Audacy to close Pineapple Street

• Audacy is to shut down Pineapple Street Studios. Nearly thirty employees are to be laid off. Pineapple Street had been bought by Audacy in 2019 for $18mn. Audacy will continue making some shows. Audacy itself emerged from bankruptcy in January; it was reportedly looking for a buyer for the company in March.

  • Audacy shut Cadence13 (a $50mn purchase) in Mar 2024, and rebranded Podcorn ($22.5mn) as Audacy Creator Lab in April this year. Meanwhile, Audacy’s purchase of Moonbeam, a podcast discovery app in Jul 2022, also appears to have come to nothing: the website is now owned by a company in Ukraine. An Audacy spokesperson didn’t return our request for more detail about Moonbeam.

• Celebrating the twentieth anniversary of podcasts being available in iTunes, Apple Podcasts released a list of “20 Years, 20 Podcasts We Love”, and posted a thank you to creators. “Podcasting has become a global force thanks to the creativity and commitment of creators, and the deep connections they have with their audiences. The twenty podcasts that we selected for the 20 Years, 20 Podcasts We Love list are a representation of this same creativity and connection found across the millions of podcasts on Apple Podcasts. We look forward to continuing to help creators grow their audiences, and listeners find and enjoy the podcasts they love,” Ben Cave, global head of podcasts at Apple, told Podnews.

  • Apple says these shows “have made a lasting impact on listeners and the podcast industry”; separately, the Essential Listening Poll is compiling a list from audio creators, writers and scholars, which will be unveiled in August at Podcast Movement.
  • Steve Jobs demoed podcasting at the D3 conference in 2005, by playing the latest episode of Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code. It didn’t, quite, go to plan.
  • Podnews restored the co-inventor of podcasting Dave Winer’s Morning Coffee Notes, which he credits for democratising the podcast medium (fearing that other early shows sounded too polished). The first episode in our restored feed is from March 2005.
  • As an aside: Apple’s list is hosted on the learn.applepodcasts.apple domain. That’s the first time we’ve seen them use this domain; there’s no homepage there yet.

• PodcastOne has launched a crypto podcast network. The press release talks about blockchain, Web3 audio and video content, and AI-hosted content.

• A free-to-access podcast studio in Cape Town, AMPD Studios, has achieved six years of success but is threatened with closure after its funding suddenly fell through without warning. Now, it’s only got less than two months of funding left. You can donate to a BackaBuddy campaign to help save it, or learn more with our interview with Jon Savage in our sister publication the Podcast Business Journal today, or in this week’s Podnews Weekly Review.

• Audio is bigger than video in New Zealand, says The Infinite Dial from Edison Research; and it marks the fourth country where the study has found that podcasts have hit the mainstream, with 55% New Zealanders consuming a podcast in the last month. Aotearoa also beats the US in radio listening.

• Ausha has achieved compliance with IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines v2.2. The IAB requires companies to recertify annually to remain in the list; but, outside that timeframe but still listed by the IAB as compliant are Podigee (who haven’t recertified for two years), Libsyn, Audion, Podtrac and Mediastream.

• Another day, another podcast app: Tone is being developed for “how I think podcasts should be experienced, or at least how the top 1% of podcasts should be experienced,” the developer writes.

• Further reading: Licensing International takes a look at licensed merch for podcasting, noting that it’s yet to make it to stores … John Wordock sees an opportunity for reaching Gen Z, after the Edison Research and SiriusXM webinar.

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