A new CEO for Acast

• Greg Glenday has been announced as the new CEO for Acast, after Ross Adams announced his resignation. Adams will continue as a strategic advisor; he’d been with Acast since 2014 (moving from Spotify and Capital Radio), and had been CEO for eight years.

  • Glenday joined in Aug 2023 as part of a raft of US appointments. He’d joined from Shazam, iHeartMedia, Lightbox and Undertone. You can read an interview shortly after he joined Acast, in our sister publication the Podcast Business Journal.

• Spotify’s video podcast program isn’t a big hit with podcast networks, says Digiday, saying larger networks are “wary”. However, creators seem keener, with YMH Studios suggesting they’re earning 5x the revenue from Spotify than YouTube, and Ryth earning more than double.

  • Meanwhile, The Times of London reveals (in a paid-for article) that Spotify “has a porn problem”, after stumbling upon “everything from lascivious critiques of skin flicks to audio erotica and reels of ASMR sounds”.
  • And, Daniel Ek’s sales of Spotify shares? He’s used that money to invest in Helsing, an AI-driven military drone company. “I’m sure people will criticize it and that’s OK,” Ek told The Financial Times in a paid piece. Among other clients, the company is making drones for Ukraine.

• Almost one in five of us eat to our favourite podcast or music, according to data from YouGov. 18% listen to music or podcasts while eating lunch; 16% over dinner. Half of us eat lunch alone.

• iHeart are running AI translated versions of ten of its popular podcasts, says Digiday. The company is using Speechlab.

• The MeidasTouch Podcast has five million subscribers, it says. (We’d love to know how they know; as our article on podcast stats will tell you, total subscribers isn’t a number visible to podcasters. You can see total followers in Apple Podcasts Connect and Spotify for Creators: but that’s just for those platforms. Maybe they are even bigger.)

• Business Insider interviewed three podcast creators about their use of Patreon. We learn that Therapy for Black Girls earnt about $2,000 in May; Wondery’s RedHanded earns $59,000 a month; and The Yard, from The Roost, earns about $242,000 a month. Podnews’s Patreon is over here, just saying.

• Radiotopia has announced a new season of Radiotopia Presents - this time round, it’s Doing The Wiz, a new documentary series going behind the scenes of a high school musical that changed everything for a group of teens in the early 2000s.

• As mentioned in May, the popular audio show Twenty Thousand Hertz is coming to YouTube - but not as a video version of the podcast, but a separate show entirely. It kicks off with a sound team tour of the Jeopardy! studio, on Dallas Taylor’s YouTube channel at 8am Eastern today.

• The FT says that if your next apartment doesn’t come with a podcasting studio, you’re straight-up irrelevant, fam.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• “Our job is to integrate well with the best-in-class tools you’re already using.“ In an interview, Greg Wasserman talks about the tech stack philosophy at RSS.com.

• Franco Solerio, the developer of the Castamatic app, joins Adam Curry and Dave Jones in the Podcasting 2.0 podcast this week.

Moves and hires

• Jen Poyant has been promoted to Deputy Director for Audio at The New York Times.

Tips and tricks - with Memberful

• Podcast Discovery posts about the most boring things people forget to do for their podcasts to help market them.

Podcast News - with Podcast Movement

Lemonada Media’s Confessions of a Female Founder with Meghan has reached the end of the first season, and has “paused”. “I need to focus on my business”, she’s reported to have said. Podscribe estimates the show has around 200,000 listeners a month.

If the world feels a bit heavy right now, Sufferless with Tim Tamashiro, a part-time monk, is a calm, practical podcast about how to make one gentle shift at a time to train your mind to find peace in every day life. Tamashiro is a former Buddhist monk and bestselling author, and each episode blends ancient wisdom with modern brain science. No need to shave your head or move to the mountains — just listen to find a little monk mindset.

In How to Change the World: The History of Innovation they have set out to chronologically document the biggest inventions of history, one leap at a time. It’ll also tell the stories of the greatest innovators from history and understand their mental models, mindsets and habits. With Acast, it’s hosted by Sam Webster Harris.

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