Continued growth in spoken word; as Spotify buys audiobook company

• Spoken word audio listening is dramatically increasing, says new data from Edison Research and NPR. Year-on-year, spoken word audio listening, including to podcasts, is up 8%, says the data - 75% of the US population listens to spoken word every month. (By comparison, 41% listen to podcasts, says the Infinite Dial research, so podcasting has plenty of growth left). You can grab the whole report here.

• Audiobooks are coming to Spotify - the company is to acquire Findaway, an audiobook distributor. Findaway will “enable Spotify to quickly scale its audiobook catalog”. It’s experimented with audiobooks before: adding classic books, and a bespoke category for spoken word. An app originally called Spooks but now named Zebralution Audiobooks surfaces more than 3,900 audiobooks on Spotify.

  
  Sep 8 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Patreon’s CEO, Jack Conte, is interviewed by Ashley Carman in Hot Pod Insider today. Patreon is to launch streaming video (it already hosts podcasts), and Conte is to launch a podcast of his own.

• The Signal from the Australian ABC, is to end, according to an announcement from one of the podcast’s hosts. The show was launched in February 2018, a daily morning news podcast for 20 and 30-something Australians. “The market has been crowded with similar offerings all largely chasing the same under 40s listener and we’ve watched our growth slow”, says an email sent to ABC News staff obtained by Podnews. The feed will be replaced with ABC News Daily from the end of January, aimed at 40-55 year-old women. The new target competes with the ABC’s local radio audience, and leaves the broadcaster without any daily news audio output aimed at audiences between 24-40.

• Staying with daily news podcasts, one doing very well is The Daily from The New York Times, and it appears to be the most popular English-speaking news podcast in most of Europe - beating the BBC, The Guardian, the FT, or The Economist, says Dávid Tvrdoň.

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• Libsyn has been announced as Elite Sponsor for the Afros and Audio Podcast Festival. Their announcement contains a 25%-off promo code.

• Lieven Heeremans writes about gentrification of the podcast landscape. He argues that the initial phase of the 'creative bohemians’ have made podcasting attractive to new listeners, and now the big commercial operators are moving in to take advantage.

Moves and hires - with Pod People

• Herzliche Glückwünsche to André Schatz and Mario Bruhn, who have been hired as Key Account Managers for Acast in Munich and Hamburg.

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Tips and tricks

• How my podcast reached one million downloads - John Stange says that giving a show a discoverable name is one of his secrets.

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Telling Everybody Everything, the podcast from Canadian comedian Katherine Ryan, has renewed with Acast. Ryan notes that the deal reaches audiences “wherever and however they’re listening”, unlike, presumably, a Spotify exclusive.