Podcasting - the game!

• The Podcast Host has built Podcasting: The Game, a PDF game to print out this holiday time. Among the rules - podcast transcripts give you an extra move forward every time. (Quite right).

• The Podcast Host also published the results of its Podcast Problems survey. Promotion is seen as the #1 problem to solve.

• Voxalyze has published their Podcast Discovery & Consumption report. The company surveyed listeners across four countries (the US, UK, France and Germany) to see if there are any local differences. Podcast listeners use 1.9 platforms on average, and Amazon Music is surprisingly high in their results. Google Podcasts reaches up to 15% of all users, but only 4% in the UK (possibly because the BBC blocks their podcasts from it).

• Audacity v3.1.3 has been released, with much faster loading times and a set of further improvements.

• Interest in smart speakers has begun to slow, says Bloomberg, citing Amazon documents. They’ve never delivered much in terms of podcast plays, though “news briefings” are well-used. (“Play the latest news from Podnews podcasting news”).

Thank you to ABF Creative, America’s first and only AI-driven producer of multicultural audio content, for becoming our latest gold supporter. We appreciate your support.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• Spotify quietly updated their Podcast Delivery Specifications last month to v1.9. “Updated wording & added few tags with more allowed values”, they say; notably, it now seems to allow AAC audio files, but not for passthrough.

  
  Sep 10 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Can 'value for value’ be used for music, too? Stay Awhile is an music album from Able and The Wolf, released as a podcast, taking payment via streaming sats.

• Podnews has added additional stats to our about page - we now have a rolling average for podcast downloads and article pageviews.

• Listen to us using some new podcasting apps, like Fountain, and you can tip us small amounts of Bitcoin while sending us a message. These are called boostagrams - thanks to Dave, talking about Spotify’s new Pod City that “Everybody’s building a podcast studio! Not sure what to make of that. 🧐”; and to Adam, who thanked us for including a donation link for the Podcast Index last week. Here’s how to enable your podcast; and some new podcast apps to try.

Tips and tricks

• Stephanie Fuccio writes about how podcast listeners meet a new podcast. Podcast descriptions are rarely good enough, she suggests, as she discovers two podcasts (one from Africa, and one multilingual podcast in Arabic, German and English.

Podcast News - with Memberful

The UN is hoping that one of your new years’ resolutions will be to look more closely at the food you eat. Better Food. Better World is a United Nations World Food Programme initiative, looking at food systems around the world and the people involved from production to consumption, from farm to plate, and asking “Can we do food better?”

Studio Ochenta, the leading multilingual podcast studio in Paris, France has launched its latest original podcast series - Atlas Linguae - a show about language, translation, and the joyfully challenging aspects of everyday communication. - read more