Ashley Carman over at The Verge — who, by the way, is doing great work on the podcast beat — pubbed a fascinating piece last week on a pernicious phenomenon: the weaponization of one-star reviews on Apple Podcasts to actively harm other podcasts. The Verge piece was built on a few key examples. There’s a […]

The Apple podcast categories are back in business. After a brief vacation, the categories, thought to be an important discovery and consumption management tool, have rolled back out, complete with the new genres and subgenres announced at the beginning of June. It will probably take a little while longer for the new categories to get […]

I was fairly delirious this weekend — between the relentless summer heat and all the heavy lifting involved in packing up an apartment — when I pulled up the Apple Podcast app only to find that, bizarrely, the entire podcast categories menu had vanished. For a moment, I briefly contemplated that it was time to […]

Obviously, we should talk a little more about the Apple business. ICYMI: Bloomberg published a story last week reporting that Apple is apparently planning to “fund original podcasts that would be exclusive to its audio service,” and that the company had already reached out to multiple media companies about those efforts. The report also noted […]

The podcast industry is buzzing in the midst of a Bloomberg report stating that Apple is in preliminary talks to finance original, exclusive podcasts for its platform. To better understand how Apple thinks about exclusive content and how this effort might maybe play out within podcasting, however, it’s worth examining the company’s current position in […]

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 […]

Checking in on a story that’s been rumbling for a few days now on Reddit and in various podcasting Facebook groups: the sudden appearance of a lot of one-star ratings for certain podcasts in Apple Podcasts. One show, the true crime podcast Obscura, has gone public about the problem, and when I reached out to […]