Three Long-time 40-something Friends Discuss Interests & Life Experiences

My name is Aric Fiscus. My co-hosts are Brady Liming and Todd Griffin.

I guess, in the spirit of Seinfeld, our show is about nothing. However, it may be better explained by being about a whole lot of nothing but a little of everything. For those who have yet to listen/watch each of our three hosts: Aric Fiscus, Brady Liming, and Todd Griffin, bring a topic to the table for each episode. Most generally topics are based on society and culture, nostalgia, food and drink, or music. However, the topic could be about anything that would come to the mind of a 40-something whose formative years were in the 80's and 90's. The topic has not been discussed at length prior to the show other than for disclosure for possible preparation by each host individually. No topic is discussed by the three of us together until the recording of the show. The discussion is unrehearsed. Hence we do what the name of the show is, we Play It By Ear. We set a 20 minute timer for each topic, although most of the time the timer is just a general framework. We will frequently discuss a topic further if the audience reaction warrants it, or stop at 20 if it doesn't. 15 episodes ago we made the decision to add live recordings on Facebook Live, Twitter (Periscope), YouTube Live, and Twitch. The addition of the audience has energized the show. The ability for the audience to participate in real time adds such an element to the process we could never go back to doing just audio.

Our listeners, according to our analytics, are most generally 25-50 years of age. The audio stats say our listeners are 65% men although our Facebook stats say our page likes are 70% female. So, I guess it depends on where you look for our listeners.

We talked about doing a podcast for a long while before pulling the trigger, probably a year or more. I guess I got the ball rolling when I was a guest on a podcast that one of my former students/baseball players (I am an educator) produces. I had so much fun that I convinced the other two that we had to go ahead and pull the trigger. As far as my personal history I have worked in terrestrial radio off and on part-time for 30 years so I have always seen it as a hobby. One of my dream jobs is to be a radio talk show host. With a podcast I can realize that dream somewhat. As far as our goals and motivations as a group we just felt that we could be entertaining by just having our normal conversations. At first we all said we didn't care if we got one listener. Of course, when the listeners started rolling in we became more focused on growing the show. This led to us branching off into a live show with video as well as keeping the audio only show alive. Best decision we ever made.

Our podcast is self-funded. We are all educators so we have the time outside of our full-time jobs. I would say, overall, I have spent about $1000 on podcasting and growing the show. I have fronted most of the funding. We hope to monetize more down the line and I will reimburse myself if possible.

Financially we have 4 monthly sponsors who contribute a total of $16 so that part is negligible. We did sell some merchandise through a retailer that took care of printing and shipping so our profit margin wasn't very high. We just wanted to take advantage of the Christmas season and hopefully make some people into walking billboards for the show by wearing t-shirts and facemasks. Most of the benefit is non-financial in the way of being a creative outlet that has nothing to do with my full-time job. I would say the other two feel the same.

We do our live recordings using the Streamyard software so we can simultaneously broadcast to Facebook, Twitter (through Periscope), YouTube, and Twitch. We all have microphones that are XLR/USB. When we are together to record we use a board to plug the mics into. When we are separate we use our USB ports. We have had a guest host once, which was another friend of ours who did the voiceover for our intro and outro. We want to explore having more guest hosts at some point. The nature of the show is that group preparation is minimal because we "Play It By Ear" with unrehearsed discussion. Individually, we prepare over the course of the week by thinking of possible topics.

Our show is currently hosted by Anchor so we are on all of the major providers. We also have a website (playitbyearpodcast.com) where we have centralized our audio, video, and social media traffic by directing our listeners to the website and click out to the various channels from there. We have a Facebook page, Instagram, Twitter, a YouTube Channel, and a Twitch channel. We have also recently started mailing out a newsletter to listeners who register with their email addresses at our website. I guess, at this point, Facebook is the most useful for us as we schedule our Live Recordings every week as events on our page.

I knew most of the production stuff as far as the on-air piece. Audio and video production was a learning curve as I have created intro and outro videos for our show. The biggest learning curve has been learning the Google search and social media algorithms to put our website and social media in a more prominent place where it can be readily seen. You can find out more about our podcast at our website playitbyearpodcast.com

playitbyearpodcast.com