New podcast features from Spotify

• Spotify announced a set of new podcast features.

  • “Users can ask Spotify questions about the podcast they’re listening or watching, and get answers in real time.” - this feature is available in the US, Sweden and Ireland for Premium users.
  • Dynamic Creator Sponsorships are now available for creators in the Spotify Partner Program. The feature allows sponsorships to be dynamically scheduled.
  • Memberships (which “will launch for select creators soon”) appears to be an equivalent to Supporting Cast, Patreon or Apple Podcasts Premium Subscriptions. Pricing and details weren’t given.
  • Personal Podcasts are coming next month to Premium users in the US. It’s a tool that lets listeners generate and schedule short, private audio episodes tailored to their interests and their listening habits. Examples given are “Help me understand economics in five minutes”, or “Share my daily city updates”. After a free set of credits per month, listeners will have the option to purchase more.

• Spotify also highlighted how its rebuilt ad platform is driving growth (major changes for podcasting go live in July); announced a paid tool to let you remix songs, including by using AI; and Spotify Studio, a desktop app that unlocks more possibilities using AI.

  • Earlier in the week, Spotify announced that podcasts can be marked as “verified”, and clarified that AI can’t be used to impersonate others using voice clones. The company still has no policy on entirely AI-generated shows.

• Audible has announced an integration with Apple Podcasts. Members can now listen to their favourite shows from Audible on Apple Podcasts, by connecting their account. The integration is also used by companies like The New York Times and Apple Music. One show being promoted in this way is Leon Neyfakh’s new show, OnlyFantasy.

• In a panel session at The Podcast Show, Inception Point AI’s CEO Jeanine Wright said that the company will no longer produce AI content with voices claiming to be doctors - something Podnews highlighted last month. “We are not any more calling [AI-generated hosts] doctors or any kind of licensed or health professional or licensed expert. They will still describe themselves as an expert or having been well read and well studied in a space. We take fiction liberties with the way that our personalities describe who they are, but always after disclosing.” However, asked by Dan Kendall of healthpodcast.org whether she would remove all existing shows where the voice claims they are a medical doctor, she declined. “We have not taken down any content we have ever made,” she said. Another audience member called her work “upsetting, apocalyptic, and incredibly disappointing”.

• By the numbers - Inception Point AI is making 10,000 episodes a week, Wright said, and has well over a million listeners every month. The company has more than 400,000 subscribers across YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. As of Tuesday, there will be 12 “real life” people on her team, as well as eight “full-time agentic employees”. One human creator can now produce “80-100 new shows a day”.

  • Wright announced the company had developed “the world’s first totally autonomous podcaster”. She explained: “This is taking the tools of our end-to-end audio automation and applying agentics, and our AI decisioning engine, to our personalities and creating a podcaster that acts as every other podcaster. It just does its own thing without any human contribution of content. They decide what kind of content to create, what feeds to create, whether to create a new show or a new episode, how long that episode is going to be, where they should put the ad breaks, what kinds of audiences they want to target, et cetera, et cetera. They dynamically create the content. And then it is surfaced in a portal where we log on and we review that content before it is now distributed into the world. Eventually, I think we will largely remove the human in the loop of the review of the content before it goes out the door.”

• In London, the winners of The Arias 2026 were announced. The awards, organised by the Audio Academy, are for the UK’s audio industry including radio and podcasting; How To Fail with Elizabeth Day from Sony Music Podcasts won the best commercial partnership. For the last decade, Global, the biggest commercial broadcaster in the UK, has not supported the Audio Academy and doesn’t allow its teams to enter, denying their people any industry recognition.

• YouTube announced a curated podcasts homepage for the UK. There also appears to also be one for Australia; shows are editorially curated into individual rails. This was first trailed in 2022 in leaked documents published by Podnews and became available in the US in October 2022. SInce October 2023, an automated /podcasts homepage has been available in many countries; but this appears to be a curated version.

  • There was no announcement welcoming YouTube podcasts product manager Steve McLendon’s new moustache, but we’ll do that here anyway.

• Mumbrella reports on our Editor’s keynote and other Australian-focused sessions at The Podcast Show, London.

• Edison Research at SSRS announced that The Podcast Consumer 2026 will be presented in a webinar on Wednesday, June 3 at 2pm ET.

• Clothing retailer Quince was the biggest US podcast advertiser in April, spending $6mn, according to Magellan AI. Liberty Mutual Holding Company, a car insurer, increased its spending the most, to $2.7mn.

• The UK’s RAJAR released the MIDAS Spring 2026 survey. It claims 25% of the UK listen to podcasts weekly; a figure that has remained relatively static since Winter 2024. Podcasts take 6% of total audio time - 6.4 hours per person, per week.

We updated our privacy policy today. The main change is to note that the Podnews Daily podcast is using Magellan AI until August for measurement, at an advertiser’s request. It’s the first change in 14 months.

Tips and tricks - with The Podcast Show London

• Being a podcast guest is great; but if you’re doing it to promote your company or your business, there are ways to make it really work for you.
• How do the podcast charts actually work? They don’t all measure the same things.

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave: This Day in History from The HISTORY Channel has the top historical event for this day in past years. A politician was born this day in 1930 who went on to be the first publicly gay man to be elected to public office in California.

The Podnews Weekly Review comes live from The Podcast Show London this week, with a focus on some of the announcements and chats from the show floor.

Leon Neyfakh (Slow Burn, Fiasco, Backfired) is back with a new podcast, OnlyFantasy, with comedian and OnlyFans creator Gracie Canaan for a one-of-a-kind exploration into the current state of human connection. Released this week, the show discovers that the site has quietly and surprisingly become something more complicated — an emotional marketplace where desire, performance, care and vulnerability seemingly blur together.

The two-time Peabody-nominated podcast Scene on Radio is back with a new series, “The News.” Hosts John Biewen and Chenjerai Kumanyika will explore the roots of today’s information crisis and solutions for bolstering journalism. The podcast is a partnership with PRX.