Glow drops charges for listener support; Audacity not for Catalina after all; unusual terms and conditions

Exclusive: Glow, a service that lets you build a podcast membership program, has just announced that the company is dropping all charges to collect listener support. Patreon charges between 5% and 8% to most content creators. “We believe that in order for podcasting to thrive, listener-supported and membership models have to thrive too, and we want to be the easiest route for podcasters to build those models,” explained Amira Valliani, the co-founder and CEO. The company will continue to charge for subscription podcasts and other services.

Sorry. Audacity’s new release, scheduled for 10th November, won’t work natively with macOS Catalina after all. The organisation has quietly added a note, after our story yesterday, noting that the upcoming release still won’t work natively with Catalina, and will require a fiddly workaround. (We’ve updated our story from yesterday).

Exclusive: Reading some unusual terms and conditions from podcast hosts, we discover one major podcast host that restricts you from monetising your podcast, and another that can take your podcast’s name and give it to someone else (and waives your right to sue them).

Acast is now IAB Certified, and are the first to claim certification for “client-confirmed ad play”: a RAD-like service that measures playback, in the Acast player, of a specific portion of audio (and whether a listener has skipped through it). Ten podcast companies are now certified.

Exclusive: Acast have also announced the launch of their own Acast Studios arm. Acast’s SVP of content Susie Warhurst said: “Launching Acast Studios is the natural next step for us as we continue to develop even more tools and services in being the creators’ network of choice.”

SPKR is a new podcast app to be released (iOS only) on October 31, which has been reviewed by a Forbes blogger. Trying to fix podcasting’s apparent discovery issue, it consists of “channels” containing short clips of podcasts, allowing you to select to listen to the podcasts in full. The clips are currently curated by SPKR staff.

Spotify has released its Q3 2019 earnings report, claiming a 39% increase in podcast listens in just three months. It made an operating profit of US $60m, in comparison to a $6.7m loss in 2018, reports Engadget. There are some calls for podcasters on the platform to be paid; and other calls for podcasters supplied to Spotify Premium subscribers to be ad-free.

Westwood One is to use Megaphone as its host, and will use “Megaphone’s hosting, publishing, dynamic ad insertion, campaign management, and analytics tools to deliver targeted ads to its podcast listeners.” They previously used Omny Studio.

The Financial Times has launched a subscriber-only podcast, and has hired Cheryl Brumley in the new role of Global Head of Audio. Brumley, from Florida, joins from The Economist.

A new edition of RadioDoc Review is out, containing critiques “by eminent scholars and/or practitioners of the form.” A staggered release with initially three podcasts, the review we read was over 2,900 words long.

Harry Duran, the founder of FullCast, is to run a live workshop on November 4th, aimed at new podcasters.