Podcast Movement scores winning set of keynotes

• Podcast Movement made its first keynote speaker announcements for Podcast Movement 2025 in Dallas, TX this August. Jack Davenport, co-founder of Goalhanger (above), the UK’s biggest independent podcaster, will give us his “lessons from across the pond”; Gabriel Soto from Edison Research will share what we know about podcasting’s new listeners; and Lauren Passell and Arielle Nissenblatt (who love our podcast) will speak about the best podcast growth tips.

  • Podnews readers get a discount on selected Podcast Movement passes.

• Podcast network Mercury has partnered with the Student Radio Association in the UK to distribute all podcast content from the SRA and its member stations. The announcement was made in this week’s Podnews Weekly Review.

• Audioboom apparently paid £10mn ($13.4mn) for Adelicious, suggests Law360. (We covered the purchase yesterday). Meanwhile, Audioboom’s chairman, Michael Tobin, purchased a further £1mn-worth of shares.

• Spotify launched Audiobooks+ in some markets, an add-on offering an additional fifteen hours of listening each month.

• Edison Research suggests that podcast consumption in the US is growing fast among those aged 55+.

• Pocket Casts now properly supports “serial” shows, grouping episodes by season, and sorting them in the correct order. The change is inspired by Evo Terra’s The End: Evo wrote a piece calling for better support in April last year.

• Bobby Carter from NPR spoke at Radiodays Europe earlier this year about the success of the Tiny Desk Concert. Radiodays has uploaded a number of the talks from the event, which happened in March.

  • Radiodays Asia is on Sep 1-3 in Jakarta, Indonesia. Podnews readers get a discount on selected Radiodays Asia passes. But, if you’re in Jakarta but unable to afford the ticket, hit reply and tell us: we’ve a small number of tickets we’d like to share.

• The US Senate agreed to President Trump’s plans to pull $1.1bn of funding from public broadcasting.

• FOX News has signed a licensing deal with conservative podcast Ruthless.

• That ad read by your favourite podcast host might not have been read by your favourite podcast host after all. Triton Digital has partnered with an AI voice company, ekoz.ai, to bring AI-generated host-read podcast ads to Spreaker. Podcast hosts can opt in to having their voice cloned; and then manually approve each ad for their podcast.

• Triton Digital released the US Podcast Ranker for June. Salem Media’s Charlie Kirk Show made it to the top 5. This American Life gets a new entry in the ranker at #12. In the top ten publishers list, the BBC and Salem saw a ranking increase. The ranker measures participating publishers only.

  • Meanwhile, it’s emerged that SiriusXM shows have been removed from Triton’s Australian Podcast Ranker. They are represented by SCA in the country. They came out of the US ranker in February.

• The BBC’s Annual Reports and Accounts were published for 2024/25. BBC Sounds, the corporation’s radio and podcast app, reported a 2% increase in weekly active users, but those listeners are older, with only 42% being aged under 55 (down from 45%). Total time spent on the BBC Sounds app remained static, at 17.3mn hours a week. Total plays increased by 8%: “on-demand speech”, which includes podcasts and on-demand speech radio, rose 8% from 768mn to 832mn for the year. (That’s the equivalent of 16 million plays a week). The BBC Sounds app closes for non-UK audiences next week.

• The Boston Globe’s Meredith Goldstein shares her favourite podcasts for Pocket Casts.

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Movement

• Don’t go to conferences… unless you want a bag of gold, says Steve Stewart, who asks: Does attending conferences make sense?

Podcast News

The Podnews Weekly Review this week includes interviews with James Burtt from the newly-launched Pivot Productions; Liam Heffernan from Mercury Podcast Network who has just announced a new partnership with the Student Radio Association; and founder & CEO Will Malnati of At Will Media on taking IP from podcasts into other platforms.

Fudd Around And Find Out is new from iHeart Women’s Sports, which celebrates its first anniversary this week. The show is from 2025 NCAA Champion and Most Outstanding Player Azzi Fudd, and is co-produced with Stephen Curry and Erick Peyton’s Unanimous Media.

CBS announced that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is ending next May. Some wonder if this has something to do with more than just the finances of the show, and more about the current political climate. Could Jon Stewart be next? Daily Comedy News dropped a bonus epsiode last night.

The Plot Thickens returns for a new season today - its wildest season yet, we’re told. Cleopatra was the movie that broke Hollywood, and the true story of its production is like a juicy summer beach listen. Elizabeth Taylor, 27 years old and on her fourth husband - meets a smoldering Welshman who seduces her into a salacious affair that dominated the headlines. It fell to the director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, to somehow wrest an epic out of chaos while staying one step ahead of financial disaster and his own failing health.

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