Radio Sodoma tops the charts in Finland; introducing 'microcasts'

• Radio Sodoma has topped the Finnish podcast charts, with the dark comedy podcast achieving 800,000 downloads in 14 days (not bad for a podcast in a language only spoken by 5.5m people). The podcast was released on Spotify and Apple Podcasts after spending a short time as an exclusive on YLE’s Areena app.

• All the audio from OzPod 2019 from Melbourne VIC, Australia, is now online and downloadable. Meanwhile, PodMov Daily report that you can also stream selected sessions free from last month’s NAB RadioShow in Dallas TX, USA.

  
  Aug 17 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Producer Lars Murray has coined a thing called a “microcast”, arguing that a 7-10 minute podcast fits nicely on a smart speaker or inside a Spotify playlist. (We’ve got a microcast, it turns out. Listen here)

• A new audio university and community for educational podcasters and their listeners, Lyceum, was announced at the Sound Education event last week in Boston MA, USA.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 17 2023

• The Athletic, a premium sports news website, has placed many of their podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• Marco Raaphorst notes that Spotify appears to be normalising the audio level of podcasts. Meanwhile, the method YouTube uses to normalise audio for their platform appears to have changed - it now aims for -14 LUFS rather than the previous algorithm, which didn’t, apparently, use LUFS at all.

• Wondery have appointed Ranieri and Co to represent them in Australia and New Zealand. The company is based in Melbourne VIC, Australia, and appears to have just launched.

  • Also in Australia, magazine publisher Pacific has hired Elissa Ratcliff as their new Head of Audio. Ratcliff joins from Mamamia.

• In Singapore, Today covers people who left their full-time jobs to concentrate on their podcasts.

• Saturday Night Live had a sketch about podcasting over the weekend. (Fans of SNL: ProtonVPN is your friend if you’re geoblocked).

• Developers: Our list of podcast audio hosts, which sits on Github (and which we use in production) has been updated with a few more.

Podcasts

The EarBuds Podcast Collective, a listening movement that sends a themed podcast recommendation email, now has a weekly companion podcast. Feedback with EarBuds will highlight each week’s podcast picks, information about the curator, and more. (Castbox)

Songbirding is a new immersive birding-by-ear podcast, recorded in the Great Lakes region of North America by Rob Porter. Each episode averages just over 20 minutes of field recordings, plus segments that focus on teaching a specific birdsong. (Pinecast)