All three podcast content companies that were acquired by Spotify since early 2019 — Gimlet, Parcast, and The Ringer — have officially unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East, and this morning, they’ve issued a joint statement pushing the Swedish audio streaming platform to engage them in “prompt and good-faith” contract negotiations. Here’s the […]

As the US podcast industry continues to see more labor organizing, the podcast labor movement in the UK begins to take shape. The first union aimed specifically at UK podcast workers — both freelance and those already working in organizations — was established recently, situated within the Bectu union, formerly known as the Broadcasting, Entertainment, […]

News, broadly… Pushkin Industries announced a new sales and production partnership with iHeartMedia yesterday. They were previously repped by Cadence13, now owned by Entercom. Jane Coaston, a senior politics reporter at Vox who was also a panelist on The Weeds, is moving to New York Times Opinion where she has been named host of The […]

A quick and incomplete list of stuff various podcasts are doing for tonight’s vote count: The Daily is doing a four hour-long live broadcast over the internet, which is technically streaming radio, but in any case Jody Avirgan is vindicated. Axios will be dropping five minute-long episode updates on its Axios Today and Axios Re:Cap […]

When Spotify signed The Joe Rogan Experience to a hundred million dollar exclusive distribution deal this summer, practically everyone wondered how the audio streaming platform would handle the next time Rogan brought on Alex Jones, the notorious conspiracy theorist whose provably false and harmful provocations got his ass de-platformed by several major tech companies — […]

I’ve been following Casey Newton’s work for closely quite some time now, particularly over the past few years as he’s zeroed in on covering tech platforms and content moderation as a senior editor at The Verge. Among his many achievements there, he broke huge stories about the horrible working conditions for Facebook’s outsourced content moderators […]

In search of an occasional break from all that listening to people talking generally required to keep up with podcasting, I’ve found myself increasingly interested in the more experimental, “sound art” corner of the audio universe. The term “sound art” is a broad one, of course, and can be stretched to include everything from soundscape-dominated […]