Spotify’s Maya Prohovnik: “you’re going to be thrilled”

• People are spending 44% more time looking at Spotify’s app than last year. “The demand for podcast audiences for video is undeniable at this point,” says Spotify’s Maya Prohovnik in an exclusive interview with the Podnews Weekly Review today. “For almost all shows who have switched from audio to video, they’re making more total revenue,” she told us; and when questioned on claims earlier in the week that creators lose features when they switch to video, she told us: “I think that’s the wrong way to look at the big picture. If you are already making video content, or if you’re thinking about expanding to video, you’re going to be thrilled by the outcome of SPP” (the Spotify Partner program).

  • Prohovnik also told us that Spotify is working to improve ad measurement and third-party attribution. “We acknowledge that gap, we see it, we agree with the problem and so we’re working on that.”

• The Cut covers podcasts being made by tweens. Most shows mentioned in the piece are video only - on Cameo, Instagram, Tikok and YouTube.

• Congratulations to Leo Laporte and all at This Week in Tech, which celebrated its 20th anniversary on Apr 17. Originally called “Revenge of the Screen Savers”, here’s episode 1: “a 56kbps MP3Pro file weighing in at around 14MB”.

• Audacy’s Podcorn, now called Audacy Creator Lab, has been accused by some podcast hosting companies of dirty tactics. Podcorn partnered with a number of podcast hosting companies to offer monetisation opportunities for their customers; but, when the company rebranded to Audacy Creator Lab and added a free podcast hosting service themselves, Audacy emailed those customers directly, encouraging them to switch hosting company. A cautionary warning to anyone to insist on non-solicitation clauses when setting up partnerships, perhaps.

  • Audacy tells Podnews: “We are excited to be expanding our offerings through the Audacy Creator Lab, while continuing to maintain strong relationships with a range of hosting companies. The suggestion of anything improper is absurd.”

• It was Headliner’s 7th birthday last week - 1.5 million podcasters in 193 countries have used Headliner since it launched.

• Quill writes about The Art of Subtle Branding in Branded Podcasts.

Tips and tricks - with Memberful

• If you only had to be on one podcast app… should you be on Spotify, on YouTube, or on Apple Podcasts? Earlier this month we published the biggest podcast app in the US for consumption.

Podcast News - with New Podcasts

The Way They Were has hit episode 100, and they’re celebrating with comedy icon Paul F. Tompkins and his brilliant wife, actor and podcaster Janie Haddad. For nearly two years the show has been gleefully digging through the glamorous rubble of celebrity break-ups – from the tragic to the tawdry – but this time, it’s something new: welcoming a real-life couple to the sofa to share their own take on love, loss, and everything in between. It’s funny, honest, and occasionally chaotic.

The Podnews Weekly Review this week has an interview with Maya Prohovnik of Spotify; John Spurlock who has architected a way for podcast apps to report playback activity; and Dino Sophos about the Crossed Wires festival.

Why Is Amy in the Bath? is the first and only cinematic bathing podcast. Three years ago, two journalists asked a silly question: Why does Amy Adams do so many bathtub scenes? Backed by a dataset of 2,000 films from 1927 to 2025 and interviews with scholars, this is the not-so-silly story of how wellness, nostalgia, and the eradication of the middle class conspired to make the bathtub a dominating visual in 21st-century pop culture. Get in.

Small Town Dicks returns for its sixteenth season today. The show, hosted by Yeardley Smith, features identical twin detectives Dan and Dave, and acclaimed cold case investigator Paul Holes. It kicks off with a gripping two-part episode featuring a high-profile cold case that Paul helped solve.