Spotify - growing the pie for podcasting?

• So, is Spotify bring more new audiences to podcasting? Panoply have published the data which claims to show that yes, Spotify is growing the pie, reaching different people in different places than other podcast platforms.

  
  Aug 10 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Meanwhile, lobby group Open Markets wants the SpotifyGimAnch deal to be blocked, and says that government “should head off efforts by platform monopolists to take control over the industry”. And an Indian website, Scroll·in, claims that podcasts are the heart of the “slow web”, and that Spotify’s investment in them might change things forever.

  
  Aug 10 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Spotify have added a “Word” category in their US app, including audiobooks and poetry.

• Commercial radio in Australia have recommended to government that there be a legal requirement to remove links to podcasts and live streams on request of the content owners. Says Joan Warner, the CEO of the lobby group Commercial Radio Australia:

  “Commercial radio stations are increasingly directing their resources towards the removal of their intellectual property from third party aggregator sites and mobile apps. Typically, such sites provide ‘listen live’ links to station broadcasts or enable consumers to access stations’ podcasts. This diverts traffic – and ultimately advertising revenue - away from the stations’ own websites.”

… our Editor, James Cridland, points out that this isn’t, quite, how podcasts work.

• PodcastOne in Australia, run by Southern Cross Austereo, has doubled its downloads year-on-year to 100m. It claims 60 “authors”, according to SCA’s CEO Grant Blackley, who says that it should move into profitability towards the middle of next year.

• There’s a new podcast studio in Cork in Ireland, and they want more than a hundred shows produced there.

• A new group: the Australian Fiction Podcast Makers, meeting regularly in Melbourne VIC, Australia.

• NPR’s RAD podcast analytics specification was launched on 12 December; but our RAD tracking server remains unbothered by any actual listens to track. This might soon change: NPR drops heavy hints to Current that Apple are quite keen on it; and RadioPublic are the first non-NPR app to publicly commit to integrating the tracking “as an opt-in feature that listeners can enable or decline for each podcast”.

• Event: March 4th: a Podcasting and Interviewing Workshop, in New York NY, USA