Spotify - scripted podcasts could grow

Should we move beyond the podcast prefix for analytics? Bryan Barletta from Sounds Profitable with Libsyn’s AdvertiseCast suggests there’s a solution that’s even better.

• Johan Seidefors, the Nordic Head of Content at Spotify, thinks there is a future in scripted podcasts, and that podcasting is intimate and that the connection between the host and the listener is important. He was speaking in an interview with Podnews’s Editor, James Cridland, at Radiodays Europe.

• SXM Media is #1 for podcasts, reports Edison Podcast Metrics. The data for the top US podcast publishers places iHeartMedia at #3, after Spotify. iHeart claim they are #1, but quote Podtrac data that does not measure SXM Media.

• BBC Sounds, the BBC’s radio, podcast and music app, has released new figures, claiming a record audience of 4.06 million users per week. (BBC Radio reaches 34 million users per week across all platforms). The corporation also revealed that it achieved a total of 288 million global podcast downloads across the world during this quarter (making it about the same size as Wondery).

• Magellan AI has released its Podcast Advertising Quarterly Benchmark Report for Q1/22. Podcast ad spending increased 23%, the company reports.

• Today, Explained has made it onto two new public radio stations, KCRW in Santa Monica CA, and WEKU, in Richmond KY.

• Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me will return to live audience recordings in June - in a new venue: the historic Studebaker Theater at the Fine Arts Building.

Tips and tricks - with SoundStack

• How to understand podcast statistics

• How Podcasters Can Grow Their Show with Cross-Promos

Podcast News - with Lemonada Media

From Lemonada Media: Burnout, hosted by Connor Franta, explores the story of burnout, discovers how it affects your body and mind, and looks at why the easy solutions simply won’t work to solve a systemic problem. Burnout is produced by Lemonada Media and Mindful.

The Media Podcast with Matt Deegan comes from Radiodays Europe this week, with a special guest of Podnews’s Editor, James Cridland. Expect a discussion on Spotify’s appearance, plus a media quiz that James has no chance of winning.

Someone Knows Something, the award-winning investigative podcast from CBC, returns for a new season, focusing on “the abortion wars”.

Kuper Island is also brand new this week from CBC. An 8-part series, it tells the stories of four students: three who survived and one who didn’t. They attended one of Canada’s most notorious residential schools – where unsolved deaths, abuse, and lies haunt the community and the survivors to this day.

She Pivots is a new podcast with Marie Claire, hosted by Emily Tisch Sussman. The show is centered on women and how their personal stories inspired them to pivot and eventually led to success.