Di Spillane is an Adelaide musician who not only enjoys performing herself, she also enjoys attending live music performances on a regular basis. Di started a Facebook page in 2017, which she used as a way to promote the bands that she had been to see. There are now over 1K videos on that page. In December 2019, she then decided to extend the Band it About page by starting a podcast series where she would interview local artists to discuss their careers as well as any other important issues that were happening at the time. Season 1 was a variety of topics but with no regular episode schedule it was difficult to grow an audience. In November 2020 while the world was still being restricted by the covid-19 pandemic, and the local Music Industry was struggling to get by with limited gigs and audience restrictions, making it difficult to get back to attending and promoting them on the Facebook page, she decided to revisit the podcast series. This time she decided to have a regular theme and release of episodes. Season two is under the subheading of The Engine Room, which is interviews with drummers. To avoid irregular release of the series, she made sure that she had a good reserve of interviews recorded before releasing episode 1. Series two is released every Saturday morning and has been a great success. Audiences have been steadily growing and the popularity has seen this podcast series ranked on the apple podcast charts on a regular basis in Australia as well as the USA. In April 2021 the series made it on the GB apple charts for the first time ranked at 93! Naturally this podcast series has its largest audience in Australia, but it also maintains a 20% audience in the USA which is fantastic. Di is constantly working on maintaining and building her skills as a host to ensure that the series continues to grow. She is not only the host, she does the editing, researchers each guest prior to recording the episode, and promotes each episode on various social media platforms to raise awareness of the podcast series. Di also research’s podcast trends and keeping up to date on new platforms and finding as much information as possible to help her to promote, and grow the series. There is a lot of work that goes on in the background of every episode and to do this without the benefit of a team to assist, is proof that she is a dedicated person who is passionate about her love of the music industry. She is now working on a new website where she can not only have each episode on, but to also include videos and other information about her guests. Her next goal is to get music related businesses involved with sponsorship and or advertising in the episodes, to enable her to fund the costs associated with the podcast series. There has been a significant number of businesses that had taken notice of the growing popularity of podcasts, and have chosen to produce their own podcast or get involved with an existing podcast series that matches their clientele, now benefiting from choosing to advertise within this space, instead of traditional advertising platforms including radio and television. With over 2 million podcasts available and the popularity seeing Spotify and Amazon both enter the podcast market in an attempt to grab a slice off of the apple iTunes pie, by offering listening to podcasts for free on their music platform. Google are currently improving their technology to incorporate podcasts listening to their Google Smart Home Devices and Amazon have added podcast listening to Alexa allowing you to now voice control which podcast you want to listen to. Spotify have been purchasing existing podcast hosting platforms offering free to listen podcasts as well as enabling premium members to listen without advertising, as well as listening to music podcasts that have more music than talk. It is really quite exciting to be a part of the future and thankfully with having an IT background, a future that this podcast host is on top of!