I hope you all had a great weekend! We’ve got some big Hot Pod Summit updates for you all, as well as the latest in audio news. Today, Audible gets another star, Spotify experiences another outage, and creators stop bothering to make podcasts when it’s so hard to get anyone to listen.
Who will be at Hot Pod Summit?
Hot Pod Summit in Brooklyn it’s emerging quickly, and we’ve been working hard to put the lineup together. I’m very excited about what we have so far, and I hope you are too! Summit headliners include:
- Spotify Global Director of Audiobooks, nir zicherman.
- dan zittSenior Vice President of Content Production at Penguin Random House Audio.
- gretchen rubinauthor of the happiness project and host of the happier podcast.
- Co-founder and Chief Content Officer of Rococo Punch Juan Perotti.
- Vulture podcast critic and hot pod founder nick quah.
And this year, we’re trying something new: Some of our favorite memories at Hot Pod Summit come from our conversations with the audience or those moments between panels when everyone lets us know what’s on their minds. So this year, we’re trying to turn that sentiment into its own segment. We’ll organize attendees into groups to discuss some of the hottest topics of the moment so everyone can fuel the conversation.
What topics? Well, we’ve got our own thoughts, but we also want to hear yours: if you’re buying a ticket, there’s a place at checkout to leave a suggestion about what you most want to discuss. We will choose our favorites and turn them into topics to organize conversations. In the end, we want to hear your thoughts on what’s to come.
We’ll have more announcements in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!
people are throwing way fewer podcasts
One thing I keep hearing over and over again is that it’s a lot harder to launch a podcast now than it was three or four years ago. And that usually comes from people at established studios with at least some marketing power. For indie creators, it must be next to impossible. It is not entirely surprising that, according to data collected by Graphic from Listen Notes, fewer podcasts were created in 2022 than in the previous two years. Even so, the margin is staggering: the number of new shows created dropped by almost 80 percent between 2020 and 2022.
Part of that can be attributed to the pandemic: Podcast creation peaked in 2020 when people really had nothing better to do. But the number of new shows in 2022 was even lower than pre-pandemic levels: 337,063 podcasts were launched in 2019, compared with 219,178 in 2022. New episode creation has performed somewhat better. Although still lower than the figures for 2020 and 2021, Listen Notes recorded 26.1 million new episodes released in 2022, up from 18.1 million episodes in 2019.
Creators seem to recognize that until podcast discovery improves, launching a podcast can be a losing proposition. Apparently the system can’t effectively handle the number of podcasts that already exist. One small solution seems to be to launch new shows on old feeds, like what The New York Times did with hard fork Y PivotThe RSS feed had a built-in audience and made it much easier for listeners to discover the new show. It may not have landed well with all subscribers (or podcasters), but hard fork it ranks in the top five tech podcasts on Apple and Spotify several months after its launch.
Spotify was down in the United States for about three hours on Friday night. Me Edge Colleague Richard Lawler reported that the cause was a partial outage that only affected the platform’s player. Users started reporting issues before 8pm ET on Friday night and the issue was resolved after 11pm ET. It wasn’t related to the kind of Google Cloud issue that caused Spotify’s latest system outage.
Development of audible inks and preliminary agreement with Daniel Dae Kim
Audible is really taking a page out of the Spotify playbook by building a roster of top names, from the Obamas to Gwyneth Paltrow to Queen Latifah. Next on his list is Daniel Dae Kim of Lost fame, whose production company, 3AD, has signed a multi-project development and first-look deal with the Amazon-owned audio company.
His first project for Audible will be an audio adaptation of the play. yellow face by David Henry Hwang. Kim will play Hwang and Leigh Silverman will direct. This isn’t the first time Kim has participated in an Audible production, as she appeared in the original audio thriller. The prophecy last year alongside Kerry Washington and David Oyelowo.
That is all for now! I’ll be back with the latest on audio next week.
