Hope you all had an ideal weekend! We’ve bought some large Sizzling Pod Summit updates for you all, in addition to the newest in audio information. At the moment, Audible lands one other star, Spotify experiences one other outage, and creators cease bothering to make podcasts when it’s so laborious to get anybody to take heed to them.
Who will likely be at Sizzling Pod Summit?
Sizzling Pod Summit in Brooklyn is arising quick, and we’ve been working laborious getting the lineup collectively. I’m actually enthusiastic about who we have now to date, and I hope you may be, too! Summit headliners embody:
- Spotify’s world head of audiobooks, Nir Zicherman.
- Dan Zitt, senior vice chairman of content material manufacturing at Penguin Random Home Audio.
- Gretchen Rubin, creator of The Happiness Undertaking and host of the Happier podcast.
- Co-founder and chief content material officer of Rococo Punch John Perotti.
- Vulture podcast critic and Sizzling Pod founder Nick Quah.
And this yr, we’re making an attempt out one thing new: a few of our favourite recollections at Sizzling Pod Summit come from our conversations with the viewers or these moments between panels once you all tell us what’s in your thoughts. So this yr, we’re making an attempt to show that feeling into its personal section. We’ll be organizing attendees into teams to debate among the hottest subjects of the second so that you simply all can drive the dialog.
What subjects? Properly, we’ve bought our personal ideas, however we need to know yours, too — in the event you’re shopping for a ticket, there’s a spot at checkout to go away a suggestion on what you most need to talk about. We’ll be selecting our favorites and making them subjects for conversations to prepare round. On the finish, we’ll need to hear your ideas on what’s to come back.
We’ll have some extra bulletins within the coming weeks, so keep tuned!
Persons are launching method fewer podcasts
One factor I preserve listening to time and again is that it’s so a lot tougher to launch a podcast now than it was, say, three or 4 years in the past. And that’s often coming from folks at established studios with a minimum of some advertising may. For impartial creators, it should be almost not possible. It’s not totally shocking that, in keeping with data compiled by Chartr from Pay attention Notes, fewer podcasts had been created in 2022 than within the two years prior. Even so, the margin is surprising: the variety of new exhibits created dropped by almost 80 p.c between 2020 and 2022.
A few of that may be attributed to the pandemic — podcast creation peaked in 2020 when folks actually had nothing higher to do. However the variety of new exhibits in 2022 was even decrease than pre-pandemic ranges: 337,063 podcasts had been launched in 2019, in comparison with 219,178 in 2022. New episode creation has fared considerably higher. Although nonetheless decrease than 2020 and 2021 figures, Pay attention Notes logged 26.1 million new episodes revealed in 2022, up from the 18.1 million episodes in 2019.
Creators appear to acknowledge that till podcast discovery improves, launching a podcast could also be a dropping proposition. The system seemingly can not successfully deal with the variety of podcasts that exist already. One small answer appears to be launching new exhibits on previous feeds, reminiscent of what The New York Occasions did with Onerous Fork and Pivot’s RSS. The feed had a built-in viewers and made it a lot simpler for listeners to find the brand new present. It might not have landed nicely with all subscribers (or podcasters), however Onerous Fork ranks within the prime 5 know-how podcasts on Apple and Spotify a number of months after its launch.
Spotify outage
Spotify was down within the US for about three hours on Friday evening. My Verge colleague Richard Lawler reported that the trigger was a partial outage solely affecting the platform’s participant. Customers began reporting points earlier than 8PM ET on Friday evening, and the difficulty was resolved after 11PM ET. It was not associated to the type of Google Cloud challenge that precipitated Spotify’s final systemwide outage.
Audible inks growth and first-look cope with Daniel Dae Kim
Audible is admittedly taking a web page out of Spotify’s playbook by constructing a roster of marquee names, from the Obamas to Gwyneth Paltrow to Queen Latifah. Subsequent on its listing is Daniel Dae Kim of Misplaced fame, whose manufacturing firm, 3AD, has inked a multi-project growth and first-look cope with the Amazon-owned audio firm.
His first undertaking for Audible will likely be an audio adaptation of the play Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang. Kim will star as Hwang, and Leigh Silverman will direct. This isn’t Kim’s first time in an Audible manufacturing, having appeared in unique audio thriller The Prophecy final yr alongside Kerry Washington and David Oyelowo.
That’s all for now! I’ll be again with the newest in audio subsequent week.
