SOUND THE TAKE ALARM. Big news drop this evening. Let’s jump in: There had been rumors, and there had been increasing reason to believe them. Spotify’s buzzy start to the year, in which the Swedish platform spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring its way into the podcast industry, had begun to inspire questions about […]

This morning, Southern California Public Radio of supposedly sleepy Pasadena — one of the two major public radio stations serving Los Angeles (excluding KUSC), the other being Santa Monica’s KCRW — announced the launch of a new podcast division called LAist Studios, which the organization bills as “a new podcast development and production studio dedicated […]

Last October, I wrote about the producer Phoebe Wang’s acceptance speech at the Third Coast Festival that doubled as a rousing a call-to-action: a crew of organizers — Adizah Eghan, Zakiya Gibbons, Aliya Pabani, Afi Yellow-Duke, and Wang — were building a directory of producers of color to negate claims by audio institutions that it […]

This news dropped came out last week, but it’s worth unpacking. The two podcast companies have launched a new joint venture called Podfront UK, which holds the express purpose of establishing a sales presence in the region to monetize the considerable UK-based listens experienced by both companies. I’m told that the UK represents the third […]

Before I move off this topic, I wanted to flag something I found interesting: Stitcher appears to be in the process of changing platform vendors for hosting services provided by Midroll, the company’s sales division. Midroll’s preferred platform had been Art19, but it’s now switching to Omny, the Australian hosting platform that Triton Digital acquired […]

I wrote a preview piece for Vulture last week on The Clearing, a new true crime project by Pineapple Street Media in collaboration with Gimlet Media that’s due to drop on Thursday. The piece focused on the creative hook of the podcast — it’s pretty wild — but what I didn’t get to discuss much […]