Australian Podcast Awards - the winners

• The 2024 Australian Podcast Awards took place last night in Sydney NSW. We have a full list of the winners: Podcast of the Year went to Ladies, We Need to Talk (above), while the listeners’ choice went to Toni & Ryan.

• A number of podcasts also made the winners list at The Anthem Awards, including the Free Associations Podcast, Culture Kids, Unseen & Unheard Season 2, Public Health On Call Podcast, Wrongful Conviction, Our New South, and Going Wild with Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant.

• Spotify has released a roundup of its new audiobook features in the app - sleep timers, author pages, video clips (but of course!), countdown pages prior to release, “follow-along” visuals, and audiobook playlists.

• In Sounds Profitable this week, Bryan Barletta has written about the finer details of the Spotify for Creators push-to-video, calling it a “a wake-up call for podcasting”, and highlighting the monetisation options you may lose by uploading video.

• On Air Fest (Feb 19-21) will feature more than six locations in Brooklyn this time around: and a welcome return for Ashley Carman, who will host the invite-only Podcast Business Summit on Feb 19.

  • Speaking of which, Ashley Carman’s Soundbite newsletter covers the interview podcast backlash, reporting on Tim Ferriss’s views on interview-style shows like his.

• Triton Digital released podcast rankers for Canada and the United States. Lemonada Media is newly listed in both.

• Adam Bowie looks at the Podtrac ranker for the UK and Apple Podcast’s Top UK Shows of 2024..

• For personal users, Hindenburg is offering an upgrade to Hindenburg Pro 2 at up to 75% off, in what it calls a “Phoenix Firesale”. You’ve until Dec 8 to take advantage of this offer.

• According to its changelog, Descript has made “overdub” become part of “regenerate”, its AI speech generation tool. You can now pay with Apple Pay and Google Pay. The text-to-speech tool now works snappier and better. You can now replace media on the fly.

• The court action between the National Association of the Deaf and SiriusXM for a lack of podcast transcripts continues. The latest is a request to push the case out to October 2025. The legal action started in Dec 2021. (Fun and entirely unrelated fact: Average law firm billing rates were $749 per hour in 2022.)

• Kast Media’s bankruptcy case continues. As part of its public filings, we get to see the company’s monthly accounts. The company earnt $5,792 from Apple Podcasts in October (we presume from paid subscriptions), and $6,153 from advertising.

30% of podcasts started in January are dead by Feb.

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Moves and hires

• Geoffrey Fossier has joined French digital audio company Audion as its Global CMO.

Tips and tricks - with Memberful

• Headliner has published How to Market and Grow Your Podcast in 2025. The company’s CEO, Neil Mody, is interviewed in the Podnews Weekly Review today.

Podcast News

The Podnews Weekly Review this week contains interviews with Neil Mody from Headliner and Alberto Betella from RSS.com - and our Editor, James Cridland, discusses podcasting’s seeming open-armed welcome to YouTube and Spotify, with Sam Sethi. Of all the podcasts we mention here, this one’s obviously the best.

A week before the election in Ireland, new podcast From Bomb to Ballot: The History of Sinn Féin tells political party Sinn Féin’s journey from the political wing of the Provisional IRA to the brink of power. John Lee traces Sinn Féin’s evolution from 1969 to the present day - from its roots in the Troubles to its historic 2020 electoral breakthrough, the series chronicles a political narrative that continues to spark intense debate.

Other cultures have some great words that English doesn’t. “Niksen” is the Dutch word for doing nothing without feeling guilty about it; “Kaputreparium” is German for breaking something while you try to fix it; and “Otsukaresama” is Japanese for a good rest after working hard. Fifty Words For Snow searches out words from other cultures that will make our lives better in some way; and launched earlier this year. Maybe play it to your machatunim?

Season 2 of Business Dad, hosted by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, launches with a premiere featuring award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns. They chat about raising daughters passionate about the family business, Ken’s favorite Christmas gift, and family trips to Revolutionary War sites. It’s produced by Realm.