The BBC will soon have new leadership. Tony Hall will step down as the venerable UK broadcaster’s director general this summer, ending a seven-year tenure. “If I followed my heart I would genuinely never want to leave,” Hall said of his difficult decision to exit. Continue Reading
Sonos announced that it will be ending updates and support for some of its older products. The company said in a blog post that it will no longer create software updates for several models that it launched before 2010. Continue Reading
RAJAR has released the winter 2019 results from its Midas survey, an assessment of how the UK audience consumes audio content. Live radio continues to be a dominating force in the UK’s audio diet. Voice-activated speakers are helping connect more audiences to live radio, which was responsible for 67% of all listening done on the hardware. Continue Reading
Yesterday we reported rumors that Spotify might acquire sports/pop podcast network The Ringer, founded by ex-ESPN Bill Simmons. Today a second swirl of rumors speculates that Simmons is asking $200-million for the deal. We scratch out some rough arithmetic. Continue Reading
The 2nd annual iHeartRadio Podcast Awards were celebrated Friday night at the iHeartRadio Theater in Burbank, CA., and RAIN was there to observe the show. Continue Reading
Podlists proliferate the podsphere. The latest? Podtoppen, which ranks the top 100 Norwegian podcasts. “Norway’s official top list and measurement of podcasts” is compiled by an entity which calls itself the Steering Group, comprised of five Norwegian media companies. Continue Reading
Spotify’s next podcast acquisition could be The Ringer, the network established by Bill Simmons in 2016. The Ringer is a sports and pop culture podcast publisher; Bill Simmons is ex-ESPN and helped start the 30 For 30 sports series. There is some fearful reaction on Twitter. Continue Reading
With podcasts on track to be commanding a cool billion dollars in ad revenue, the fight to be the leading listening platform will only be getting more intense. This year kicked off with multiple reports from difference sources with their own datasets about which service is the biggest. James Cridland of Podnews gave his take on how to reconcile the different assessments Continue Reading
Lizhi, a leading audio content app in China, has launched on the U.S. stock market. It is trading on Nasdaq, and is one of the first non-music platforms from the country to go public. Lizhi is offering 4.1 million shares at $11 per share. Continue Reading
The Canadian Podcast Listener published a blog post with an exploration of the value in niche audiences, both for shows and for advertisers. The post included a graphic with a breakdown of the audience demographics for the top 10 podcasts on investing. Only 3.3% of monthly podcast listeners said they listen to shows about investing, meaning that mass-market brands likely won’t turn to those programs to reach a large market. Continue Reading
Podtrac released its December 2019 podcast ranker. The analytics platform made some format changes to its publisher chart last month, and its approach to the top shows has also gotten a slight tweak. Continue Reading
TuneIn announced that it has adopted a new sonic logo. This short audio snippet is designed to present company branding to listeners who are accessing TuneIn’s service on connected devices or screenless platforms. Continue Reading