Amazon has introduced a certification for developers building skills for its Alexa voice assistant. The certification is fittingly called AWS Certified Alexa Skill Builder – Specialty. Amazon said this marks the first time it has provided a certification for developers. Continue Reading
Independent music distributor CD Baby announced a partnership with Audible Magic, a specialist in digital content identification, licensing, and monetization. Under the terms of their arrangement, CD Baby will use the RightsRx service from Audible Magic to find content rights conflicts before music is sent to a digital platform. Continue Reading
The Crime Junkie podcast has signed cabana as its exclusive ad sales partner. The new deal expands on an existing relationship between the true crime podcast and the digital audio arm of AdLarge Media. Continue Reading
Apple Music is making some minor quality of life improvements to one of its signature features. The “For You” section of the streaming service, which has curated editoral playlists, will be updated with new content multiple times a day. Continue Reading
Universal Music Group’s quarterly earnings continued to grow on the back of a strong streaming performance. The label’s parent company, Vivendi, has released its first-quarter results as it moves ahead with plans to sell off a stake in UMG. Continue Reading
Research firm Canalys has released a new report with projections for smart speaker sales this year. It anticipates that the global install base for the product category will increase 82.4% from 114 million units in 2018 to 207.9 million units in 2019. The company forecast that smart speakers would have a larger audience than tablets by 2021. Continue Reading
Podtrac has released its March 2019 podcast publisher ranking. It was a month of growth, with seven of the top ten increasing their U.S. unique monthly audience from the previous month. The average U.S. unique monthly audience for this group reached 8.2 million, edging up 1% from February 2019 and up 43% from March 2018. Continue Reading
Brief news items and worthy reads from around the web: Behind the scenes with The Daily. Building the perfect podcast studio. People still want to pay for records. Continue Reading
NPR has entered a new partnership with Amazon that will increase the amount of content to listeners with Alexa-enabled devices. Requests to “play the news” on Alexa have defaulted to the most recent NPR hourly newscast. Going forward, this voice skill will offer a continuous listening experience of content from the broadcaster. Continue Reading
Apple Podcasts are going to move toward a standalone web presence. This week, several tech outlets reported that the web listening experience would be getting separated from iTunes. A few podcasts are getting preview versions that show a URL of podcasts.apple.com rather than requiring either the iTunes app or website to play. Continue Reading
Pandora has revealed new insights from the Share of Ear report from Edison Research. The audio company posted some of the key takeaways from the Q1 report on its Pandora for Brands blog. The highlights are all about digital listening and its impact on broadcast. Continue Reading
Podcasting app Castbox has added a new feature called Community. It adds a dedicated feed in the app for posts about what people are listening to, bringing a social component to the platform. Continue Reading