Spotify announces a new focus on women creators

“Allowing podcast adtech to remain unbalanced along gender lines will only hurt podcasting’s growth as a medium that can hold its own alongside all major forms of media.” - Twila Dang writes Sounds Profitable today with Claritas, saying we need more women working in adtech. Subscribe

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• Spotify has announced a new focus on women creators. Called EQUAL, it includes a set of new playlists and content, and also establishes an EQUAL Board, offering a grant to fifteen organisations across the world to work on making the audio industry more equitable for women creators.

• ART19's “Director of Data”, Chad Hollowed, says that we’re now seeing 72,000 new podcast episodes per day (that’s five new podcasts every six seconds).

• African Media Entertainment, AME, has secured the rights to represent advertising for Wondery podcasts in South Africa. The company runs radio and digital platforms in the country.

• Acast Australia released their Sounds Smart report, claiming that 37% of Australians have listened to podcasts in the past three months.

• The Verge takes a look at Fireside - the Mark Cuban Fireside, not the Dan Benjamin Fireside - with some screenshots of what’s to come.

• Clubhouse has rewritten its terms of service to now allow recording with “the express consent of all the speakers involved”. It previously required written consent. (h/t Daniel J Lewis)

• New podcast app Podz gets a review in DigitalTrends. The app automatically generates 60-second clips of podcasts to help with discoverability.

• Bullhorn Live is a new feature from the Bullhorn podcast app, with chatrooms and interactive features.

• The forthcoming Edison Research and Triton Digital “Infinite Dial” will tell us that “the amount of ad-skipping (in podcasts) is high”, pre-warns Tom Webster in his newsletter. He points out that podcasts are the only audio medium that even has skippable ads.

  
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• Two white doctors did a podcast on racism in the US for a prominent medical journal; promoted with a tweet claiming that no physician is racist. It went just as well as you’d expect it to.

• Entries for the Jesse Cox Audio Fellowship close on Sunday. It aims to support Australian creative practitioners to produce new audio storytelling that takes risks and makes an impact.

  
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• More unsavoury stories from Gimlet Media: this time from The Mystery Show's Starlee Kine. “Power and money was given to the wrong, oh so predictable archetypes and they wreaked white male mediocrity accordingly.”

  • Meanwhile, Reply All’s Alex Goldman is putting pressure on Spotify to reach agreement with the Gimlet Union.

• Moves: Margie Smithurst is the new Supervising Producer for ABC Podcasts and ABC Audio Studios.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 1 2023

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• On the Podcasting 2.0 podcast, Adam Curry suggests that “now should also be a time for everyone to catch up with integration,” saying that there are many podcasts out there who don’t use all the available new tags.
• 13.2% of recently-updated podcasts now use the podcast:namespace.
• The Podcast Index API’s documentation website has received an overhaul, thanks to Steven Crader.
• Benjamin Bellamy has written a proposal for podcast:recommendations, where podcasters could recommend other podcasts to their listeners.
• A proposal has also been suggested for podcast:license to enable more permissive licenses to be described.
• A podcast host called Castr, “an immutable podcast upload portal and aggregator for Bitcoin”, where all podcasts “are stored directly on the Bitcoin (BSV) blockchain”, now supports locked, funding and categories.

Tips and tricks - with Radiodays Asia

• How to Navigate the Podcast to TV Pipeline According to Pros (Timber)

• Five things to avoid if you want to grow your podcast (Pod Bible)

Podcast News

Forgotten: Women of Juárez​ has been released in three new languages, to honor International Women’s Day.

Fierce Girls, the stories of some of Australia’s most extraordinary women, is back for a new season.

From Canada, Decomplicated claims that the media industry has been filtered, scripted, and produced by older white men for far too long. Rumneek Johal and Carol Park are two Canadian women of colour, producing a daily breakdown of current events and cultural affairs designed to appeal to a new generation of listeners.

Stolen: The Search for Jermain tells a story from 2018, when a young Indigenous mother named Jermain Charlo left a bar in Missoula, Montana, and was never seen again.