Spotify CEO: goal is to be “the best partner for creators”

• “I’m never going to click a podcast app to try and get into podcasting [for the first time].” Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek spoke to the Acquired podcast in a Spotify studio in Stockholm, and focuses on podcasts. Ek describes why podcasts are in the main Spotify app, rather than in a separate one; and when asked if Spotify should pay podcast creators, he replies that the company’s goal is to be “the best partner for creators”. (It’s also in video).

• Podscribe has added YouTube conversion modelling to its attribution service, with YouTube stats appearing in its unified dashboard.

• Want to know what’s going on in the Chinese podcast scene? NPR Extra interviewed Yang Yi, the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of JustPod and a prominent figure in China’s podcasting and digital audio industry.

• Katie Price, a UK celebrity, has joined Crowd Network for a podcast later this year. She’ll be speaking at The Podcast Show this Wednesday.

• PodcastAddict was subject to a DDOS attack over the weekend, pulling down podcast search and other services for the popular podcast app.

• Podfest will be Jan 25-28th, 2024 in Orlando FL, USA at the Wyndham Orlando Resort International Drive.

• Lex Fridman wants Twitter to become “the best podcasting app”. In response, Elon Musk suggests he uses Twitter Spaces when recording his podcast.

• Further reading: Writing in The Guardian, Fiona Sturges looks at the phenomenon of the TV show companion podcast, and why it’s seen recent success … meanwhile Tim Loh writes about “deliberately boring audio” in Bloomberg.

Tips and tricks

• There’s little that Evo Terra doesn’t know about fiction podcasts. In an article for The End, his fiction podcast newsletter, he writes ten ways to package your fiction podcast to maximise the listener experience.
  • One of his suggestions - make (and properly mark) a trailer - means automatic entry to our New Podcast Trailers podcast if we cover you.

The Tech Stuff - with The Podcast Standards Project

• Writing a clever bit of redirection magic for your new RSS podcast feed? Apple Podcasts requires a valid file extension in the enclosure URL for your show to be correctly ingested, even if the enclosure URL is actually a redirect. (Ask us how we know!) The Livewire Podcast Validator has been updated.

• Also, while we’re talking Apple Podcasts: you can add RSS URLs directly to the Apple Podcasts app. But, if debugging an RSS feed, know that if the RSS URL appears in the Apple Podcasts directory, your app will use the version parsed by central Apple Podcasts systems and not the RSS feed directly. Add a cachebuster parameter at the end of the RSS URL to stop this from happening.

• Podcasting 2.0 this week has Mike Kadin from Red Circle as a guest, talking about dynamic audio insertion and the challenges it gives a podcast hosting company.

Podcast News

Actor Rachel Bilson says she was fired for podcast comments she made about her sex life in Women on Top, which the press took out of context and “put out as these clickbait headlines”. She didn’t name the company she was fired from. Meanwhile rapper Ice T also highlights the issue of taking a comment out of context.

Travelling to The Podcast Show? New Podcast Trailers will help you find a new podcast to listen to on the way.

ARN’s iHeartPodcast Network Australia has launched Your News Now, which they claim is one of the world’s most advanced news podcasts in the world. The “under three minute burst” contains geo-targeted segments, including local weather. NPR’s geo-targeted Consider This](https://podnews.net/update/daily-localised-podcast) podcast launched in 2020, though is updated once a day; Your News Now is updated every six hours.

When you’ve booked a luxurious holiday away from it all, what’s the best way to learn more about where you’re going to stay? Why, a podcast, of course. Mt Cook Lakeside Retreat focuses on the story of a high country estate in New Zealand, and is the first project from podcast company Story in Sound

Manchester: Your Airport, MAN launches today - lifting the lid on the airport in the north of England. It’s new from Crowd Network’s new Crowd Branded division, and explains how a busy airport - that handles 30 million passengers a year - works.