Month: January 2021

Audible makes changes to its maligned audiobook royalty rules

Posted on by Brad Hill

When was the last time you returned a book you purchased? If it was an audiobook you bought in Amazon-owned Audible, you might have benefited from a relaxed and encouraging returns policy which allows a listener to trade one audiobook for another within a year from purchase. Great for customers; bad for authors and publishers (and some voice performers) whose royalty statements were filled with deductions from payments received months earlier. There has been clamor for change. At the new year, Amazon has responded. Click through for the story. Continue Reading →

Podcast daily news news

Posted on by Brad Hill

The podcasting daily news space is crowded and successful as a category. The extensive lineup of daily news podcasts fluxes quite a bit, with new additions, and revisions to existing programs. Here, three items of note. Cadence13 partners with a new organization, Punchbowl News, for The Daily Punch. Vox starts a not-podcast which is really a playlist of podcasts, all squeezed into one feed — we were baffled, then curious, and now we like it. A well-regarded news podcast from The Washington Post switches out the host, who becomes an opinion columnist at the paper. Click for specifics. Continue Reading →

Spreaker AdHub launches — for podcasters, not advertisers

Posted on by Brad Hill

Spreaker has launched a new self-serve tool called AdHub. If it sounds like another do-it-yourself way for marketers to buy dynamically inserted commercials, it’s not. AdHub is directed toward Spreaker podcasters, who can place targeted ads  for their podcasts into other Spreaker podcasts. Click through for deets. Continue Reading →

Kast Media goes with Triton Digital for podcast management, money, and measurement

Posted on by Brad Hill

Kast Media, the #11 podcast publisher in Podtrac’s monthly Top 20 Podcast Publishers list for December, has loaded its podcast business into  Triton Digital’s delivery, measurement, and monetization products. Kast Media publishes 51 podcasts (according to Podtrac) across many categories. In December the group served over 28-million downloads and streams to an audience of nearly 5-million unique listeners. Continue Reading →

SoundCloud (unsurprisingly) picks AdsWizz for exclusive ad-repping in 14 Euro markets

Posted on by Brad Hill

AdsWizz is trumpeting a major get — Berlin-HQ’d global streamer SoundCloud has chosen the U.S.-HQ’d global ad-tech company AdsWizz to exclusively represent digital audio ad sales in significant European markets. This deal has an in-house feeling; AdsWizz is a subsidiary of Pandora, which is owned by Sirius XM, which also owns 30% of SoundCloud.  Continue Reading →

ASCAP and BMI jointly comment on DOJ review of consent decrees in a middle-road acceptance of no change

Posted on by Brad Hill

ASCAP sent us an open letter written jointly with BMI to Makan Delrahim, the Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice. The subject is a recently concluded DoJ review of consent decrees, the government regulated law which compels ASCAP and BMI to license creative musical works at a set royalty structure. ASCAP and BMI don’t like being compelled. Congress doesn’t like choking a pipeline of content availability to distributors. The latest result is that the 80-year-old law will continue without change for now … and there was an unexpected twist in the proceedings. Continue Reading →

24% of Cumulus radio streams are on smart speakers; and interesting ad campaign results

Posted on by Brad Hill

“Smart speaker ownership soars and brings AM/FM back into the home,” writes Pierre Bouvard in a new Westwood One blog post. A key statistic from the parent company backs this up: 24% of stream listening to Cumulus radio stations happens on smart speakers. Cumulus booked an interesting smart speaker preroll campaign with a consortium of Ford dealerships. Click through for more context, a chart, and link to more. Continue Reading →

On MLK Day, a dramatic and exhaustive manifesto to solve institutional racism in public media

Posted on by Brad Hill

A loose organization of 200 public media professionals, including some of NPR’s most illumined leaders, has been organized by public radio veteran Celeste Headlee. A months-long collaborative effort to remedy institutional racism is brought into public view today. It is a 6,500-word roadmap for structural corrections in public media related to diversity, equality, and the very conception of journalism. Continue Reading →