British Podcast Awards returns for 2019

• The British Podcast Awards have announced their return for 2019. Entries open today for 15 categories; writer and critic Miranda Sawyer, pictured above, has been announced as the new Chair of Judges. Here’s a list of the winners from 2018; this will be the third year for the awards.

• Apple’s quarterly financial figures now include total active users on iPhone: there are 900m globally (and therefore 900m installations of Apple Podcasts). Analyst Benedict Evans estimates 2.5bn Google Android phones (which all have the Google Podcasts player installed, if not the full app), and a further 600m in China.

• Patreon are having system difficulties, and podcasters (and others) have been waiting longer than usual for payouts. The site has been taken down for maintenance at times over the last few days. They’re hoping to have sorted payment by the end of tomorrow (and if it helps, ours came in three hours ago).

• The impending launch of Podfan - membership for podcasts - was announced on Feb 1. It’s like Patreon, but specifically for podcasts, says developer Jamie Perkins. It has a different payment model, too. You can reserve your Podfan URL today, though.

• Looking back: Steven Goldstein blogs about what he saw at the Alexa conference; and the event management team of PodUK also blogged about their event.

  
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• Spotify and Gimlet - Kevin Goldberg shares his thoughts, pointing out “Apple has been mostly complacent on their podcast strategy, only minimally innovating their app, slow rolling their hyped analytics, and overall squandering their massive head start.” Eric and Ely from the Bello Collective have a conversation about whether it’s a good thing or not. And radio executive Stephen Martin makes an interesting point… “Does this mean that Gimlet podcasts could contain commercial music, at least within Spotify’s castle walls? It could mean the advent of a new class of podcast; one that benefits music owners.”

Stats and data

• Edison Research have revealed that we’re listening to less of our own music tracks (both CDs and MP3s). “Five years ago 38% of all Americans ages 13 and older listened to owned music at some point each day, today this has fallen by one-third to 25%.” The company promises a further blog post to explain whether all this listening has moved to online music services like Spotify - we’d hope podcasts have a part to play too.

Podcasts

Gimlet have released Conviction, an investigative podcast that features a detective, Manuel Gomez, who is “straight out of a detective novel”. All episodes were released yesterday, on “Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all podcast streaming apps”. (Gimlet / Megaphone)

Trailblazers is a new podcast for “sound media professionals”. Its first guest is correspondent and host of Planet Money, Robert Smith.

Thank you

• Thank you to the world’s biggest podcaster NPR, and to Synth, a short-form podcasting platform “in 256-second increments”, for your kind support. You helped us make our podcast technical analysis service more robust.