Spotify wraps up some stats

• Spotify has launched 2022 Podcaster Wrapped, “a treasure trove of growth insights and data” about your podcast - and offers plenty of bragging rights. (For seven people, the Podnews Daily is their most listened-to podcast, apparently.)

• Buzzsprout has posted its network statistics for November. The only regularly released IAB-compliant numbers, the numbers show a slight drop for Apple Podcasts (now 38.2% of all downloads), and a smaller rise for Spotify (up to 26.6%). Google Podcasts is the third largest podcast app, with 2.7% of all downloads.

  • Buzzsprout don’t give any AppleCoreMedia traffic to Apple Podcasts, so Apple’s figures are higher in reality (we estimate 4.5% higher); but Apple has automated downloads by default, which Spotify or Google do not. We estimate unlistened-to downloads in Apple Podcasts represent 31% of all these downloads, though Apple doesn’t agree. After all that, though, Apple’s revised share of 29.8% of all listens still makes it #1.

• Magellan AI is announcing a new collaboration with Experian: the Experian Identity Graph will power Attribution by Magellan AI, the company’s new attribution platform.

• In Germany, a podcast analytics startup Voxalyze has raised a pre-seed round of EUR 1.2m (US $1.27m).

• Aliza Rosen’s AYR Media is to make a show about conman David Bloom - which will be narrated by model and TV star Caroline D’Amore, one of Bloom’s victims.

• Giide - an augmented audio experience “like a podcast, walking tour, and workshop, all rolled into one” - has been highlighted as one of Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech for 2022.

• AudioLabs has just launched - a service that lets podcasters make videos from audio-only podcasts to help promote their shows on YouTube Shorts, TikTok or Reels. Here’s an impressive example featuring sharks and pigs; the tool uses generative AI.

• The new issue of Pod Bible magazine is out now for you to read, featuring interviews with cover star Marc Maron from WTF and Kemah Bob from The FOC It Up Comedy Podcast.

• Paul Kondo’s Podcast Gumbo newsletter is on hiatus until, perhaps, April 2023.

• New apps: Castle is a podcast app that transcribes every podcast it plays, and lets you search the transcriptions. Meanwhile, SHAYK is a short-form audio social media platform, currently invite-only for iOS, sharing “audio snacks” (and promoting itself as “not another podcast app”.

Thank you to remote audio company Cleanfeed, who have updated their support. When the Emmy award-winning company originally supported us, Patreon only did US dollars, but Cleanfeed just switched to their preferred currency of UK pounds instead. You can do that too, here.

Moves and hires

• Chris Baughen was made Head of Spotify Studios UK & Ireland a few weeks ago. He’d worked at Global for eight years, most recently as Head of Podcast Production, and also worked for Deezer.

• Podcast sound designer Brian Vasquez is seriously ill in hospital. An independent sound designer, he has no medical insurance: a GoFundMe page has been set up for his family.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• If you’re using the Podping watcher, make sure you’re running the latest version, due to a new JSON schema.

• RSS Blue has launched an RSS feed validator, which supports many podcasting 2.0 features. The Livewire Podcast Validator shows cross-app comments, too.

• Podnews now natively supports cross-app comments using ActivityPub. Find the socialInteract tag in our RSS feed, and tell us if your app surfaces them.

• John Spurlock is showing, and graphing, Podcast Index statistics. (We’re taking some data from this below.)

• Want to pull OP3 redirect logs for a specific day via PHP? Here’s a Gist to do that. Don’t laugh at our Editor’s poor PHP code.

• Pocket Casts released v7.27 last week, which appears to contain the AVURLAssetHTTPUserAgentKey fix, so it no longer calls itself AppleCoreMedia. We’ve confirmed (by listening to PodClock's S1E1 episode) that it now correctly calls itself Pocket Casts when playing on-demand shows.

  • Where Pocket Casts leads, Apple Podcasts may follow - but not yet. iOS 16.2 beta 4 was released on Friday. Apple Podcasts still doesn’t use the AVURLAssetHTTPUserAgentKey to set the app’s user-agent correctly when playing on-demand audio, and is hiding behind the generic AppleCoreMedia user-agent.

Podcast News - with Campaign Legal Center

People Spooning has just featured a week of actors from Stranger Things. The podcast is hosted by Tristan Spohn who played Two in the show, so perhaps that’s why he was able to book Audrey Holcomb (Eden Bingham), and Logan Riley Bruner (Fred Benson). The show focuses on the tipping points in their acting careers that led to booking professional work.

Cookery by the Book is to end after seven years. The show achieved more than 2.5 million downloads. Host Suzy Chase will work on sister podcast Decorating by the book, and is collaborating with Vizzy to release enhanced episodes on popular podcast apps.

By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities, and How to Really Run a City is new from The Philadelphia Citizen, telling us how mayors and their teams should be innovating. It’s hosted by Kasim Reed (Atlanta’s mayor from 2010 to 2018) and Michael Nutter (Philadelphia’s mayor from 2008 to 2016); and, fittingly for a podcast from Philadelphia, is hosted by Libsyn, who are based there.

Four days work for five days pay? Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? But this is what is being offered to 3,500 employees in the UK right now. Working It, the Financial Time’s premier workplace trends podcast, follows four companies in this radical experiment.Is it possible to have 100% productivity for 80% of the time and 100% of the pay? The mini-series starts today, and naturally lasts for four days; it’s produced by Novel.

The British tradition of a pantomime is a bit difficult to explain to someone who has no idea what one is - so in the latest episode of the podcast for kids, Armchair Adventures, let Connie and a bunch of school kids tell you all about it with a sing-and-dance along of the top ten panto ingredients 'Top of the Panto Bits!' It’s full of bad jokes, celebrity guests and happy endings… Oh no it isn’t, oh yes it is!

Charm Words Español: Afirmaciones Diarias Para Niños launches today - the first-ever Spanish-language daily affirmations podcast for children. The podcast offers family-friendly, psychologist-approved daily positive affirmations meant to teach children mental health and self-awareness tools such as combating negative thoughts, self-esteem, conflict resolution, and more.