Cumulus-owned Westwood One has announced a partnership with ad tech company XAPPmedia to jointly create, launch, and promote smart-speaker experiences for national brands. The idea here is to combine Westwood One’s content creation expertise with XAPP’s experience building and developing smart-speaker apps. Continue Reading
Tencent Music has filed the paperwork for its IPO in the United States, putting the music branch of the Chinese conglomerate Tencent on track for a listing later this month. The SEC papers reveal a bit more insight about what is expected to be a landmark listing. Continue Reading
Spotify has launched a beta test for a new dedicated portal for podcasts. Spotify for Podcasters lets any users distribute their shows to the streaming service by submitting their RSS feeds. The dashboard also offers daily statistics and analytics about a show’s complete catalog or individual episodes in addition to back-end management. Continue Reading
iHeartRadio partnered with The CW to create a version of the network’s upcoming Charmed reboot for devices enabled with Amazon Alexa. When users ask their Alexa device to “open Charmed,” they’ll be asked a series of questions and trivia. Continue Reading
Gimlet Media unveiled its fall lineup, with several new podcasts from a range of genres premiering this month. Today marks the debut of a new program from a familiar name for Gimlet fans. Continue Reading
Spotify has had a series of developments over the past few days. That’s not unusual for the streaming service, which has been aggressively seeking more subscribers and revenue sources after going public. But many of the updates from the last week are circling around the concepts of family and community. Continue Reading
Smart home technology is on the rise in India, with smart speakers one of the newer contributors to the growth. Research firm IDC shared the country-focused data from its global quarterly smart home device report. Continue Reading
James Cridland’s Future of Radio is a column by the Australia-based radio futurologist. THIS WEEK: Sirius XM acquires Pandora. Breaking down the latest in upheavals at the leadership at ABC in Australia. Continue Reading
Show Shouts highlights noteworthy new and upcoming podcasts from across the vast and fast-growing category. Today’s updates are the first new project from iHeartRadio and HowStuffWorks, an experiment with augmented reality from USA Today, and cover songs with Spotify. Continue Reading
Futuri Media has unveiled new features for its system of converting broadcast radio content into podcasts and other on-demand audio. POST now has logger capabilities, allowing programmers with regional or format-specific responsibilities to access all of their stations with a single login. Continue Reading
Research is showing lots of growth in the podcast space, and now some individual platforms are corroborating those trends. Both Spotify and Deezer released internal data about their rates of podcast consumption, and both services are finding successes with that audio format. Continue Reading
Next Big Sound has made the entirety of its Pandora data available for public viewing. Anyone who is curious about statistics (and has a free Next Big Sound account) can explore metrics such as radio spins, interactive plays, thumbs up, and station adds for every artist on the audio platform. Continue Reading