Amazon Music covers London with podcasts

• Amazon Music has covered London and other European capitals with advertising for the company’s Best of 2022 podcasts. In London, ads will be appearing for the next two weeks promoting ten of the top podcasters. The company also carried audio ads within the Wondery network for the chosen podcasts, and produced social media assets. See more examples of the projections in London and Paris below.

• Spotify is reportedly telling its employees that they can’t go to conferences, must have no “off-site” meetings, and that all non-essential travel will be reduced. The Swedish tech website Breakit also says office space will be cut, and some offices will see an end to meals.

• Ausha tells Podnews the podcast hosting company now has more than 10,700 podcasts on the platform, and achieved 167m downloads in 2022.

• The New Zealand Podcast Awards announced the 2022 winners. The podcast of the year was The Commune from Stuff. RNZ won the most awards, gaining thirteen.

• Female-focused podcast network Mamamia is to join the Australian Podcast Ranker. The ABC, the country’s largest podcast publisher, is still unmeasured by the ranker.

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• The winners of the Asian Podcast Awards were announced. Almost all are in English; and they are: Best podcast: 1920, within the YES 933 Radio Drama feed (Mediacorp, in Chinese / Omny Studio) … Best podcast host: Adulting with former children (Zodapop, SYRUP Media / Anchor) … Best narrative storytelling or fiction podcast: Creepy Twisted Asians (ZAG / Castos) … Best science, tech or business podcast: Inside China: Coronavirus Podcast, within the Inside China feed (South China Morning Post / Acast) … Best comedy, entertainment or lifestyle podcast: A Brief Case: true crime in Asia (Indie / Podbean) … Best arts, society or culture podcast: Miss Conduct (IVM Podcasts / Omny Studio)

• Podnews has so far carried 1,637 press releases. We thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if we drew the location of every press release on a map. And it is - the UK isn’t as London-focused as we thought; there’s an unsurprising pull to Los Angeles and New York; and sorry Melbourne, but you’re being beaten by Sydney.

Moves and hires

• Callum Clark is the new Head of Podcasts, UK & Ireland at Apple. He joins from Sony Music Entertainment and Global.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Podlove, podCloud and Castopod have joined Transistor in supporting OP3, the open analytics service.

• Podindexr is “an R package providing a tidy interface to the Podcast Index database API”.

• The Livewire validator now also validates the new podcast:txt tag, used to validate shows.

  • John Spurlock has discovered a bug with the Opera browser’s RSS feed reader, which could be leading to inflated download figures.

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The latest episode of Built to Sell Radio has AdvertiseCast’s Trevr Smithlin and Dave Hanley talking about their acquisition by Libsyn. It includes “a crafty negotiation tactic to increase an acquirer’s offer”…

The team from Wondery’s Morbid are launching Frozen Head today - a twisted tale that investigates the quest for eternal life, and the lengths people will go to achieve it. It debuts today on Wondery+, and will be available everywhere from Jan 23.

Normalize This is new today from SpringHill. Figure skating champion Adam Rippon and media personality Danielle Young unpack different trends, behaviors, and stigmas and discuss whether or not they should be normalized in our everyday lives. The first episode looks at dating apps.

One Minute Podcast Tips is new from Danny Brown today, and does exactly what it says on the tin - short, punchy tips in a minute or less to help you be a better podcaster. Recording, editing, publishing, sharing, growing, networking, and more are covered in the snack-sized episodes.

Amazon Music podcast ads in the wild

The “best of 2022” got significant promotion on Amazon Music’s front page.

Lower Regent Street, one of London’s busiest shopping streets, with Piccadilly Circus in the distance. Behind us is where the King lives.

Facing St Paul’s Cathedral, rebuilt after the Great Fire of London and completed in 1711.

Facing down to the Millennium Bridge. Opened in 2000, it wobbled too much, and was re-opened in 2002. (It still wobbles).

Bermondsey Street, near London Bridge station. The building used as a projection screen houses The Shipwright’s Arms, a pub built in 1884, and a hairdresser. The Shard looms to the top-left of the photo.

Shoreditch is where the hipsters live. Shoreditch High Street Station, one of London’s newest stations, opened in 2010. It doesn’t take you anywhere useful, so the hipsters are kind of trapped here.

New Oxford Street, a short walk away from the busy Holborn underground station. Holborn Tower, built in 1960, is being used to display the ad here: the Women’s Freedom League, founded 1907, worked for equality between men and women from its headquarters on this site between 1914 and 1959.

From a different campaign (but also shown recently), here’s London’s Waterloo Station, and the +44 podcast. Waterloo is the busiest station in the UK, handling 41 million passengers a year, and was featured in The Bourne Ultimatum. The ad for the podcast is animated.

And now, to Paris. The Gare du Nord, a train station opened in 1864, is undergoing a four-year renovation programme. It also featured in The Bourne Ultimatum, but the Gare du Nord is the busiest station in Europe with 131 million passengers a year.

The Boule & Bill podcast is produced by Bababam. Bill is the name of the dog. The comic strip has been published since 1959.

Nota Bene is a history podcast from Acast.

Cléopâtre is another history podcast, this one from France Inter, the French equivalent of NPR or BBC Radio 4. French people all look as stylish as this.