Tag: podcasts
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Times Radio?
Update 28 January: This is now confirmed as happening, so I’ve added an addendum below. It’s interesting to read the reports suggesting that News Corp is about to launch what has been described as “a new radio station designed to threaten Radio 4” or “a rival to Radio 4” this spring. According to the Telegraph…
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Is Spotify Really Bigger Than Apple Podcasts?
Two data points: A Morgan Stanley note for investors is reported to claim that Spotify is now the #1 podcast platform beating Apple. MIDiA Research publishes a blog based on their regularly published tracking report that says “Spotify AND Apple Lead Podcasts – It’s All Down to How You Measure It.” From these two reports…
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Eight Seconds
This year is the 30th anniversary of what in my lifetime has been the greatest Tour de France of all time. In 1989, American Greg LeMond defeated Lauren Fignon by just 8 seconds with everything coming down to a unique final stage time trial. Usually, the end of the Tour is a processional stage followed…
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Podcast Day 2019
This week I attended the third annual Podcast Day organised by the Radiodays Europe team. I attended the first conference a couple of years ago in Copenhagen, but this year’s event was on an altogether bigger scale. The event in King’s Place, London, was sold out. I presented a pithy session entitled “The State of…
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Podcast Exclusivity
As always, these are my personal views, but it’s probably worth reiterating at the outset. I am not a fan of exclusivity, for a number of reasons. Let’s start by looking at the streaming music market. We continue to see fairly significant growth in this sector with companies like Spotify, Apple, Deezer, Google Play Music and Tidal…
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Trends in Podcasting: Cults and Cult Leaders
This is a sort-of follow up to yesterday’s piece on daily news podcasts. It may become an occasional series. In March this year, Netflix launched a documentary series called Wild Wild Country. It’s a six part series exploring an Indian guru and his followers in a county in deepest Oregon. There’s no obvious way to…
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Trends in Podcasting: News Podcasts
In January last year, The New York Times launched a new podcast called The Daily. Spinning off to an extent from what the paper had been doing during the 2016 Presidential election, The Daily quickly developed a following. With a strong voice – both authorial and audible – in Michael Barbaro, it grew quickly. For…
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Apple Podcasts Charts
It appears that Apple’s podcast charts are somewhat broken. Or specifically, they had been broken for a period of time over the weekend while Apple perhaps tried a new algorithm to rank podcasts. Behind the scenes we know that various bad actors have been attempting to game the system. In the same way that you…
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The One Podcast to Rule Them All
Tom Webster of Edison Research wrote a very good piece on Medium recently to back up a presentation he recently gave at the Podcast Movement conference in the US. The main theme of his piece was about getting to 100 million weekly (i.e. regular) podcast listeners in the US. Currently they are at 48 million weekly…
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Overly Mannered Podcast Presentation
I wrote this as a podcast thread last week, but thought it was worth re-visiting a little more here. If there is one thing I hate in many podcasts (or radio programmes), it’s a presentation style that I would describe as overly mannered. What I’m talking about is a podcast that’s likely to be scripted,…
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Google Podcasts
Without an enormous amount of fanfare, Google yesterday launched Google Podcasts for Android yesterday, with the possibility of being game changing. I’ve long argued that for the Android/iOS podcasting gap to be closed, Google needed to get involved and create a generic app. Apple Podcasts is a pre-installed app on every iPhone sold, and with…
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Podcasts and Paywalls
There seems to be something of a brouhaha* just now in podcasting land over the idea that some podcasts might live behind a paywall, and I thought it was worth thinking about that a little more. It was reported at the end of last week, that Amy Schumer has signed a $1m deal with Spotify…