Ashley Flowers's Audiochuck signs with SiriusXM

• BREAKING: Spotify have just released their Q3/21 results. They say: “Podcast MAU continued to increase, accelerating relative to Q2 trends. Among MAUs that engaged with podcasts in Q3, consumption trends remained strong (up 20% Y/Y on a per user basis) while month-over-month retention rates continued to trend positively. Podcast share of overall consumption hours on our platform also reached an all-time high during the quarter.” We’ll have more tomorrow.

• Another high-profile podcast signing: SiriusXM has done a deal with Ashley Flowers’ podcast network Audiochuck. Audiochuck was previously with AdLarge. SiriusXM has done a number of deals this month, including Rory and Mal, Last Podcast on the Left, and production company Audio Up. Through its ownership of Stitcher, the company is #1 for podcasts according to Triton Digital’s US podcast ranker.

• Now that everyone can get their podcast into Facebook (even if not everyone can listen there), we’ve had the opportunity to look to see what your podcast host needs to look for to monitor listens from Facebook. In our article, we discover Facebook is using at least four different user-agents, and some podcast hosts will give some of the traffic to… Apple Podcasts.

• RØDE has released a new update for their podcasting and streaming software RØDE Connect, which adds compatibility with the shotgun microphone VideoMic NTG. The Wireless Go II was added previously.

  
  Sep 8 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• In an email, the award-winning House of Pod has announced that it may be closing. The podcast company has no additional funded projects lined up for 2022; and is seeking an investor, a large production contract, or advice on how to survive.

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• Podfest Origins starts tomorrow. Our Editor is speaking; promo code Speaker30 will save you 30% off tickets.

• You’ve probably not heard of Li Jiaqi, a livestreamer in China. You might not have heard of Alibaba’s Taobao, the online marketplace where he was streaming his show. But, in a twelve hour show yesterday, attracting 250 million views, he sold $1.9bn in goods. Viya, another livestreamer, sold $1.2bn; and another, Cherie, “only” managed $187m.

Moves and hires - with Pod People

• Kai Chuk has been hired at YouTube, according to HotPod as Podcast Lead, to “manage the large volume of existing podcasts and relationships across the YouTube platform”. He’s been at YouTube for almost a decade.

This link is no longer available, as at Sep 8 2023

Tips and tricks - with Shuffle

• How to write mentally ill characters in horror audio drama - there are things you shouldn’t do, and things you should, says Cassie Josephs.

• What makes your podcast unique?, asks Colin Gray

Podcast News - with AdLarge Media

Presented by AdLarge Media: Angela Yee’s Lip Service Join hip hop radio star Angela Yee and her cast of good girlfriends as she talks sex, relationships, and everything in between with the hottest stars in hip-hop and R&B. Each week this award-winning podcast gets up close and personal in a forum that is pure fun, with storytelling like you’ve never heard before.

Jasadi - 'My Body’ in Arabic - has returned for season three. Featuring anonymous true stories read by female actors, the series shares the real experiences of women, from painful tragedies to glorious pleasures, across the Middle East and North Africa.

A podcast is being made into a Broadway play. Closing the Distance, performed and recorded last year, has being adapted into a play called Windows, written by Tawni O’Dell. It’ll premiere next Spring.

Radiolab is presenting a special five part series on the intoxicating, revolutionary, and mostly forgotten history of the cassette tape. The currently available episode highlights how rock’n’roll penetrated China - through old cassette tapes sent as plastic waste.

A branded podcast in Spanish: Samsung en colaboración con PODIMO ha puesto Tecnología con propósito - en marcha una serie de contenidos en formato podcast que abordan, desde un prisma diferente, la transformación que el mundo está viviendo gracias a la tecnología.

The restaurant critic for The Guardian, Grace Dent, has returned with a new series of Comfort Eating, where celebrities spill the beans about the comfort food they enjoy. We used the pun “spill the beans” last time, and we don’t think anyone noticed.

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