Audioboom reported its first-quarter financials. The podcast company reported $6.4 million (£5.2 million) in revenue for the first three months of 2020, a jump of 40% from the year-ago period. The increase was largely due to a corresponding spike in brand advertiser count. Continue Reading
Triton Digital has released its LATAM Podcast Report. The latest chart covers February 17 through March 15. For that period, the top 100 podcasts generated 19.4 million downloads. Continue Reading
The coronavirus pandemic has already had an impact on music consumption and performance around the world. Performing rights organization ASCAP is the latest company to share changes as a result of the disease. President and Chairman Paul Williams told members in an email that the organization is postponing its scheduled April 6 payments to April 28. Continue Reading
Canalys has published its 2020 outlook for the Internet-of-things industry. It projected that smart speakers, smart personal audio devices, and wearable bands would see a 9.8% increase in shipments for a total of 718 million units during the year. Smart speakers are forecast to see just 1.5% year-on-year growth. Continue Reading
Blubrry has shared data from its podcast platform, offering a look at how its audiences are responding to the coronavirus pandemic. In this blog post, it only shared figures for aggregate number of downloads. Continue Reading
Podtrac has released its ranking of the top podcast publishers for February 2020. A change is afoot — Podtrac has added five more places to this ranking, making it a top-20 list. Also, the RAIN Remix, to gain insight about how the audience, and streams/downloads, are distributed across number of shows for each publisher. It reshuffles the list considerably. Continue Reading
Tencent may be focusing on Africa as the next market for its Joox streaming service. The platform is already very popular across Asia, including in some emerging markets such as Indonesia and Thailand. Continue Reading
Spain’s music industry could lose at least €100 million ($109 million) due to the global pandemic of COVID-19. Antonio Guisasola, president of industry group Promusicae, gave dire predictions about hits to both physical and streaming revenue in 2020. Continue Reading
Counterpoint Research added its own data to the body of research into music streaming. The company found that global online music streaming subscriptions grew 32% on-year during 2019, reaching a total of 358 million. In its data, Spotify was the leading streaming platform last year. Continue Reading
TikTok may have at least temporarily gotten its ducks in a row for licensing, but music publishers are still threatening legal action. David Israelite, CEO of the National Music Publishers Association, told the Financial Times (paywall) that a lawsuit is a “likely future step.” Continue Reading
A weekly column from the preeminent Radio Futurologist. THIS WEEK: James offers some real talk about the wave of listening statistics coming in from radio and podcast operations alike as the world remains on pandemic lockdown. Continue Reading
RAIN Founder and CEO of AccuraRadio Kurt Hanson posts this special announcement about a new coronavirus resource from AccuRadio and RAIN News. We know there’s already a lot of news out there. The mission of Coronavirus Watch is to organize and synthesize information overload in a uniquely useful format. Continue Reading