Tips from Spotify’s editorial team to promote your show

Not long left to fill in the Podnews Report Card. Please do! Your voice deserves to be heard.

• How can you get your podcast promoted by Spotify? Today, Podnews speaks with Lizzy Hale, Spotify’s Head of Podcast Editorial. The company has dozens of people based all over the world, watching for shows to highlight, and guiding Spotify’s recommendation systems to reflect cultural moments. In an interview, Lizzy tells us how they aim to “give more creators a real shot at being discovered”.

• SiriusXM and iHeartMedia are in talks to merge, reports Variety. The news was initially the subject of a set of reports by Bloomberg ($).

  • From a podcast point of view, merging the two would mean one network with 3,422 shows; representing around 207 million downloads+views a month. Spotify would remain bigger, suggests the Podscribe ranker - but that’s only until SiriusXM starts representing YouTube’s audio advertising later this year. Both iHeart and SiriusXM have, of course, significant radio businesses. RadioInsight suggests a merged company will be a juggernaut.
  • SiriusXM obfuscates its podcast revenue by including Pandora in its data, but earned $2.1bn revenue from that business unit in 2025 (25% of overall revenue). iHeart earned $563mn from podcasting in 2025 (14.5% of overall revenue).
  • The deal would force the hand of the UK’s Global (the owner of DAX and Captivate). In 2020, the FCC allowed iHeartMedia to be 100% foreign-owned; and through its investment arm, Global owns 32% of iHeartMedia. On Mar 5 this year, the FCC allowed an application from iHeartMedia that Bahamas-based Global Media & Entertainment Investments Ltd’s shares could be transferred to the UK-based Global Media Investments Limited.

• 233 million people live in Nigeria - so podcasting could be massive in the country. As Tony Onwuchekwa writes for Podnews today for another of our market focus articles, 88% of Nigerian podcasts are in English; but almost a third have either podfaded or are on pause. The Nigerian Podcast Index has more data on shows produced in, or for, Nigeria; and highlights where the industry is strongest.

• Audion has raised US $15mn for an expansion into the US. The digital audio ad platform will also use the money for the development of an AI tool.

• AI voices are bad at non-standard text like dates, currencies and phone numbers, according to new research from AI voice company Async. Testing things like “$14.99” or “03/15/2024”, the company has released a set of benchmarks, which show the company’s own AI voices achieve the highest performance (but the full data is open for others to work on).

• The New York Times reports on the results of Amazon’s 2025 restructure of its podcast business (gift article), highlighting the monetisation of New Heights. “A new series with Jason Kelce is also planned, although its launch date was pushed back. It will be a YouTube show, not a podcast.”

People News

• Carlo Robles has been hired by Corsa Digital as Account Director, to help work with its connected TV, video and display initiatives.
• Meta is to cut 8,000 staff.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Some podcasts only let you listen to episodes for a short while, before they are removed from the feed. CastKeeper is a new iPhone app that archives podcasts, adds automatic transcripts, chapters and summaries, and lets you archive the audio/video files to iCloud, Amazon S3, or similar.

• The latest threat to podcast directories is people reposting free, public domain recordings of books from LibriVox. “One of the things I’ve been seeing a ton of lately are people taking LibriVox recordings and reposting them on Spreaker to get the ad revenue,” David Jones from the Podcast Index said on the Podcasting 2.0 podcast. “Legally, it’s fine - except you’re going to have over a hundred different people posting the same thing over and over again,” he adds. A search for Frankenstein certainly seems to return many different treatments.

• Today, we published an llms.txt file and an agents.md file (they’re actually the same file for now) on our website to give hints to AI agents on how to use our website. We have no idea whether it’ll work, but it’s worth a try, no? (Interestingly, on Saturday, we had four hits for /llms.txt on our website, so it’s already being requested by AI agents, hungry to see what we have.)

Tips and tricks - with the Podnews Report Card

• You can absolutely use AI in your podcast - but be aware of the legal implications, suggests Gordon Firemark.
• You can play RSS podcasts in YouTube Music. It’s kind of like the spiritual successor to Google Podcasts - if you know how to use it.

Podcast News - with Airwave

With Airwave: Rule Breaker Investing is a weekly show hosted by David Gardner, who shares his insights into today’s most innovative and disruptive publicly traded companies -- and how to profit from them by following his signature “Rule Breaker Investing” principles.

A premium podcast episode of Core Memory with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Greg Brockman has been made free, after a laser manufacturer CEO paid $100,000 to get the episode out from behind the paywall. The company, SendCutSend, will also become a sponsor.

True crime podcast Who Killed Roxanne? has been credited with four arrests in Louisiana. The podcast encouraged a number of tips and new witnesses, and was “a crucial part of getting us information that we needed”, said state police Lt Heath Miller in a news conference.

The show Hat Business: Fun Stories for Kids came from a walk along the beach in Queensland - and now, it’s up for an award against Brisbane’s Bluey. The show whisks your child into a world of silly stories, big feelings, and playful learning with Ruby and her magical bucket hat leading the way.

Marriage and Menopause aims to avoid “grey divorce” - divorce rates among couples over 50 have doubled in the last thirty years. The show’s hosts say that “the couple’s angle on menopause is almost entirely unoccupied in podcasting” - until now.

In Buzzcast, you’ll learn why a “crowded podcast niche” is usually just a broad category that needs sharper positioning. The hosts compare five top business story podcasts to show how audience, format, tone, and payoff can make similar topics feel completely different, then share practical ways to define a podcast niche that actually stands out.