Should you include seasons in your episode titles?
Thank you for joining me for The Audacity to Podcast.
I'm Daniel J. Lewis.
If your podcast uses seasons, you have multiple options for how to display them.
Here's some guidance to help you decide what's right for you, your podcast, and
your audience.
But don't worry, if you listened to my previous episode about episode numbers in your episode
titles, this is not as complicated as that. But I do highly recommend you listen to that
previous episode because seasons do share many similarities with episode numbers. So
please go back to that previous episode. I have a link to it in the show notes for this
episode. That previous episode will give you the extra context upon which this episode
will build. But we can be thankful that seasons are not as complicated as episode numbers.
To get the links that I mention in this episode, as well as to see some of the screenshots
that I've included, tap or swipe inside of your app or go to theaudacitytopodcast.com/seasonsintitles
First, this does beg the question, do you even need seasons?
I made another episode back in 2015 called "Should You Podcast in Seasons?"
I have a link to that in the notes for this episode.
I think that episode, even as old as it is, does answer this question in great detail,
and maybe even in exhausting detail. Boy I was verbose in that episode. So listen if
you have the time to, and definitely do go back and listen to it because it does help
answer that question of should you have seasons, and what's good for seasons, what might not
be good for seasons, and some multiple things for you to consider. But here's a concise
and slightly updated summary of my thoughts about seasons. Similar to whether you should
use episode numbers, again, definitely listen to the previous episode about that, I challenge
you to question whether seasons will matter to your audience, especially if they are listening
a year from now. I recommend you use seasons only when each season follows a particular
theme or arc. For example, each season of the podcast Serial told a completely different
story. Each season, and sometimes half season, of serial TV shows has a separate story arc.
And I've heard other podcasts follow different formats in different seasons, like a season
all about tools, or a top ten season, a client stories season, or separate seasons for beginners,
intermediate, and advanced people. These are great reasons to use seasons and indicate
those seasons. So put another way, the audience can easily associate a theme or arc with these
kinds of seasons because the seasons actually make sense and serve an obvious purpose.
But if you're thinking of using seasons merely for your schedule, then I don't think
you should use seasons. If you need a planned hiatus, then simply announce it and take the
planned hiatus. There's no need to use seasons if you only need a break. Yes, in your mind
you could think of it as "this is the season that I'm going to podcast, this is the season
I'm going to take a break," but that doesn't actually matter to your audience. Your current
and future audience likely won't care about these kinds of seasons that are based on your
schedule and they won't even make sense to your future audience. If your audience will
not notice any big content changes progressing immediately from one season to the next, then
And the seasons are probably not necessary.
If I'm listening to your podcast a year from now and I hear, "Alright everyone, that's
the end of season one.
Join us again in a few months for season two."
And then I listen to season two immediately after that, the first episode of season two
immediately after the last episode of season one, and there's no major difference?
Then that whole thing about seasons was just a waste.
Wasted time, wasted content, wasted instructions.
You could have just ended when you did, I'm not even going to call it season one, but
you could have just stopped podcasting when you did, put out a short little announcement
episode saying, "We're going on hiatus.
We'll be back at such-such date and we might make a few changes when we come back."
Then you come back, you delete that little hiatus episode, and you're back.
And then when someone listens to your podcast a year from now, they'll hear the end of
that one episode, then the beginning of the next episode with just a few changes.
They don't need to know that they're different seasons and that seasons don't even make sense
in that case.
But you need to decide what's right for your podcast and your audience.
So with the assumption that your show does need seasons, but it probably doesn't, but
if it does, let's consider how to best display them with your episodes.
Again, follow along with the show notes, a tap or swipe away inside of your app, or go
to theaudacitytopodcast.com/seasonsintitles, especially for this section because I have
a few screenshots that I'll talk about.
So first, use the season RSS tags.
Both the Apple iTunes namespace and the Podcasting 2.0 podcast namespace offer RSS tags for indicating
seasons, just like they do for indicating episode numbers.
For Apple Podcasts, the season tag is iTunes colon season, which allows only a non-zero
number.
For Podcasting 2.0, the tag is podcast colon season.
But of course, like everything else with Podcasting 2.0, the Podcasting 2.0 season tag offers
more by letting you give each season a name instead of only a number.
So the first season could be labeled "Getting Started", the second season could be "Growing",
the third season could be improving. That's what's really cool about these Podcasting
2.0 tags is that they offer more than the iTunes tags that we've used for many years.
And the Podcasting 2.0 tags will eventually replace the iTunes tags. I really hope someday
all podcast apps switch over to the podcast namespace tags. But nonetheless, and in the
meantime, use both tags as well as you can until all of these apps support the Podcasting
2.0 standard. When you use these season tags, modern podcast apps can more intelligently
display the season information in appropriate contexts and possibly group your episodes
by season. It can even cause an entire season to download for new followers and start playing
at the beginning of that latest season instead of the latest episode when you combine your
seasons with the serial podcast type.
Apple started offering the season tag with the release of iOS 11 back in 2017. That's
also when they released the episode numbers, the podcast type, and a lot of these other
new things that they started doing. Pocket Cast supported it very quickly too.
Both Apple Podcasts and Pocket Cast provide good examples of how the seasons might be
displayed. First, neither app, and probably no other podcast app out there, will put the
season number in the episode title like Apple Podcasts sometimes does with episode numbers,
which I talked about in the previous episode.
If your podcast type is episodic or it's not indicated, which then defaults to episodic
and most of the podcasts out there are episodic.
So if you have an episodic type podcast, Apple Podcasts does not display the season number
in the episode listing or the episode player, but only in the meta information when you
open an episode. I have a screenshot of this in the notes. And when you look at this in
Apple Podcasts, like I pulled an episode from our Once Upon a Time podcast, when you're
looking at a single episode, when you've opened it, you'll see the meta information at the
very top, which is when you're using a season, it's the date of this episode, then the season
number, episode number, and then the length of the episode. Then below that in the bigger
text is the name of the episode and then below that the title of the podcast. That's how
Apple Podcasts displays it when you're not using the serial podcast type and you're using
instead the episodic podcast type, which is the default if you haven't defined a podcast
type.
But if your podcast type is serial, Apple Podcasts then groups episodes by season and
it lets you filter by season or all episodes and it shows the season number in the meta
information both when opening an episode and when playing that episode.
So it does show in the player.
I have a screenshot of this also in the show notes where I looked at, again, the Rabbits
podcast that I mentioned in the previous episode.
It's a serial podcast type.
It has seasons and it has episode numbers.
And when you look at it, you can see that all of the episodes for one season are grouped
together and you will see that latest season by default when you visit that podcast.
But you can also switch to viewing a different season or all episodes or unplayed episodes
or downloaded episodes.
But that season number displays only as a section heading that you can then click or
tap on to filter by different seasons.
Even if you go to the old episodes listing, it lets you filter based on the different
seasons and it displays that season number only in that section heading.
It does not display it for each individual episode.
Which makes total sense in this case because it's redundant if you have episode after episode
repeating the same thing.
You don't need to see season 2, season 2, season 2, season 2, season 2, season 2 that's
repeated across multiple episodes.
You just need all of that season grouped together.
That's how Apple Podcasts does it.
Pocket Casts, however, does not seem to display episodic or serial podcast types any differently.
And remember, that episode grouping under seasons is now only with the serial podcast
type but not episodic podcasts.
In PocketCasts, the season number is shown with other episode meta information in the
episode listing, but apparently not anywhere else inside the app.
So if you look at the list of episodes for a podcast, either in your library or in the
catalog, through PocketCasts, you'll see above the title, the season number, the episode
number, a bullet, and then the date of that episode.
Then below that in bigger, bolder text is the title of the episode, and then below that
is the length of the episode in the faded text just like the other meta information.
And that seems to be the only place I could find the season number displaying inside of
Pocket Casts. Not even if you open the episode and scroll to the bottom would you even see
the season number in Pocket Casts like you can see in Apple Podcasts in some cases. Podcasting
2.0 apps usually support the podcast season tag and display the season name if present.
Because some apps might group episodes under their seasons, like Apple Podcasts does for
serial podcast types.
And other apps might merely show the season with other meta information in the episode
listing like pocket casts.
But I don't think that this is all that big of a deal that there's this inconsistency.
Because seasons are not as important to your audience as episode numbers might be.
And as I mentioned in the last episode, even episode numbers might not be all that important.
So seasons are even less important than that, at least to see what season number it is.
Being able to listen to the correct season and stay in that correct season is important
and that's what these apps are trying to do.
But as you can tell, this is much simpler and less prominent than episode numbers.
There's none of this stuff like "Oh if you do this then the episode number displays here,
but if you do that it displays there, if you view it this way it displays there."
No, it's pretty much in all of these places the season just displays either helping to
group the episodes or as some small meta information for the individual episodes. But it's not
displaying inside the title. It's not wasting space like that. It's merely an extra indicator.
A tiny extra bit of information.
Moving on then. Use your webpage field and groups if available. You might have your podcast
website from your podcast hosting provider like Captivate or WordPress with a great WordPress
theme for podcasters like second line themes, or a third party tool like a pod page or a
podcast page.
And again, I will have a future episode about how to choose from these different options.
Each of these website management methods might offer a season field that, like the RSS tag,
allows the website to display the season number in better places.
But unlike episode numbers, since the season information is not very important to individual
episodes, any kind of display will probably be only in the episode meta information along
with the date, the number of comments, and that kind of stuff, and maybe with separate
collections for each season, depending on your content management system, or CMS.
Even if your CMS doesn't support podcast seasons, you can easily group episodes of
a season together by giving them the same tag or category.
Then your website probably allows you to make a page, an episode list, a widget, a player,
or something like that that contains only that season's episodes.
And that's based on the shared tag or category.
Just like you could make a collection of episodes based on any other tag or category of any
time with your archive of episodes.
But this would be specifically for your seasons.
And what you actually call that tag or category might not matter because your website might
let you give it a different label or put a header above wherever that episode list is.
So your tag might be S1 and that's how you tag all of the episodes from season 1 and
then you just make a little widget or a box and you give it the title of "Listen to
Season 1" or whatever seems appropriate in your case.
Next, how should you include seasons in your titles?
Seasons are simpler than episode numbers, and I couldn't find any content management
system or podcast app that automatically puts the season number inside the episode titles.
So should you?
While I think your audience probably does not need episode numbers, I think they need
season numbers even less than that.
So for this reason, I suggest not including seasons in your titles, with a couple of exceptions.
Do include the season in the title if your episode is about a season, like Season 2 trailer,
or behind the scenes of Season 3, or Season 1 bloopers.
If your podcast is about other content that has seasons, like a TV after show podcast,
you might want to include the TV show's season and episode numbers in the titles,
But not the podcast's own season and episode numbers, which could be different from the
TV show or whatever that thing is that you're talking about. For example, my retired podcast
about the Once Upon a Time TV show would have two or three episodes per week, while the
TV show would have only one episode per week. This is because we would usually have an initial
reactions episode the night of the TV episode, then a full discussion episode about halfway
between TV episodes and sometimes even a spoilers episode shortly after that full discussion.
Or sometimes we just tack the spoilers onto the end of the full discussion episodes.
So by the time the whole TV series ended, we'd published more than 350 episodes and
our episode numbers would not align at all with the TV shows. But we did align our seasons
and would indicate the TV show's season and episode number we were talking about within
our episode titles since some people might actually search for content about the TV show
by its season and episode numbers. And that's a good reason to include it in your title
is if people are actually searching for that content based on that thing. And for this
reason most podcasts probably don't need the season numbers or episode numbers in their
titles because if you're not talking about something that already has its own seasons
and episode numbers like a TV show, then your audience probably won't care about the season
and episode numbers.
And that's it.
That's as complicated as it gets.
These same guidelines for whether to include a season in your episode title can probably
apply to all the other contexts and that full list of six places where you could have separate
titles that I mentioned in the previous episode. And that list is number one, the RSS items future
podcast title tag. Number two, the RSS items iTunes title tag. Number three, the RSS items title tag.
Number four, the web pages HTML meta titles for social networks. Number five, the HTML title tag,
which is for the tab bar, bookmarks, search engines, and such. And number six, the post title
or heading, which is usually the H1 tag in HTML, and that's what shows most prominently on the
web page. Whatever you do decide for your episode titles, whether to include seasons in it, which
most likely you don't need to except for these few exceptions I've mentioned, you could probably
apply that for all of those other places. You don't have to worry about, "I'm going to write
it this way in this context, or that way in this place," and all of that. If you need the season
in one of these titles, you'll most likely need it in all of them. Unlike with episode
numbers where you want it in some of these and not in others. And if you include seasons
in your titles, please don't make the season and episode number the only things in your
titles. Just like you shouldn't make your episodes be called Episode 1. And that be
it. So don't make it Season 1, Episode 5. Please don't make it like that. You can do
better. Give your episodes unique and interesting and compelling titles that are descriptive
of the content within those episodes.
Then moving on, put seasons on all episodes, if possible. If you start using seasons, consider
editing even all your old episodes so they contain the relevant season information. If
you have some episodes with seasons and some without, Apple Podcasts will group all the
non-season episodes into "unknown season". They used to do that for any podcast with
seasons, but it seems that they've now limited that behavior to only podcasts with the serial
podcast type. And remember that seasons will likely affect groupings too, on your website
and in some of the players. So if your website has separate lists for episodes from each
season, any episode marked for season 1 will be listed in season 1, no matter when it was
published. This is the same way that Apple Podcasts works with serial type podcasts where
they do group the episodes by season. If you publish an episode for season 1, it will then
be grouped in season 1 even if you publish that episode while you're working on season
7. In the visual listing and for your listening audience, it will be grouped with season 1.
Now if they're currently listening to season 7 and you put out a season 1 bonus episode
for example, of whatever type of bonus that is, then they'll probably hear that special
episode that you released, even though it's for season one and they're currently in season
seven, assume they're going to hear it when you published it or it's going to download
when you published it.
But that might not always be the case, but you can probably safely assume they'll hear
your episodes as they're being published.
That is your current audience.
Your future audience though would hear that episode in Apple Podcasts at least if you
have a serial podcast.
Your future audience would hear that episode in season one, but most other podcast apps
simply play based on when the episode was published.
So it goes by chronological publish date, not season groupings.
Now how to write the seasons.
If you're going to include seasons in your titles or refer to episodes by their season
and episode number, I think there are only two popular conventions for it.
Number one, uppercase S, season number, space, uppercase E, episode number, and that's
without leading zeros for either of those.
So it would be like S2 space E7, S2 E7 with a space between them.
This is how Apple Podcasts and Pocket Casts will abbreviate season and episode numbers.
I've seen variations like without the space, with lowercase letters, and with leading zeros,
I recommend the capitalized and spaced version like you see in Apple Podcasts and PocketCasts.
It's very clean, it's very standard, it's very easy to read too.
There's not as much guessing about what does that number mean versus that number.
Which kind of leads me into number two, which is the less popular but kind of leads to some
guessing is where you write "sees a number" a lowercase x or the multiplication sign,
which looks slightly differently from a lowercase x, than the episode number and possibly with
one or two leading zeros for clarity. Like 2x07. WordPress, by the way, will probably
automatically change the letter x in this format to the multiplication sign. Which kind
of looks a little nicer too, makes it look a little bit more sophisticated. But this
is the less popular method and especially if you don't have a leading zero, then it
could be a little confusing to see. I think people generally assume the first number is
the season number, but if you just see 1x3, is it season 3 episode 1 or is it season 1
episode 3? There might be that possible confusion and it just doesn't look as good or produce
as consistent results. And besides, the more prominent way that I mentioned S2E7 like that
is much more common in the apps. I think it communicates very clearly. Either of these
would be in places where you refer to only a single episode. Maybe in the title, maybe
when you're referring back to an episode. But don't follow this format for whole season
content like "Season 1 Trailer" write that as "Season 1 Trailer", "Season 1 Bloopers"
or whatever that is. Don't write "S1 Trailer" or "S1 Bloopers". That's just not as clear
in my opinion. Whether you write season one or first season is up to you. Season one seems
to be easier to read, but first season, where you're spelling it completely out, F-I-R-S-T
season, is more formal and it's how I see most TV shows write it, like the complete
first season, the complete second season, and so on. I think this might simply be a
matter of what sounds or looks best in its context. But when in an episode title, such
as for a trailer, I think season in the number one format is better because it's shorter and
the number is clear. If you put in there "first season trailer" then are you saying it's a trailer
for the first season or it's the first of several trailers for this season? So is second season
trailer, the second trailer for the same season as the first season trailer, or is it for
a second season? Do you see how that can lead to some confusion in that kind of context
and writing style? That's where if you just write "season 1 trailer" "oh, that's
very obvious." So with this in mind, are seasons worth it? We certainly don't face
the same complications with season numbers and season names in Podcasting 2.0 as we faced
with episode numbers that I covered in the previous episode. You're also probably even
less likely to need seasons unless they make sense to your audience beyond merely a schedule.
So the technical "cost" we could call it of using seasons is much less than episode
numbers. And their usefulness is less too, except for serial type podcasts. To figure
out whether seasons are worth it and how you should include them in your titles and meta
information should really come down to what makes the most sense for your audience. And
actually enhances their experience. If using seasons and season numbers in your titles,
however you work that out, if it doesn't enhance your audience's experience, then it's probably
not worth the effort, as small as it might be, for that additional effort to have seasons
and season numbers. But it's up to you and what's best for your audience and what makes
sense for your audience. I think there are a lot of podcasters out there doing some things
that just really don't make sense. Episode numbers, season numbers are just some of those
things and I really want to help you do what makes sense, what helps you engage with your
audience better and helps your podcast just stand out as being better and showing that
you are pursuing excellence. Whether your podcast is for a hobby, for a profession,
whether you're getting paid, or you're doing it just for the love of it, whether you're
a beginner, whether you're advanced, or any of this to make your podcast better.
If you found these two episodes helpful, the episode about episode numbers in your titles
and the episode about seasons in your titles, if you found these helpful, please share these
episodes with other podcasters.
You can share this episode by going to theaudacitytopodcast.com/seasonsintitles.
Now that I've given you some of the guts and taught you some of the tools, it's time for
you to go start and grow your own podcast for passion and profit.
I'm Daniel J. Lewis from TheAudacityToPodcast.com and @TheDanielJLewis on Twitter.
Thanks for listening.
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