Jottings of note:
Crime and More Crime
iHeartPodcasts and Glass Podcasts, a division of award-winning Glass Entertainment Group, today announced the second season of the hit podcast series “Betrayal,” which will focus on Ashley Lytton, a typical suburban Utah wife and mom of three, who discovered her husband was hiding a horrifying secret. It was a shocking crime that would alter her life and jeopardize the safety of her children. Additionally, the two companies have also signed a slate deal for new true-crime titles, including “Burden of Guilt” and “Last Seen on South Street.”
Playing Ball
Tom Webster (Partner, Sounds Profitable), published a column in response to recent research released by his former employer Edison Research. The Edison study (HERE), playfully titled “Want a hit podcast? Swing for the fences with True Crime,” used a baseball metric to rank podcast genre success. Webster, a baseball fan, offers a thoughtful refinement of Edison’s numbers, and advice to creators, in a column playfully titled “How to Murder a Podcast.” He reviews the Edison findings and promises, “I thought I’d break this data down a little bit,” which he does with a mix of criticism and encouragement. READ
Removals
Just as we noted UMG’s agitation around AI-created music which uses popular human-created music as a data training set, an AI-created track was removed from leading streaming services including Apple Music, Spotify, Deezer, and Tidal. The action was about exactly UMG’s caution — namely, that it used existing music by Drake and The Weeknd to train and clone the track’s voices. TikTok and YouTube are reported to be in the process of pulling the track also. Our outlook? Buckle up.
