Spotify unveils new podcasters portal for you to submit your show

• Spotify, the second-largest podcast platform in the world, has today released a dedicated podcasters portal. The website now lets you instantly add your podcast, even if you’re not with a partner host; and promises audience consumption data including gender, age and location. Unlike Apple Podcasts, there is no editorial approval process.

  • Because Spotify normally caches your audio, stats from Spotify won’t appear within your normal podcast host’s stats, and won’t be measured by Podtrac and similar services. The bot uses Spotify/1.0 as a user-agent; and comes and grabs all older episodes as soon as you submit. Spotify’s systems also appear to check your RSS feed as often as your TTL figure says so. If you’re already listed in Spotify, you should continue using your host to get statistics, and you cannot use this new portal.
  • We’ve updated our list of where to submit your podcast, and our podcast app user-agents. And as if you’ve not already realised: our daily podcast is now on Spotify. Do us a favour and please subscribe.
  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 6 2023

• Apple Podcasts last week suggested that podcasters use AAC rather than MP3. The makers of the Castro podcast app crunched the numbers: only 11.8% of all episodes released in the past ten days are AAC; 86.5% were MP3. (We would recommend sticking with MP3.)

• Edison Research unveiled some data about in-car audio. Podcasting appeared not to be in the list, so we checked - it’s part of the “other” category, at less than 4% of all audio listened-to in the car . Larry Rosin, who presented the data, told us:

“While podcast listening is clearly growing, for most people, listening to a podcast in the car is just more trouble than it’s worth. The radio that is baked into the car is easy to use, comes with a life time of habituation, and provides great (or good enough) content for the overwhelming majority of people. Blend that with the fact that most individual rides are not that long, and bothering with a podcast (or audiobook) is just not worth it for most people.”

• Ofcom, the UK media regulator, released data showing UK podcast listening is “booming”. “The number of weekly podcast listeners has almost doubled in five years – from 3.2 million in 2013 to 5.9m in 2018” - 11% of UK adults are listening to podcasts. While not entirely comparable, Edison Research data claims that figure is 17% in the US.

  
  Aug 6 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.
  • Also of note: “Among the most commonly used [sources to listen] were the BBC website and app (used by 36% of podcast listeners), YouTube (26%) and iTunes (25%).”
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• Data from the Indian podcast market - Aman Goklani from Audioboom shared consumption data, including that 77 per cent of the listeners in India are consuming podcasts on mobile phones. You can watch his full speech here.

• Gimlet Media have unveiled their Q3 2018 lineup. It includes a horror show, and Alex Blumberg has a new interview show.

• The Australian ABC is announcing tomorrow the outcome of their AU$1m podcast fund, which was announced last year.

• The Podcast Brunch Club’s playlist for October is all about the sharing economy.

• Adam Curry doesn’t like CJR’s assertion that the podcast bubble has burst.

• PANIC: Amazon has started making its own mattresses.

Jobs

• Junior Quality Assurance Technician at StreamGuys (San Luis Obispo CA, USA)
• Podcast Producer at SBS, Sydney NSW, Australia
• Jobs are free

Podcasts

Mad Influence is GQ magazine’s new podcast. “Legendary actor Ethan Hawke” is the first interviewee. (Libsyn)

Chicago Beer Pass is celebrating five years of podcasting. (LooseKeys)

The Pulp Tales of Gwendolyn Gween, P.I. is an episodic comedic podcast series in the vein of old radio dramas. It follows Gwen Gween, a junior P.I., as she takes on New York City’s strangest cases. (Soundcloud)

Jones.Show is a new podcast from Randy Jones and the original voice of Siri, Susan C Bennett, and promises Thought-Full Conversation.

Round the Houses is the debut podcast from UK property television star Sarah Beeny. “Episode 1 features Sarah’s visit to notorious comedian Julian Clary’s home, where she unearths the shocking behaviour of Noel Coward’s lively cigar smoking ghost” (Audioboom)

The New Yorker Radio Hour has kicked off a special short documentary series called The Long-Distance Con. Maggie Robinson Katz received an inheritance when her father died: a suitcase crammed with some 150 audio tapes and old papers from her dad’s office. Since then, Maggie has tried to piece together who her father really was.

Listicle corner

• Three Food Podcasts That Will Make You Hungry for More (Podcast Review)
• The best French podcasts (and part two)
• The best podcasts on EU politics (PolicyLab) (stay awake at the back there)

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Thank you to Veritone One for your kind support.