Attacks briefly knock some podcast hosts offline

• Buzzsprout, Podbean, Spreaker and Captivate were all subject to a denial-of-service attack. The same attackers appear to have been involved. We were wondering why they’ve targeted podcast hosts: so we talked to the group behind the attacks.

• A company called Happyscribe is publishing automated transcripts of podcasts without the apparent consent of many of the publishers. We covered issues around auto-transcriptions in June.

• Cumulus Media, owners of Westwood One, says it achieved more than 1bn downloads in 2020, and podcasting is “pacing up more than 30% in Q1”. Podcasting revenue grew 40% last year. “We’ve made our bet on partnership arrangements with talent as opposed to going out and spending a lot of money on IT or infrastructure,” said CFO Frank Lopez-Balboa. The company uses Spotify-owned Megaphone.

• Backtracks has launched a tool that monitors your head gesture movement. The tool require the listener to be using AirPods Pro headphones.

• Investor Andrew Wilkinson says he’s removing podcasts from his phone: “podcasts are mostly people repeating ideas you already agree with or talking about things that trigger anxiety”, he says. Wilkinson is co-founder of Tiny Capital, which invests in iOS podcast app Castro, podcast membership platform Supercast, and podcast producer Ride Home Media.

• Triton Digital has released the latest Podcast Rankers for the US and LATAM. These rankers are incomplete and contain participating publishers only; notably these rankers do not include iHeartRadio’s podcasts. Triton Digital is being bought by iHeartRadio.

• Matt Deegan writes about Spotify’s announcements yesterday. On the interactivity, he writes “It would be much more interesting if they served these new features through the RSS feed, challenging other apps to include it in their services too. This would properly drive the take-up of the feature, and Spotify would still benefit if they were the people executing it the best.”

• Echoing the open, independent nature of podcasting, writing in the Financial Times ($) former Spotify chief economist Will Page notes that major labels released 1.2m songs in 2020: but DIY artists released 9.5m songs. The music industry is making more money, he says, but has more mouths to feed.

• Ivy is a new podcast app that offers a way to follow topics, tags, hosts or podcasts.

• CephaloPod is also a new podcast app for Android.

• Movistar Home, a smart speaker in Spain from Telefónica, now incorporates iVoox’s podcast catalogue.

• Podnews’s Editor is speaking at the RAIN Podcast Business Summit, with NPR’s Bryan Moffett. Tickets are free.

• Fans of Michael Barbaro’s Mmms, this is for you.

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Podcast News - with CBC Podcasts

From CBC Podcasts: Pop Chat Every week, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud invites you into his group chat to help make sense of the cultural drama blowing up the internet.

The Journal has an interview with Dominion Voting Systems CEO, John Poulos, today. His company has filed three defamation lawsuits against TV networks, saying his excellently 100% accurate and very handsome voting machines are perfect, which of course they absolutely are.

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