New Spotify book, and patent for mood detection by voice

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• A new book, The Spotify Play: How CEO and Founder Daniel Ek Beat Apple, Google, and Amazon in the Race for Audio Dominance, has been released. Our full review of the book says that you’ll get “a renewed admiration for what the company has achieved, and the way in which it all happened”.

• Talking of which, Spotify has a new patent. It details the idea of using the microphone on your device to recommend music to you based on whether you’re alone or with other people, whether you sound happy or sad, or whether you sound old or young.

• Triton Digital has released the Latin American Podcast Report for December 2020. Grupo Globo podcasts, including the former market leader O Assunto, are “excluded from this Report while we conduct an additional review of recent data”. An incomplete ranker, it measures participating podcasters only.

• As Tom Webster shows us, podcasting is more than five times bigger than AM/FM radio simulcasts on mobile phones.

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• Jason Feifer changed the name of his podcast, now called Build for Tomorrow. In this newsletter, he explains why.

• A US sports broadcaster, Colin Cowherd is to create a podcast network called Volume. iHeart Media will sell the ads.

• Pionaire is a new “boutique, talent-driven podcast consulting network”. They launch with House of Kim with Kim Zolciak, which was previously on PodcastOne.

• A new microphone, the H&A AC50 Studio Broadcast Microphone, claims to be a dynamic podcast mic for $99.95, reports a music website.

• Africa Podcast Day 2021 has announced its full programme. It’s free to attend; the event is on Friday February 12.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 31 2023

• Podpage has launched Podpage Legacy, a website for your podfaded podcast. (You’ll still need to host your audio somewhere, though).

• Clubhouse uses user IDs which increment, one by one, when new users register. That’s how we know that they’ve got over 5.6m registered users and they’re growing at ~20k users/hour.

• Targetspot has appointed Alexandre Ouhadi as its new Chief Revenue Officer. Ouhadi was previously Head of Global Sales & Business Development at Proctor & Gamble in Singapore.

• There were multiple reports that Apple Podcasts’s website, including their embedded players, had technical difficulties late Friday night. It’s all fine now.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• 10.7% of podcasts now use a Podcasting 2.0 namespace tag. 7.9% use the locked tag; a further 1.2% use both locked and funding. (This is based on all podcast RSS feeds we inspected last week, a sample of 10,964 this time round).
  • Libsyn feeds all now include the namespace declaration; but this number shows use of tags.
• The second phase of new namespace tags is now closed. While the Github isn’t yet updated, podcast:person, podcast:location, podcast:season and podcast:episode were up for adoption.
  • You’ll find podcast:person in Podnews’s RSS feed.
• A proposal is open for <podcast:media>, a way to highlight many types of different transports or audio codecs of podcasts.

Tips and tricks

• 6 Things About Podcasting I Would Never Have Predicted - “you’re not always jazzed about it”, and you stop looking at the stats, says Tae Haahr.
• Trying to record Clubhouse with your Rødecaster Pro? Tanner Campbell says you need just one cable.

Aug 31 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

Podcast News - with CBC Podcasts

From CBC Podcasts: In Evil By Design, Host Timothy Sawa tells the story of the women who stepped forward, seeking justice against powerful multi-millionaire Peter Nygard, and brought his empire crashing down.

Sounds Profitable is a new podcast from Bryan Barletta focusing on podcast ad-tech. We’ll have all the detail tomorrow - or get to Sounds Profitable to find out more and subscribe to their newsletter. This first episode looks at geotargeting.

Australian comedy podcast A Rational Fear will reach its 100th episode on February 10, and celebrates with a theatre show in Sydney NSW, Australia (and virtual experience too), with guests including Hamish of Hamish and Andy fame, and Alice Fraser, of The Bugle fame with a different Andy.

Adventures in Coffee launches today - from coffee magazine Caffeine and the producer of Filter Stories, it asks whether super expensive coffee is a bit of a ripoff. It’s sponsored by Oatly, an oat milk brand, and iFinca, a coffee trading verification tool.

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