Oh my goodness. It's Tuesday. I'm trying to figure out where we are in the
calendar. It's May 19, 2026. We're at the Poduty Live Podcast
theater in downtown to rent them for another episode of Poduty
and the News. I'm Jeff, your host. We've got six great
stories headed your way. I got Amani Roberts joining me,
dj, author, professor, entrepreneur. We're going to hear all
about it after the theme song. Amani, do you know
what time it is? It's time to get going.
What time is it?
The only live news podcast about
podcasting from the stage.
The only live news podcast about
podcasting from the stage.
Amani Roberts, welcome to the show. Thank you very much.
I am excited to be here. So glad to have you here. I was going
through amaniexperience.com all kinds of things.
You got DJ, author, professor, entrepreneur.
You've got tremendous stage time presentations, really
encouraging creators to get up there and really push their
boundaries and tell us a little bit about what you've been working on and
what you're building and what is the Amani Experience. So the
Amani Experience is an entertainment based company where I
focus on working as a fractional artist
manager with musicians and some authors on
monetizing their artwork. I'm also a professional dj, music
business professor and author of two books. The latest of
one is called the Quiet Storm and that's a USA Today best selling
book. That is what my company is about and that's who I am. Well, that's
real easy. It's amaniexperience.com and check it out.
When did the book, the book just come out? The book came out February
2025. So we celebrated our one year birthday and
the project for this year is we're going to turn the book into a trivia
game which I know you would love. Oh, I would definitely love that. And if
people want to, is that going to be a local event or are you going
to start to stream that so people can watch from all over the world?
So it'll be a trivia game, kind of old school. Like you have it's card
base with a little board and there'll be some music implemented. So you have questions,
you might have some musical questions and that's
how it works. So it won't be like a live streaming game but it'll be
more back in the day when you do like
not Kahoot but like you do Monopoly, stuff like
that, you play with your friends and family. I'm trying to think of the game
where you would guess the clues, people would guess the clues, but stuff like that.
Yes. Yeah. Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun. Like a board game,
card game. And you can do it on road trips or, you know, family game
night. Exactly. Yeah. Family game night would be perfect.
Awesome. We'll put the link to the show notes. We also build a crew page.
Anybody who's ever been on Piduti in the news gets their own dedicated landing
page on the podcast page. And it'll have links to all of Amani's links,
all the social profiles. The Amani Experience.com so check
it out. Check out my guests, support them for coming. We're so excited to have
them come on the show. Make sure you go ahead and support them and check
out what they're working on as well. Amani, are you ready to
get into our stories? Yes. Yes. Let's go. I'm ready. Here we
go. We got story number one comes from the
Podcasting Today website and it's an opinion piece.
Podcasting continues to evolve beyond traditional audio and video
formats, according to a new opinion piece by
Alexandra Forsyth. The article points to
growing interest in live events, hybrid content and in person
audience experience as creators look for stronger audience
connections. Forsyth also highlights the rise of
micro creators, brand partnerships and performance based
storytelling as part of a larger shift happening across the
entertainment and media industry. And this speaks right to
my language and it speaks to all the experiences that you've had up on
stages as this is really becoming the future
model for podcasts and for smaller independent creators.
They're looking for live events, live stages, conferences,
places to fill in entertainment. And they're using podcasters in
those events and those conferences. So, you know, think about where does your event
fit in? Where does your podcast fit into different types of events?
And, you know, how can you position yourself in live events to really get in
front of new audiences? Yeah, I think this is
a trend that's been growing for a while. I've kind of spent the last three
years at this one major conference in the meetings and events industry
Meeting Professionals International. And I would have a live
podcast show on the floor. We would have two sets
of episodes, one in the morning, one in the afternoon before each general
session. And people would come by, they take pictures, they'd be looking.
Then if maybe you're running late or you're in your room, you
can actually watch it live on like the
brand's LinkedIn or Facebook page. So that's the whole beauty of
live. So this is right up my alley. I agree. And I do think
that micro creators are going to be more and more important as it
comes to brand partnerships too. I love that. And
I love that. You know, when we think, when I think of conference, I'm turning
50 in a month or I'm going to be June 12th, it's my birthday. My
wants to pen me a letter. Congrats, congrats. But when
I went to, you know, I mean, I also worked in automotive and they have
giant conferences in Automotive. And 20 years ago, if
you went to a conference, a lot of times it'd be a side
stage with a panel of four people probably
placed by the sponsors of the event, people who paid tens of thousands of
dollars to sponsor the event. And it was just a really dry
conversation kind of scripted by the corporate
guidelines. And that was kind of the entertainment that you got at conferences.
But recently in the last five, six years,
you're really seeing them pull away from these panels
and putting live podcasts into the center of the conference as
part of the entertainment for the conference. There's different types
of celebrities and different types of personalities in different
industries. And those people are kind of like micro celebrities within
that industry. And that audience comes to see them. Now. That audience
comes to see that podcast of that industry podcast that they listen
to every Wednesday on their morning commute. They're coming to
conferences now to see that show live. And, and we're kind of
touching on that here. And I just think that's a tremendous opportunity
for a lot of podcasters to tap into events that are already happening.
Yeah, I think they should put them on the main stage, number one, have them
in the middle of a general session. Like if you have a keynote speaker, maybe
you have it either right before or right after the keynote speaker. And then figure
out a way to get the audience involved. If you're taking questions, there's some great
tools out there that can allow you to accept questions from the audience so that
it can be as interactive as possible. Yeah.
And speaking of a place to have interactivity and a major
event, this place is a brand new theater. It's 300 seats and
they're building it around content creators. This comes to us from
the short list. Curzon has announced plans for
Curzon Chelsea, a new flagship entertainment venue opening in
London in late 2026. The 20,000
square foot space will include a 300 seat auditorium,
podcast studios, recording booths, flexible
event areas, workshop rooms, writers rooms, and
cafe style gathering spaces. Curzon says the project
reflects how film podcasting Live events and
digital media increasingly overlap as entertainment
companies rethink what modern creative spaces look like.
Yeah, this one's another good one. I because if you think about
it, traditionally most entertainment venues
really their bread and butter is their evening events. What's happening from like 7
or 8pm to midnight basically. And so now they're
recognizing there's huge profit potential if they actually make
their event space flexible, number one and two available
all day so that they can maximize revenue. It's you're going to be there anyway,
so why not open it up, have podcast studios during the day
event space. So if there's day meetings or things like that, people can come during
the day, so it makes sense. This is a nice size venue to
20,000 square feet is pretty good size. And they have the most up
to date technology too. So they could probably, they might be
surprised, they might do more business in terms of smaller events and during the day
than in the evening time, which would be okay because it's probably higher profit margin.
And I love the forward thinking of this event, of this space. They're really
thinking and leaning into local creators, people who can
use a space like this every day or you know, all during the
week. You don't need a 2,000 seat theater or a
17,000 seat arena. These smaller venues fill
a whole different need that isn't really addressed in a lot of communities. And
they're so forward thinking. They're putting in recording spaces,
podcast studios, cafe, places to meet up. There's
smaller rooms where you can probably get a room for, you know, a couple
hours if you want to record a remote podcast with a guest who's coming to
town. They're, they're thinking 24 hours a day. You know,
what I have here is a little 1600 square foot theater. And
if I'm not open, I'm still, I still have rent to pay,
I still have electricity to pay, I got bills to pay whether or not I'm
using the space or not. And like you mentioned, imani, they're thinking
24 hours a day, how can I make money during the day, in
the evening, in the nighttime, and have this thing really be
an asset to the community and something that, you know, it gets
used more than just twice a week at 7pm Whenever there's
a main show. Yeah, exactly. Very smart, very forward thinking. I
love it. Forward thinking. How about all the way to the
Rock or the Punk Rock Music hall of Fame? We
got no Doubt. This comes to us from Neon. Adrian Young of
no Doubt appeared at the Punk Rock Museum in Las
Vegas for a live podcast event. Tied to the fully
vented podcast, the event included a live recording and
audience Q and A focused on the history of drummers connected to
Orange County Drum and Percussion, a shop associated with early
2000s punk scene. The appearance was offered free
with museum admission ahead of no doubt scheduled performance
at the Sphere. Yeah, that's a good one. So of course,
the Sphere, that's good. But look at this. A museum. It's a very
niche museum, by the way, but very, very highly rated. Great museum.
Once again, they get people to the venue. With a live
podcast, people can interact with Adrian Young, and then, you
know, people get exposed to the museum. They can say they're there. If they have
tickets to the specific date, they. In time, that becomes a collectible.
There's so many things they can activate by this experience, and it's a great
way for podcasters to think about how can I tap into
current events? And maybe this is on a bigger scale than most people
operate in their hometowns, but they were going to do, or
they did do a residency at the Sphere, and this was in the
same town, as Amani pointed out. I didn't even know this was actually in Las
Vegas. So it makes total sense. If you were coming in for the Sphere
show, maybe you extend your stay a little bit. You can catch a podcast at
the Punk Rock Museum, see Adrian Young,
see the full podcast, see the interview live, maybe do a meet and greet afterwards,
then go to the show. I mean, what a better way to spend a week
or so. But really, the lesson is the podcast
capitalized on that current event and made something out of
it. You know, kind of. They used to call that news jacking
20 years ago. This is really. You're taking something that's. That's really
in the public eye. Everybody knew that no Doubt was doing the Sphere
tour and this museum happened to be in the same town. They capitalized on
that. Yeah, I wonder if they created packages or bundles so that you
could get a ticket to the show also, and the museum and a meet and
greet like that meet and greet bundle put a cooler soul for a good amount
of money. Like you say the meet and greet at the museum, then you watch
the podcast, then you get a ticket to the Sphere, Maybe discounts to local
restaurants, like that would be a good package or a bundle. That could really, really
elevate the live experience even more. Yeah,
that's the kind of thinking that we're trying to get podcasters to think about. How
do you get outside the box. Instead of just thinking, I'm going to build an
audience and read ads for purple mattress or ME
undies or Sherry's berries. What. What else can I do? And in
this case, this podcast capitalized with the museum and a current
event and really rode those coattails into creating a spectacular
event. Yeah. Plus anything you could do to attach your name, your
brand to the sphere is worth its weight in gold. Yeah,
absolutely. Well played. Speaking of
well played, let's go to some Olympians. This comes to us from in the
Snow channel on YouTube. The Whiteout podcast recently
hosted its first live podcast event at the Snow center
in Hemel Hempstead. Following the 2026 Winter
Olympics. Hosts Dom Killinger and Rob Stewart
were joined by Olympic athletes, broadcasters, and professional
skiers and snowboarders for a live audience conversation
covering Olympic competition, injuries, travel crashes, training,
and the realities of professional winter sports. The event also
highlighted youth sports organization SNO Camp
and included support from several industry
partners. See this? This event here
highlights just the beauty of collaboration. So you have the Whiteout
podcast. They have their own brand, their community. Then they get
to tag all these Olympic athletes and get exposure to their
communities, grow their community organically. Plus, then you have
the organization SNO Camp. So that's another organization you can collaborate with.
So it's probably a good five or six different collabor operations within one
live event. So you get exposed to all these different people's audiences,
you grow your community, your platform, and then they're sharing it. People
are finding you, and you can create content for weeks, months, based on just
this one episode. Yeah, they're capitalizing
on each other. Right? There's a charity, a camp for
kids. There's the Olympians, who the kids are looking up to. There's this
podcast who tells the stories about the Olympians and maybe works on behalf
of this camp and this community that you're talking about. That's what
they're building. And they're leveraging that to reach an audience, to bring in
more people from three different places. The podcast fans, like you mentioned,
the Olympians and the campers, to build something
bigger than just themselves. So, you know, think about who can you partner with,
who's in your neighborhood that you can work, collaborate with
and work with them to get something going locally. Yeah,
yeah. Plus, like, athletes have some phenomenal stories
about their journey, how they made and to make it to the Olympics. They each
have a unique and probably inspiring story. So that would carry the
episode. You wouldn't really need to prepare much. Just tell us your story, ups and
downs. What are you looking forward to? How did it go like that? That just
lends itself to easy conversation for a live event. And
I hear there's some great stories from the Olympic Village that happens every
year. You said that. I wasn't going to mention that, but you mentioned that.
That's why I'm going to this one. I don't want to hear what happens in
Olympic Village. They say it stays in Olympic Village. Not really, but anyways,
well, let's keep it going. And a lot of, you know, we try to tie
these stories into Amani's experience and really parallel them with what
he's building and what he's done on stage. And this was a great example of
adult conference. You're just talking and addressing the audience
in a specific industry, a specific niche. And this comes to us from TechCrunch on
YouTube as well. And the TechCrunch's Equity
podcast recently recorded a live episode at Humanx
conference in San Francisco featuring Amazon Chief Security
Officer Steve Schmidt. During the conversation,
Schmidt, see how I told you? All my words run together. During the
conversation, Schmidt discussed how AI is reshaping
cybersecurity and including concerns around AI agents,
internal company risks, containment systems, and human
oversight. The episode also explored startup security
practices and how companies are adjusting to rapidly
evolving AI technologies. This is another
example of just a conference. They did it the right way, actually, because, you know,
they had them on the main stage, a live interview and
audience interaction, which is perfect. And I'm sure
it got a lot of live impressions. It's going to continue to get a lot
of replays. People were probably tweeting or chatting about it online
at the same time. And so it just, it probably really
elevated the value of that conference and that session. So they, they did it
right. Plus they had a notable person who hopefully was able to
speak as freely as possible about the current issues.
I mentioned the panelists that they used to have at these conferences
years ago, and now they're replacing it with keynotes,
podcasts. And the one thing that we're kind of touching on a little bit
is, and you kind of really just hit on a little bit of money, was
the lifespan of this performance, of being on this
stage and at this conference. And the reason I'm saying that is because if you
think about a panelist of four people, nobody talks
about that after the panel's over, like, hey, how was your session? It
was all right. You know, I heard a couple people talking about something, but here's
something where they're creating content that's going to live on beyond
this live session. They've recorded it, they're going to release it over time,
release it as podcast episodes. They're going to use it as an asset
to start to promote next year's event. And probably even leading up to
that, if they're going to do this again on the stage next year, I bet
the person on stage starts promoting it for the next event
earlier. So this kind of snowballs these types of things
happening at conferences. Recording podcasts on. On live
stages, lives on well beyond that
one time that it happens in the, during the session, it
happens over and over again as content that lives on
in the podcast. It lives on in social media. Yeah.
Plus, let's think about, okay, next year for the conference, this would
be front and center for their advertisements, their video, their sizzle reel
to kind of inspire people. Well, you want to be here this upcoming year because
you don't know who we're going to have on stage and you want to be
in the room when the conversations are happening. So it also lends itself
to promoting next year's conference, which will increase
registration and increase the value then also. Yeah,
a little fomo. If you weren't here last year, this is what you missed. You
better not miss it next year. Yes, exactly.
Well, I warned you. This goes by so fast.
This is our last story already. Story number
six. The Glitch Theater records live performance events
for a future podcast series. This comes to us from
Ms. 604 and the Glitch Theater
is presenting Ark 1 on May 23rd at the Roundhouse Performance
center in Vancouver. The live event features performances
from 10 emerging artists presenting original prose,
poetry, stories and essays. Organizers. Organizers say
the show will include live mixed sound and music and the
entire performance will be recorded for a future
podcast series later this year. Yeah, this
one here. So when they say recorded, I'm,
I'm thinking they're also going to be recording video and audio together.
So this right here just lends itself to a very easy 10 episode
season for Ark 1. They could put it on YouTube. You
maybe each episode could be 10 or 15 minutes. Especially if they get some behind
the scenes of the poet or the person that's singing before,
during and after. Then they have the actual performance. That's a good 15
or 20 minute episode right there. You, you cut that up into 10 pieces.
That's a good season's worth of content right there. Put it up on
YouTube and your platform, the website, maybe sell
advertising, whatever you need to do. But that. That's what that sounds like to me.
Which is very, very another future thinking way to
combine live events with podcasting. Yeah. And this
link in the show notes, it's still available. There is a
contest to give away some tickets to this event too. So if you're in the
Vancouver area, check out the link in the show notes. And I also think
this is an event for special needs and disability artists. They're
really showcasing and focusing on
talent from all over the place. Everybody can contribute and support to this.
And they selected these 10 artists to present their original
works and I think it's going to be a great event for put on by
Ms. 604. Yeah, it sounds like it. I mean, anytime you have
poetry and music all together and essay, spoken word as a fun
event. Yeah. And they'll get to. Like you mentioned, this could be. If
there's 10 different artists, that could be 10 episodes of a podcast, you could
have one event and you end up recording your next 10 episodes. You
get two and a half months worth of content out of one single
episode. So I really love that strategy. I hope that's one that they're
deploying based on this. But it's a one way to have
a single event and stretch it out over weeks or months just because
you plan for it, you prep for it, and then you prep for the
distribution of it too. So think long term. Don't just think, oh, one night, one
event, one night. Could be multiple podcasts. Yeah.
Save yourself some time energy, be more effective and you
know, seasons. You have your winter, summer, spring, fall seasons right here.
Done. Awesome. Amani, this
has been so much fun. We crush these
stories today. Great insights. All your DJ and
professional being a professor, your entrepreneur experience,
writing the author, the two books that you've penned, all
those insights and expertise really went into these six stories. Tonight,
I'm so grateful that you're able to join us and I do something
before we say goodbye is I turn the floor completely
over to you. You can plug, promote, talk about
anything you'd like. Amani, the floor is yours.
Well, I appreciate you having me first of all, so thank you very much. If
there's any type of creative out there, particularly musicians or
authors who are looking to monetize their artwork, create a legacy.
I work with many different types of people, like musicians and authors, to
help them monetize. If you're a musician, your royalties
get you activated on all these different platforms and get the money that's owed
to you and authors will help you with completing the book and the book writing
process and launching the book and then post launch. So those are people I
love to talk to. You can go to amaniexperience.com
backslash call, set up a free call. I love to chat with you, see how
I can help. And once again, just thank you for giving me the floor.
Awesome. Thank you so much. I'll put the links in the show notes
amaniexperience.com do you remember
what time it was? It's time to get started.
What time is it?
What time is it?
Oh, it's time for Poduty
and the News. The
only live news podcast about podcasting
from the stage. Poduty and the
News. The only
live news podcast about podcasting from
the stage.