Podcast Movement scores winning set of keynotes

Spotify launched Audiobooks+ in some markets, an add-on offering an additional fifteen hours of listening each month.

Pocket Casts now properly supports “serial” shows, grouping episodes by season, and sorting them in the correct order. The change is inspired by Evo Terra’s The End: Evo wrote a piece calling for better support in April last year.

Bobby Carter from NPR spoke at Radiodays Europe earlier this year about the success of the Tiny Desk Concert. Radiodays has uploaded a number of the talks from the event, which happened in March.

The US Senate agreed to President Trump’s plans to pull $1.1bn of funding from public broadcasting.

That ad read by your favourite podcast host might not have been read by your favourite podcast host after all. Triton Digital has partnered with an AI voice company, ekoz.ai, to bring AI-generated host-read podcast ads to Spreaker. Podcast hosts can opt in to having their voice cloned; and then manually approve each ad for their podcast.

Triton Digital released the US Podcast Ranker for June. Salem Media’s Charlie Kirk Show made it to the top 5. This American Life gets a new entry in the ranker at #12. In the top ten publishers list, the BBC and Salem saw a ranking increase. The ranker measures participating publishers only.

The BBC’s Annual Reports and Accounts were published for 2024/25. BBC Sounds, the corporation’s radio and podcast app, reported a 2% increase in weekly active users, but those listeners are older, with only 42% being aged under 55 (down from 45%). Total time spent on the BBC Sounds app remained static, at 17.3mn hours a week. Total plays increased by 8%: “on-demand speech”, which includes podcasts and on-demand speech radio, rose 8% from 768mn to 832mn for the year. (That’s the equivalent of 16 million plays a week). The BBC Sounds app closes for non-UK audiences next week.