RAIN Notes: Wednesday, March 31
Author: Brad Hill
Quill Podcast Awards honor creators and companies; “Mind Love” takes top prize
Podcast consultancy and production company Quill has released the winners in the 2022 Quill Podcast Awards. The company describes its Awards program as “A hybrid of a public nominations and a judging period by a panel of experts, the awards are given to companies and podcasts that have built strong audiences, innovated within their category, and created outstanding content.” Continue Reading
TuneIn adds MLB to its Premium sports programming
TuneIn is notifying us that the Premium subscription level of the streaming audio app has struck a distribution deal with Major League Baseball (MLB) to carry radio broadcasts of all 2022 games. TuneIn serves 75-million active monthly users. The Premium subscription is offered at $9.99/month, and includes major sports, music, news, and 100,000 global stations with reduced ads.
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Webby Awards spins off podcast award program for 2023
The Webby Awards, which since 1995 has been operating an annual ceremony for excellence on the internet, now announces a spinoff podcast award program. Called the Signal Awards, the first ceremony will be in January, 2023. Click for categories and submission info. Continue Reading
RAIN Notes: Tuesday, March 29
iHeartMedia joins with Collab Inc. to launch Curativity and new kids podcasts
iHeartMedia is partnering with digital talent network/studio to form a new network called Curativity. The alliance kicks off with three kid shows. Continue Reading
Podcast downloads +45% year-over-year (Podtrac)
In our latest intermittent check-ins to Podtrac’s weekly podcast download report, we see a 45% increase between March 22, 2021 and March 27, 2022. The Society & Culture category showed the strongest week-over-week growth at +5%. Science showed the weakest week-over-week growth at -7%. Click for graphics.
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Podcast Movement Hall of Fame returns with eight inductees
The Podcast Movement Hall of Fame, which was inaugurated in 2015, was resumed at last week’s Podcast Movement Evolutions gathering after a hiatus of a few years. “We are honoring the pioneers,” was the theme for this returning ceremony. Continue Reading
Spotify’s “Loud&Clear” portal evangelizes value to musicians
Spotify has dropped an interactive graphic website which presents statistics promoting Spotify’s value (and the value of streaming music generally) to musicians at many levels. Up top, Spotify notes that it has paid over $30-billion in royalties to the music industry as a whole, including $7-billion last year. Following that is an interactive card deck, called Top 10 Takeaways,” which highlights selected payout metrics. And there is much more. Click for illustrations and a link. Continue Reading
Crooked Media signs with SiriusXM / SXM Media
Podcast network Crooked Media has signed with SXM Media (ad-sales arm of Sirius XM), giving SXM exclusive global ad sales rights across Crooked Media’s catalog. Crooked is best known for Pod Save America but has 27 titles. The sales rights in this deal are extensive. Click for details. Continue Reading
Opinion flood: Podcasters and listeners rate services in Podnews survey
At this week’s Podcast Movement Evolutions, Podnews editor James Cridland released some results of the recent Podnews Report Card 2022, which asks podcasters and listeners to rate and comment on platforms, apps, podcasting services, and directories according to several criteria. Today, the Podnews website spills out an enormous repository of survey results. Click for details and the link. Continue Reading
Folger’s wins top grade in Veritonic 2022 US Audio Logo Index
Veritonic has released its US Audio Logo Index, ranking the sonic brand identifiers of dozens of companies. Click through to hear the winner, see the top-10 list, and link to the larger listening station, and read the criteria for scoring and judging the effectiveness of audio logos. Continue Reading