A quarter of all Brits listen to podcasts every week

• 25% of UK adults listen to podcasts weekly, according to new research for UK media regulator Ofcom. While not directly comparable with data from elsewhere, broadcast analyst Adam Bowie has taken a look at the details.

• Cleanvoice is a new service promising to automatically remove all those “uhhhh” words from your recordings. It’s $3 a shot, but could save quite some time in editing.

• Apple’s Podcasts Connect still isn’t allowing new podcasts from some users, with error messages about missing artwork and copyright statements. Podnews lost access to our account again last week (it’s since returned, minus any stats). Still, we’re doing better than Dirk Primbs, who has been waiting for more than ten days to access his.

• Podpage is now working with Fusebox, a paid podcast player.

• Ximalaya has filed for a US IPO. The largest online audio platform in China (with spoken-word and music content), it has 250m monthly users, and 5.2m active content creators. Out of all audio listened-to on mobile in China, Ximalaya provides 75%.

  • JustPod's Yang Yi points us to their (English) prospectus, which contains Ximalaya’s view of the Chinese audio market. As with all coverage of podcasting in China, the definition of what a “podcast” is could be different to yours.
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• Free editing software Audacity has 'been acquired' by a new company, Muse Group. The announcement video from Muse Group’s Martin Keary claims he’s “been asked to step up and manage Audacity in partnership with its open source community”.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 3 2023
  • Keary has a good reputation for UX research and design; but Audacity’s website doesn’t mention this news, and nor is it mentioned in the development mailing list or the Audacity Forum: so it’s a little unclear what’s going on.
  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 3 2023
  • Audacity is free software: a GPL open-source project with more than 100 contributors - anyone can download the source code. The Audacity trademark, registered by the original developer Dominic Mazzoni, does appear to have been acquired by Muse Group.

Tweet of the week: from The Guardian’s podcast and radio reviewer, Miranda Sawyer: “Male celebrities! Congratulations on your great idea of moving into podcasting, with a revealing interview show, where you chat to your mates… . But honestly, the most revealing element of your podcast is the fact that you don’t interview ONE SINGLE woman in an entire series. As a reviewer, I’m considering a boycott of these shows. There are so many celebrity podcasts out there, that ignoring the ones that ignore women seems reasonable tbh”

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• In case you missed it on Friday, Apple Podcasts on iOS 14.5 no longer directly reads RSS feeds, and relies on data from its crawler. That crawler currently visits very irregularly; we understand the plan is for some improvements to its polling schedule shortly.
• Apple Podcasts on v14.5 has changed how show and episode descriptions work, as detailed in a Podlove discussion.
  • If you use <itunes:summary> then that’s all it displays. It’s happy falling back to <description>; and if your <description> is HTML wrapped in CDATA, then it displays HTML (up to about 4000 characters).
  • Both <itunes:summary> and <content:encoded> have been quietly dropped from Apple’s RSS examples.
  • We’ve dropped <itunes:summary> from our feed.
• There are now 3.7m podcasts in The Podcast Index, with 319,712 shows having posted once in the past 30 days.
• Apple Podcasts Connect appears to be promoting a “Reporter” command-line utility (under the error message) to grab your data from the portal. Here’s the zip to download, in case you’re interested. The user guide contains, er, no mention of the word 'podcast’, so quite how useful it’ll be is anyone’s guess.

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Day 24

• How to Use Affiliates to Make Money Podcasting - Jared Easley points to different opportunities from promoting other peoples’ stuff on your podcast.

• How to get to one million downloads; an interview with Sheena Yap Chan.

  
  Sep 3 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

Podcast News - with Sounder․fm

On Sounder: Real Sports Heroes explores the importance of today’s black sports star having a voice that goes beyond the court and playing field.

A Positive Climate launched today. Through interviews with inspiring people driving positive change and looking at products to tackle climate change, it should help everyone have a more positive impact on the planet.

Sounds Profitable's podcast interviews Nick Hilton, who regularly podcasts slightly alarming blogs about the dark future for podcasting. Will he have a more positive outlook in real life?

Podland News may have been over a day late if you use Apple Podcasts; but you’ll hear more about subscription services and more in this week’s episode, with James Cridland and Sam Sethi.