News, broadly…
- Spotify has launched a US weekday “morning show” called The Get Up, which seems to mirror morning drive-time radio shows in structure and makes use of the new mixed format feature that we talked about last week.
- Speaking of Spotify: The Joe Rogan Experience briefly paused publishing last week after the show’s producer tested positive for the coronavirus. It resumed new drops on Thursday, releasing the previously flagged Kanye West episode on Saturday.
- ICYMI: a new paid podcast platform, Quake Media, launched last week with $2.5 million in seed funding and an initial focus on political content, Axios reports. This isn’t the first public mention of the company, though — we wrote about the startup last summer as it was beginning to pull together a product.
- The Audible dealmaking engine continues apace, with new production deals forged with LeBron James’ Spring Hill Entertainment, Kevin Hart, and Charlamagne Tha God.
- James Purnell, the Director of Radio & Education at the BBC, is leaving the organization. Here’s his Twitter thread announcing the move.
- Team Coco adds Scam Goddess to its portfolio. The show, hosted by Laci Mosley, was previously distributed under the Earwolf banner.
iHeartMedia acquires Voxnest. No stranger to podcast acquisitions of late, iHeartMedia announced last week that it is moving to pick up Voxnest, the podcast hosting, analytics, and monetization platform. The relationship between iHeartMedia and Voxnest doesn’t quite come out of the blue: Voxnest was formed in early 2018 through a merger between Spreaker and BlogTalkRadio — at the time, two somewhat middling podcast hosting solutions — and iHeartMedia had previously acquired a minority stake in Spreaker back in July 2013. No details on the deal size were publicly disclosed.