Monthly update for December 2020

Search playlists. API business.

Hi there!

This is the 39th full month (3 YEARS and 3 months) that I worked on Listen Notes full-time. Hope you are doing well and staying safe!

And Happy New Year!!!

Product updates

1, Podcasters can upload transcripts on their own — Example. Transcripts can be found on individual episode pages (Example) and are indexed by our podcast search engine (Example).

And our API is able to return the transcript for a specific episode now — use show_transcript=1 parameter for GET /episodes/{id}. As of today (Jan 1, 2021), we have transcripts for less than 1% of 90,000,000+ podcast episodes in the world.

Is 90,000,000 a big number? Well, kind of -

• Spotify & Apple Music have 60,000,000 songs each.

• Audible has ~500,000 audiobooks in total.

• IMDb has 7,500,000 titles (i.e., movies, TV episodes…).

Basically you can learn any topics from podcasts today. There’s a podcast for that.

2, Be able to search user-created Listen Later playlists (NOT including unlisted & private playlists, of course) - Example:

3, Be able to include or exclude episode search results from multiple podcasts (up to 5). This is done for both our website (Example) and the podcast API:

Company updates

I wrote a long blog post about our API business:

How I accidentally built a Podcast API business

Essentially, an API is a simple user interface that hides all the operational complexity and management overhead from users (developers). APIs are the supply chain in the software industry. APIs enable small software teams to ship products fast and compete with big corporates.

---

btw, do you know that ~47% of ALL public rss-based podcasts were created in 2020?

---

Thanks for reading! Drop me a line and tell me what you think about Listen Notes -- just reply this email or hello@listennotes.com :)

Stay safe!