The Art Biz Podcast - Review

Professional, and Informative

As we continue our series of Podcast reviews we reviewed five episodes of The Art Biz, a pod cast that so far has 250 episodes of about 45 minutes, each, coming every week.   This podcast is hosted by Alyson Stanfield, an artist and art business coach that has along with the podcast an extensive network of clients and artist she works with providing coaching and ideas via her Essentials program.  The Podcast is mostly based around interviews with artist and creatives that speak to specific topics themes. For the review we listened to episodes 239, 240, 241, 242, and 243.

Content and Format

Alyson Stanfield as the host runs the podcast with a familiarity and clear point of view that drives the conversation with her guest and runs upon a specific topic or theme with the episode well managed around that topic, ensuring that there isn’t a lot of pfaff or wasted time, which I appreciate, after the last podcast we reviewed that had episodes up into the two hours.  The themes that these episodes covered ranged across, talking about your brand kit as an artist, how to use Pinterest as a social media/search engine, and interviews with an artist, and other people related to the art and small business space. The discussions were positive and well managed. The Podcast does have a focus on America and American contexts so keep that in mind when listening.

Reviewing the topics of more episodes in the podcast series we can see more very relevant topics and scope for the small business creative. As with many of the reviewed podcasts that had an interview focus, I have found much value in the conversations and discussions that we have here about that artists journey in art business along with how they did it and what their experience of success and failures are.

I learned a few things!

 I wanted to call out a pair of specific topics that were covered in this batch of episodes, these episodes and their topic gave me actual pause and taught me a few things. This is important since it’s the first time I walked away from a podcast episode with a clear set of things that I wanted to apply to my own business.  In the episode 241 – Time to rethink Pinterest w. Hayley Price. The guest Hayley is an artist, and the host discuss the functionality of Pinterest and set a clear perspective that Pinterest isn’t a social media but a search engine. This came from Hayley noticing that a large volume of her website hits was coming from a series of pins on Pinterest that they had set up several years ago and largely forgotten. These pins, and pins in general on Pinterest don’t have a timeframe in the same way we know from Instagram. The pins form a result in the search engine that Pinterest indexes and searches. Creating these pins, will not generate movement within minutes like Stories and Reels on Instagram however creating pins of your artwork or of your website blogs, can result in many views, and site referrals years in the future.

This discussions in the interview gave me a lot of pauses and it resonated as I had specifically written off Pinterest for my small business.  So now I have a task to enable a business Pinterest board, and get my blogs, reviews and articles pinned properly and indexed by the algorithm. With a degree of work that can be queued up and isn’t bound by urgency such as Instagram, makes it work well within my routine and doesn’t add too much to the workload.

This is a great lesson of why and what podcasts, and conversations with other professionals can teach us. Yes, we must go through potentially a lot of conversations to find the gold but don’t forget your stories can be that spark to someone else.  Communications community and conversations should always be part of our work.  

From another episode 240 – Entrepreneurial Fatigue. Here Alyson is speaking with Katie Hunt who helps artists business development with a focus on Wholesale sales.  In Katies business for the last two years they have run a large state of the small business survey which in 2025 got over 400 respondents. The survey here while sounding not specifically interesting is something that got my attention as a data and math nerd. I love empirical data and studies. Katie and her team were with this information able to publish a report about the data they collected from small business owners of all types. This included a lot of information about the size of operations, and details of their business status, revenue, salaries, sales etc., but also details about do you see yourself continuing this work in the next years, or similar information. While the content of the survey is discussed in the interview, and are interesting on their own, the overall idea is what more stuck with me. Having this range of information collected and the sharing of the state of the business with all participants, I feel can be a wonderful benchmark for those people in the same situation to let them see how the rest of their colleagues are faring and give them information and comfort in their own situation. Knowing that you are not alone is very much a positive for small business and solo operators.

The conversation has inspired me to see if we can build a similar type of survey to understand the state of the small business environment in Europe and specifically Portugal where I’m based. This is an idea I’ve had but struggled in getting the right focus and with episode I’ve decided to dust off the idea and try to bring this to our community.

Summary

The Art Biz is a great podcast, and for me it really hit most of my own personal itches. The focused discussion and well hosted conversations I appreciate as it respects my time. Additionally, the themes covered let me walk away with inspiration and ideas that I plan to apply directly to my business. That’s the first time in this review series and I have no doubt that if I when through the backlog of episodes, I would find more nuggets of gold. I appreciate the Art Biz podcast for this set of ideas and inspiration I’ve been able to gather from this handful of episodes.

I’ve not generally been a bit podcast person so this endeavor has been new to me however I plan on sticking with this podcast specifically and I can recommend it for a follow and a listen for inspiration and idea.

If you find yourself in need of business advice, or need that project idea you’re building fleshed out. Don’t hesistate to reach out to us on our email (timh@department45.eu) or on send us a DM on our instagram @department45.eu. Likewise if you have suggestions to podcast add them in the comment section below.

As always thank you for your time.

Tim H. Lead consultant.