Podcast Movement and Sounds Profitable announce merger

• On the eve of Podcast Movement 2025 in Dallas, it’s been announced that Podcast Movement and Sounds Profitable have merged in a seven-figure deal. Bryan Barletta becomes President of Podcast Movement. Dan Franks will continue producing the event as President of Event Movement, an independent production company.

  • Podcast Movement’s flagship event in 2026 will now be held in New York City in September. It was due to be held in San Diego.
  • The deal includes Podcast Movement’s existing 50% business partnership with Podnews.

• Exclusive: Ausha has launched free podcast chart tracking and alerts on Apple and Spotify. The product is free and available to everyone. You can get email alerts either daily, weekly or fortnightly.

• Libsyn has launched “PodRoll with Libsyn”, a new discovery and monetisation tool that enables dynamic feed drops directly within the Libsyn platform. Promoted episodes appear in the second most recent episode slot of podcast feeds, labeled “You Might Also Like,” and include the artwork and direct links for the promoted show.

• If you’ve ever wanted to record a show with Conan O’Brien, now’s your chance - SiriusXM and Airbnb have just announced the next Airbnb Original Experience, to offer fans a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be in the studio and participate in a recording of an episode of the beloved podcast (including the intro!). The experience has gone live on Airbnb this morning, and is open to book on Thursday, August 21, at 12pm ET.

• YouTube Music has added a “skip silence” function for podcast playback. The function was in Google Podcasts, which the company closed in June last year. The feature is still not available in Apple Podcasts.

  • YouTube Music plays RSS podcasts, by the way.

• Podcast app Fountain has updated its Home tab, added a “like” button, and launched other new features.

• Are top podcasters fudging their numbers? asks The Hollywood Reporter, as part of its podcast edition.

• Goalhanger’s The Rest Is Football posted a record for the show - 1.4 million downloads and streams of an interview with Marcus Rashford, recorded on location in Barcelona.

• Frequency has changed its brand and website to frequency.media, rather than its old frequencyads.com address. “We’ve grown far beyond ad tech alone.” said Pete Jimison, CEO of Frequency.

• PodcastOne released its financial results for Q2/25. The company saw revenue of $15mn, up 13% year-on-year, but made a loss of just over $1mn for the quarter.

• Deepcast became “temporarily unavailable” in mid-July, and all websites for the service are no longer operational. We understand the company is under new management. We’ve removed all links to the service from our podcast pages.

• Ashley Carman points out in her newsletter that the New Heights podcast (Taylor’s version) featured not a single host-read ad. Of course, when Amazon’s Wondery fired 110 people earlier this month, it was video that was apparently to blame.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• SoundStack’s Rockie Thomas posts Better podcast delivery through HLS – key questions answered! HLS is of particular use for video podcasting, since it allows for adaptive bitrate (just like Spotify and YouTube do).

  • Opinion: HLS delivery could well help with audio delivery as well. However, if we’re building an alternate audio delivery mechanism, perhaps it’s also the time to make the switch away from MP3 to a more modern codec, like AAC, for these files.

• Are any shows already supporting HLS? Well, yes - and this HLS Podcast Radar, launched over the weekend by John Spurlock, will help find them.

• Chrome 139, which has rolled out, includes on-device speech recognition. Might be useful for something. You’ve long been able to turn on captions for audio played in your browser.

• After changes to BlueSky’s terms of use, co-inventor of podcasting Dave Winer suggests that a future use of RSS might be as “a billionaire-proof social network”.

• XSLT, nice-looking style sheets for XML pages like podcast RSS feeds, are being suggested as being deprecated in web browsers, and will be removed - even if most developers have expressed reservations about the plan. Here’s the ticket in Chrome.

Tips and tricks - with Patreon

• How often should I publish new podcast episodes? Dan Misener of Bumper gives us all an approach that’s informed by data - including the data from Podnews’s own podcasts.

Podcast News

With Airwave: NerdWallet’s Smart Money Podcast dives deep into topics like budgeting, saving, investing, home buying, and credit cards, cutting through misinformation to bring you clear, actionable advice backed by thorough research.

The Note Closers Show Podcast celebrated its 1,000th episode last week. With over 1.5M downloads, it’s the #1 podcast in the niche of note investing - buying and selling mortgage debt. The host, Scott Carson, is at Podcast Movement this week.

Things Are About To Get Weird made it onto the BBC News website for being a top ten podcast on Spotify. It’s produced by Chyaz Samuel from her spare room in her south Cheshire home. The show also had a stint at the top of Spotify’s true crime chart.

Solutions with Henry Blodget is new today from Vox Podcast Network, hosted by the journalist and Business Insider co-founder. Each week, he and his guests will tackle some of the most pressing challenges of modern life – from AI risk and climate change to burnout and the loneliness epidemic – with an emphasis on practical, achievable solutions.

Divorce. Custody battles. Domestic violence. These cases play out daily in family courts — but the courtroom is just the beginning. lovelustlaw takes you beyond the headlines, beyond the clickbait, and into the heart of the legal and emotional chaos behind modern relationships. Hosted by Michele Locke, a veteran divorce attorney and former Associate Judge with over 5,000 domestic violence cases under her belt, this podcast exposes the truth behind some of the most shocking cases you’ve heard of… and many you haven’t.

In Calm History this week, you’ll learn about the bizarre Phantom Airship Invasion of the 1800s. This true story includes naked aliens, abducted cows, a crazy dentist, a floating booze cruise, and Thomas Edison.