The road ahead: Spotify to overtake Apple?

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• eMarketer claims that Spotify will overtake Apple Podcasts by US total listeners (if not downloads) this year. No methodology or source for this data is given, though. Meanwhile, The Hustle publishes “Spotify’s plan to monetize podcasts, explained”.

• Today, the RAIN Podcast Business Summit takes place from 10.00am to 1.30pm New York time. It’s free to take part on Zoom; tickets are here. Our Editor, James Cridland, will speak with National Public Media’s Bryan Moffett about the latest happenings within the podcast landscape. Conal Byrne, Eric Eddings, Anne Frisbie and Christian Facey are among the speakers.

• Podsights has launched Podsights for Publishers. They are using their recent acquisition of pod․link to create measurable ways for publishers to grow their shows, whether by promoting them in other podcasts or via social links, all quantified and measured within Podsights.

• Who owns who in podcasting? Evo Terra and Anne Baird have published a list.

• In Australia, NOVA Entertainment and FOX Sports have launched “a strategic commercial relationship” for podcasts. It’s part of a wider strategic partnership between Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp Australia and Lachlan Murdoch’s NOVA Entertainment.

• The IAB tell us that the public comment period for their updated v2.1 podcast measurement guidelines is now extended until March 17. The first update of these guidelines since 2017, we’d recommend you review them; given our story yesterday you might want to confirm your feedback has been received.

• Google has unveiled a new audio codec, called Lyra, which the company describe as a “high quality, very low bitrate speech codec”. How low is “very low”? Just 3kbps. There are some examples to listen to; the company plans to make it open source.

• Omny Studio’s CEO, Sharon Taylor, has released her predictions for podcasting in 2021. The company, owned by Triton Digital, puts Amazon Music ahead of Google Podcasts for downloads in 2020.

• Podtrac has released the top 20 US podcasts for February (no change in the top 3), and the top US podcast publishers (no change in the top 3). They report a drop of 13% of downloads since January; February has 9% fewer days than January, so this is a drop in real terms, too.

  
  Sep 1 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.
  • This is an incomplete ranker, listing participating publishers only.

Tips and tricks

• Will Repurposing Help You Grow? How To Turn Your Podcast Episodes Into Blog Posts (& Why To Do It) (Pod Reacher)

  
  Sep 1 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Do you need a podcast guest release form? (Buzzsprout) (Includes a link to an actual podcast guest release form)