phone and use your iPhone as your mobile field recorder instead of having to carry around another box.

Um, so that's at least something that you can uh you know use and take with. Um we've got Tina's, we've still got a minute 50 on Tina, so she can continue to do her thing. But we can go back when you go over to the show screen here. This is where we can actually enable call-in. And so this gives you like the last warning, okay, buddy, you're gonna open this up to the world.

And now it says we don't have any callers back. So let's jump back to the uh so it's interesting. At the bottom it says grow your audience, encourage more listeners to call in by very oh, I see. So when I read that first, I thought it was sort of that chat feature of like, hey, at John J. Wall, you know.

Um, but it sounds like you, as the host, DJ, would be saying, Hey, looks like John J. Wall's listening, you know, thanks for coming up, or thanks for, you know, showing up to our show today, just like as we're doing this live stream, hey, Ty, thanks for watching our show today and asking about Android. Yeah, absolutely. This is the uh yeah, it's just the kind of the classic repeat your branding every second or third song, you know, try and get people on board. And the big one was, you know, go ahead and follow me, you know, so you can get them on the platform, and so then they will be getting notifications next time you go live.

Got it. So I guess I guess the big question, you know, for you, John, as the person on our team who is really the podcasting expert, this sounds like this is yet another platform to be doing podcasts. Is this a platform that you know is good enough for people to start a podcast on, or do you think that it still needs more time? You know, it does need some work, but again, because it comes back to the music thing. Like if you were just doing a talking head podcast, like uh no, I wouldn't bother with this at all because the big thing is you own nothing here, right?

You just have your user account and your followers. It's like Twitter or Facebook, you have no control over anything. But yeah, I know for a long time there's people that would have wanted to do a podcast where they're spinning music, you know. Um Tom Webster did a show, just kind of proof of concept, uh, talking about uh in Los Angeles. There's the um, oh, for the love of me, I can't remember.

There's a valley over there where, you know, during the 70s, like all the major artists were there. And he was able to go on and tell the story of uh of what's going on in this part of the city where it was like, you know, Van Halen lived there in Fleetwood Mac, and you know, everybody would just come over to other people's houses and and so you could he could spin an hour's worth of music of like here's the stuff that came out of this thing, and to do that kind of storytelling backed up with music. And and because the big thing is it so many people have missed out on this music exploration. You know, it used to be everybody listened to the radio. We all heard the same songs, we all bought the same songs, and the internet blew that to pieces.

You know, now it's, I mean, if you have a kid or an older person and you go look at their playlist, like 90% of the music, you probably don't know who they are or where they come from. And so this is, you know, hoping to solve an exploration problem, really. Interesting. I like that. All right.

Well, so, John, as we start to wrap up, um, you know, so what we've been able to see is that at least going through the navigation, starting a show, um, doing the basics, that user experience is fairly straightforward. Um, you know, what other things would you recommend? Like, what kind of features do you wish this platform had for you to become more of a power user? Like, what would make you, you know, put marketing over coffee on this platform? I'm guessing one of the things would be the ability to download the show afterwards or get some sort of metrics.

Yeah, you know, downloading after that, and of course, that uh, you know, hits all kinds of music rights, so there's questions with that. For content creators, it's always more access to the audience, you know, if there's other ways where you can get more people on or in. Um, you know, easy sharing would be something. Uh I mean, StreamYard kind of solves some of this problem, and that you know, we have it running on LinkedIn and YouTube and uh Twitter, you know, it's streaming on a bunch of different platforms where this is single platform. Um, but then the other thing too is to I don't know, they've been doing a lot of work with Guy Roz.

If you're familiar with him, he's famous for a number of radio shows and different audio programs, and he has a huge audience, you know, millions of people. And to be, you know, to have kind of a curated platform of like, okay, here's some big names, and if you like this, you're gonna like that, it could be access to to more people. Um, and then yeah, there there kind of needs to be a little bit more. So we've got the new caller thing here. I can actually we can just run through this.

I can submit myself as a caller so you can see how this thing works. If we request a call from over here. Okay, so now we show two new callers on this screen. And uh shout out to Mike Mataloni if you can hear us out there, my buddy from Chicago. Uh, but we will invite Corinne and so she's now there, and yeah, basically she's given the option to turn her mic on and just start talking.

And so, you know, this is which is a little dangerous, depending, well, not in the fact that it was Corinne, but in the fact that, you know, if you don't know the audience members, you don't know what they're gonna say. Um, and so you know, I think you and I both have had experience in, you know, more traditional radio. There's a there's a delay. Screener uh callers are screened, you know, you don't even get to talk to the radio show first. Like, so uh I used to work um over near AAF, the studio um in Boston.

So, you know, I Boston based. And where I worked, the hosts of the show would actually come in frequently. So I would get to know them a little bit, you know, talk to Hillman and LB and stuff like that. And I got to learn a lot about how real radio actually operates. And there's a big process that you go through before you, the caller, gets to be put on air.

And then even then, you're not put on live. There's a delay between whatever it is you're saying on air to when it actually goes on air. So if they have to drop it or you know, it's called like the dump button, if they have to dump the call, they can do that before it even becomes, you know, before the audience even becomes aware that that was a thing. This to me, uh, for Amazon Amp, sounds like a little bit of a risk, a little big risk, because there is no delay, and you don't know, you don't necessarily know who the callers are, you don't know what they're gonna say. Yeah, absolutely.

And there, you know, there tends to be at least a two to five second delay most of the time, which is a little wonky and can be a little weird. And yeah, but on the other, you know, another way to look at it is this is kind of the golden age of social media for this thing. Like everybody that gets on channels early knows that kind of like for the first two years, it's only the cool kids that want to have fun and are willing to get through the beta. And so it's not like you know, five years from now where it's gonna be a lot of haters and weirdos and angry people. So you can meet, you know, interesting and cool people.

But yeah, it's absolutely that of you know, you're gonna click the button and you're gonna pray that they're not, you know, just gonna start spewing something ridiculous or being a jerk or whatever. I mean, you can you do have the dumps, so you can dump them, but yeah, it's you're you're definitely trading it being a scripted show to like, okay, who knows what the hell's gonna happen. Here we go. Um, all right, we got another any last track you want to request here. We'll add one more to the file.

Um, you know, and that's and so, but this is a great example of why doing this live is not, you know, a great. I mean, we're doing this live to demonstrate the capabilities, but like in general, like if you ask me like what's on your place right now, I would stutter and be like, uh, I don't know. It's a great question. Because then, like, your mind starts spinning, but having it pre at least having like a list written down of songs that you want to play is probably not a bad idea. But to try to do it like on the fly does not make for good audio, does not make for good content.

Because that's really quite honestly what we're talking about is just another way to create content. And you know, that's a lot of what marketers are asked to do is content creation. And this is just yet another vehicle for that. Cool. All right, but come on, let's see if you can stump the uh well.

We don't want to stump it. Think of somebody you think is pretty big, but may or may not be in here. Oh goodness. Um let's go Elton John. Oh, Elton John, I'm sure there'll be a ton of them.

I'm sure there's in there. Yeah. That way. I mean, we gotta go tiny dancer. I didn't know he did a song with Duo Lipa.

All right, we'll add Tiny Dancer to the mix. Uh let's see. Yeah, we could we could, you know, totally riff on the whole, you know, newer collaborations thing. I'm not a fan of that particular version. But that's me personally.

That's not representative of the majority of people who really enjoy that song. Um, all right, so John, as we're starting to wrap up the live stream, any last thoughts on these newer content creation platforms like AMP. Obviously, Clubhouse didn't stand didn't stand the test of time. We have good uh Twitter spaces, like what are the big takeaways for marketers who are looking for new ways to create content? Yeah, again, you know, with this one, it comes down to the music.

If that fits into your strategy, jump all over it. Um, otherwise, you know, yeah, the kind of wait and see thing might be worth doing. You want to jump in, try it out once, lock down your brand names, you know, so you have an account with your name and whatever you want to do, um, and have fun with it. But yeah, otherwise, I think you know, this is one where if you've got a strong blog and a strong YouTube strategy, I would spend your time over there before you start messing around over here. All right, I think that's solid.

Well, that I mean, unless there's anything else, unless anyone has any other questions, that kind of wraps it up for this week. So we just did a review of Amazon Amp. Um, if you are still listening to John's test show, you are currently listening to the Dropkick Murphy's, which are near and dear to my Boston heart. Um original lineup was, you know, probably better, but we we don't have to get into that. Um, so until next week, John, any final thoughts?

No, that sounds good. If you love any music stuff, go ahead and ping us. We're always up for talking about this and producing audio. All right. Until next time.

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