Podcasts, Radio, TV, Books, Cycling, Photography and More
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More on Podtrac: Australia
This is a follow-up to a piece I just published which looked at the newly launched Podtrac ranker for the UK and compared it with Edison Research’s equivalent ranker. Even allowing for the variability of these kinds of things with different methodologies, there were some profoundly questionable results. And to be clear, recall surveys like…
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A New UK Podcast Ranker
Last week Podtrac announced the availability of its podcast tracker in 30 countries including the UK. Podtrac has for a while been publishing US figures including a list of Top Podcast and Top Publishers, but this is an opt-in methodology. In other words, the publishers that appear on those lists have chosen to let Podtrac…
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Sports Disappearing from Free-to-Air TV
There were a couple of bits of news over the last week or so that have continued a trend that seems to have only grown in recent years – the disappearance of live sport from free-to-air TV. First came news that Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) has signed an exclusive deal with the European Broadcasting Union…
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RAJAR Q3 2024
This post is brought to you in association with RALF from DP Software and Services. I’ve used RALF for the many years, and it’s my favourite RAJAR analysis tool. So I am delighted that I continue to be able to bring you this RAJAR analysis in association with RALF. For more details on the product, contact Deryck Pritchard via…
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The Podcast Listener Landscape – Acast/Nielsen
Acast has just published some research carried out by Nielsen in the UK based on podcast listening, called The Podcast Listener Landscape. The research dives into the role of podcasting in UK media, how people engage with podcasts and what listeners attitudes are towards podcasts. The full report is available on request from Acast. According…
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RAJAR MIDAS Report – Summer 2024
[UPDATE – 2 October: After I asked a question about the Need States chart, RAJAR published a revised version of the Podcast chart, and this is now included below.] RAJAR has just published a summary of its Summer 2024 MIDAS report. The research was carried out amongst 2,048 previous RAJAR respondents across two weeks in…
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Battlelines: Sky, HBO & Max in the UK
I’m fascinated to see how Sky manages the seemingly inevitable launch of Max as a streaming brand in the UK. Things came to a head this week as Sky launched a lawsuit against Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) accusing it of a contract breach, in large part because of how a new Harry Potter series is…
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Testing Google’s NotebookLM with RAJAR
Google has a recent-ish AI tool called NotebookLM. The idea is that you throw a lot of information into it, and it can sift through it, answer questions based on what you’ve told it and so on. Recently they added the ability to auto-generate a podcast! So I decided to test it. I gave it…
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Edison Podcast Metrics UK – Top 25 Q2 2024
The latest Edison Research Podcast Metrics for the UK has just been published with a top 25 based on reach during Q2 2024 This follows previous releases for Q1 2024, Q4 2024, Q3 2024 and Q2 2024. The top four podcast remain the same and in the same order this quarter. Then we get a certain amount of re-shuffling…
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When Should Big Concerts Go On Sale?
Yes – two blog posts about an impending gig that I won’t be going to is probably two too many. But one of the things I’ve always wondered about is when should a concert put tickets to major concerts on sale? You’ve got to assume that tickets to an Oasis gig in 2025 won’t be…
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Oasis for Breakfast?
Following the news that Oasis are to reform for a series of no doubt very lucrative stadium gigs, I thought I’d look to see how a sample of UK radio stations reacted to this widely anticipated news. Note: I used the various stations’ websites where they publish show track information. Not every station has this…
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The Dark Side of True Crime – A Must Read
This incredibly important article written by Sirin Kale, and published in The Guardian last week is really worth your time. It tells the tragic story of John Balson, a producer of true crime television programmes who saw things spiral badly. I think the article speaks for itself. But it does continue to highlight for me…
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You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music by Glenn McDonald
Glenn McDonald, as the cover says, was formerly Spotify’s Data Alchemist. He joined when his previous company, The Echo Nest, was purchased by Spotify in 2014. In many respects, this book scratches a lot of itches for me, getting into some of the details about how Spotify works, and in particular some of the algorithmic…
Hadrian’s Wall
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