In a significant development, YouTube — the world’s most popular podcast platform — has selected SiriusXM Media as exclusive representative for its audio inventory in the U.S. The announcement must be categorized as landmark. Investors are enthusiastic. Continue Reading
YouTube Music has released a milestone announcement: Over $8 billion was paid out to the music industry in the 12 months between July 2024 and June 2025. That riveting metric was released at a conference by Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s Global Head of Music. Continue Reading
YouTube has launched and announced a podcast popularity chart, awkwardly named “Weekly Top Podcast Shows: Most popular podcast shows on YouTube.” The date range for this debut weekly chart is May 5-11, establishing a reporting cadence with a one-week lag. We examine and compare this ranker to recent Edison Research data on podcast popularity. Continue Reading
“We want to make sure we get this right.” —Google YouTube team. Google will discontinue the Google Podcasts app, and move its central podcast offering to YouTube Music in 2024. In choosing YouTube Music as the home base for podcasting, YouTube is emulating Spotify’s hybrid music/talk content model. Continue Reading
Global technology and services company Triton Digital announces this morning that it now includes podcast consumption data from YouTube in the company’s IAB-compliant Podcast Metrics product. “YouTube’s influence on video podcasting is undeniably transformative,” said Triton’s head of podcasting Sharon Taylor. Continue Reading
The awaited opening of YouTube Podcasts has arrived. Podcasts have long been posted to YouTube, of course, but until now there has not been a structured presentation of them, or promotion and discovery tools specifically for them. It is detached from traditional RSS distribution. Click through for details and images. Continue Reading
Jottings of Note
— Pre-Audible … Way Pre (NY Times)
— Taking the Measure (Westwood One)
— End of an Executive Era (YouTube)
Popular listening platforms, from streaming music to broadcast radio, have stepped into podcasting by pulling podcasting onto their platforms, mostly through acquisitions. Alphabet/Google/YouTube is taking a somewhat different tack, offering six-figure grants to podcasters and podcast networks to create video versions of their shows. This according to Bloomberg, which cites anonymous sources. Continue Reading
For his latest collection, music superstar Ed Sheeran is partnering with YouTube Shorts by producing one Short for each song. YouTube Shorts is the video behemoth’s competitive stab at Tik Tok. Continue Reading
The headline is that YouTube has its first home-built podcast, but the deeper story is that it’s a bottoms-up collaboration with National Public Media (NPM), the sponsorship sales division of NPR. Click for details. Continue Reading
The number includes current trials, but is still impressive: YouTube Music crossed the 50-million mark in subscribers. Lyer Cohen, head of YouTube Music, says “We’re in our own lane.” Much of the growth is international, especially Asia and South America. Continue Reading
Over 176 different songs surpassed 1 billion video views on micro-video platform TikTok. That from the company’s first annual music report. Over 70 artists have broken on the platform, and landed major label deals. While major surveys put YouTube as a leading music discovery environment, TikTok seems determined to build recognition for its role in finding and sharing songs. Continue Reading