Hope you all had an excellent weekend! We’ve obtained some large Sizzling Pod Summit updates for you all, in addition to the most recent in audio information. In the present day, Audible lands one other star, Spotify experiences one other outage, and creators cease bothering to make podcasts when it’s so onerous to get anybody to take heed to them.
Who can be at Sizzling Pod Summit?
Sizzling Pod Summit in Brooklyn is arising quick, and we’ve been working onerous getting the lineup collectively. I’m actually enthusiastic about who now we have to date, and I hope you’ll be, too! Summit headliners embody:
- Spotify’s world head of audiobooks, Nir Zicherman.
- Dan Zitt, senior vp 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 if 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 matters of the second so that you simply all can drive the dialog.
What matters? Properly, we’ve obtained our personal ideas, however we wish to know yours, too — if you happen to’re shopping for a ticket, there’s a spot at checkout to depart a suggestion on what you most wish to talk about. We’ll be selecting our favorites and making them matters for conversations to prepare round. On the finish, we’ll wish 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 means fewer podcasts
One factor I preserve listening to time and again is that it’s so a lot more durable to launch a podcast now than it was, say, three or 4 years in the past. And that’s often coming from individuals at established studios with a minimum of some advertising and marketing would possibly. For impartial creators, it should be almost unimaginable. It isn’t completely stunning that, in keeping with information compiled by Chartr from Hear Notes, fewer podcasts had been created in 2022 than within the two years prior. Even so, the margin is surprising: the variety of new reveals created dropped by almost 80 % between 2020 and 2022.
A few of that may be attributed to the pandemic — podcast creation peaked in 2020 when individuals really had nothing higher to do. However the variety of new reveals 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, Hear Notes logged 26.1 million new episodes printed 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’t successfully deal with the variety of podcasts that exist already. One small answer appears to be launching new reveals on outdated feeds, similar to what The New York Instances did with Laborious Fork and Sway’s RSS. The feed had a built-in viewers and made it a lot simpler for listeners to find the brand new present. It could not have landed properly with all subscribers (or podcasters), however Sway ranks within the high 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 problem was resolved after 11PM ET. It was not associated to the sort of Google Cloud challenge that prompted Spotify’s final systemwide outage.
Audible inks growth and first-look cope with Daniel Dae Kim
Audible is basically 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 record 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 can 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 authentic audio thriller The Prophecy final yr alongside Kerry Washington and David Oyelowo.
That’s all for now! I’ll be again with the most recent in audio subsequent week.
