Jottings of note:
Following TheMoney (Sort Of)
Milly Botes, VP of Product at global podcast company Acast, has posted an interesting column which compares Acast’s product management to basic investment philosophies. Those investment planks include diversification, rebalancing, and risk management. Acast’s scale encourages broad management philosophies: 135,000 podcasts generating over a billion listens per quarter. The challenge is felicitously connecting those shows and their audiences with brands. “By thinking like an investor, you can make more informed decisions, minimize risks, and build resilient product portfolios that thrive in both good times and bad,” Botes observes. Read her treatise HERE.
Benchmark Survey; New Questions
Radio/audio consultancy Jacobs Media has begun preparation of the 2025 edition of Techsurvey, the broadcast industry’s largest participant survey. The survey is open to commercial radio stations in the U.S. and Canada; last year 500 stations and 31,000 listeners participated in the detailed questionnaire. The broad purpose is to identify key digital trends. New questions this year will explore the impact of time-shifting, the popularity of online newsletters, how consumers are using YouTube, and the appeal of short-form videos and how radio stations can best utilize them. Participating stations receive nationwide total results, and (for a fee) individual station results. Info HERE.
Shade
DIY music distribution expert and indie musician hero Ari Herstand has posted How To (Officially) Report Shady Spotify Playlists — a tutorial for grass-roots efforts to keep Spotify royalty operations legitimate. Not throwing any shade on Spotify itself, the article supports a grass-roots bulwark against AI-generated non-human music and playlists. Those faux playlists potentially soak up royalty payments and dilute the royalty pool at the expense of human creators. He observes that 100,000 tracks are uploaded daily to Spotify,with payment based on an artist’s proportion of streams. “Even if you didn’t listen to Taylor Swift last month, she got some of your subscription money,” Herstand asserts. “That’s how pro-rata works.” Record labels are also complicit in Herstand’s outlook. READ
November 20, 2024
