Today is Tuesday, August 18th, and let’s begin this thirty-third episode.
Thirty-three episodes — which for me means thirty-three weeks — are not a huge number in the podcast world.
Quite the opposite.
Everyone says that before one year — fifty-two weeks — you cannot mathematically see results, let alone look for them.
These are slow processes.
People have to get used to it.
They arrive little by little.
Someone who follows a podcast is not the same kind of user as someone who reads a post on Facebook, watches a video on YouTube, or scrolls through photos on Instagram.
Yes, because if you do not receive notifications directly from your podcast aggregator — such as Anchor, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts — listening to an audio file requires at least three steps.
You open your phone.
You click on the link I publish on Facebook.
You click on the podcast of the week.
And then…
then you have to listen.
There are four or five minutes in which someone’s voice tells you something.
There are no images.
Nobody teaches you anything.
It is not a tutorial where you learn how to do things.
It is a voice that gently tickles a few reflections.
A gym for thought.
All this introduction is simply to say that, as with every action in which I invest energy, two days ago — Sunday, August 16th, the day I wrote this podcast — I asked myself whether the game was worth the candle.
I did this, of course, before reaching the famous fifty-two-week mark.
But we know how it is.
Theorists speak and write.
And then, on the other side, there are us: ordinary human beings, who constantly need to understand the meaning of what we are doing.
And when we are a little tired, we look for that meaning outside ourselves: in the audience, in the followers, in the virtual community we are building.
In these hot mid-August days, I am a little tired.
So I went back and listened again to all thirty-two episodes, and looked at how you reacted to each of them.
The interface I use to upload the audio files to the website gives me a dashboard with statistics.
Let me share a few with you.
Total listens have been just over 6,500.
This does not mean that 6,500 different people have listened to the thirty-two episodes published so far.
It means that the episodes of A Light-Hearted Journey Through Music Therapy have been listened to 6,500 times.
Most of you — 50 percent — listen to me on Spotify.
Another large group — 26 percent — clicks on the link I place at the bottom of the Facebook post and therefore arrives on the Anchor website, where A Light-Hearted Journey Through Music Therapy is hosted.
The remaining 24 percent is scattered between Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and other smaller aggregators.
One curious figure is that 90 percent of those who listen to me live in Italy, while another 10 percent is scattered around the world: Ireland, the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Spain, Argentina, Colombia.
You are mostly women — 61 percent — aged between 28 and 59, using this medium to maintain an extra-training contact — this is not a course — with the world of music therapy, or, much more simply, with my own little music therapy territory.
The episode that has received the most listens overall so far is episode number 2, from January 7th, 2020, with 540 listens.
The day with the highest number of listens was May 19th, when I put online the episode entitled “I Miss Having a Normal Job.”
On that day, 220 people listened to one or more episodes of A Light-Hearted Journey Through Music Therapy.
The latest episode — number 32 — currently has 52 listens, definitely fewer than the number of likes received by the Facebook post in which I announced it.
So much for the numbers.
They are small numbers.
And then come my questions.
Some of them have to do with the medium.
Are people who do music therapy in Italy interested in a podcast about music therapy?
Why is it that those who listen to me are mainly colleagues who are already working, and not students?
The age data tells me this without any shadow of doubt.
Perhaps a twenty-year-old perceives the podcast as a tool for old fogeys.
Should I try TikTok?
Do people today want interaction, which the podcast completely lacks, and is it therefore not very stimulating?
And then, I never reply to any comments.
Other questions have to do with the content.
Are the topics I choose interesting?
Is the title I decide to use to summarise the content of my weekly recording catchy enough?
Do I choose the cover image for each episode effectively?
Then I question the subject.
Are Italian colleagues who listen to podcasts interested in hearing Paolo Caneva’s music therapy reflections?
I know that not everyone loves me — and fair enough.
How does my voice sound to the ears of those who listen to me?
I stubbornly insist on beginning and ending my podcasts with unspeakable little jingles improvised on the spot.
Maybe these irritate 99 percent of the people who do my work in Italy.
Maybe there is a rumour going around that listening to Caneva’s podcast on Tuesday morning brings bad luck for the whole week.
And what if I am ahead of my time?
These are all the questions I asked myself in this mid-August period.
Of course, if I am here recording this thirty-third episode, it is because I have decided that it is worth carrying on.
I’ll stop here.
We’ll meet again on Tuesday, August 25th, with a new episode of A Light-Hearted Journey Through Music Therapy.