Hot Pod is The Verge’s premier audio industry newsletter, delivering news, analysis, and opinions on how the audio world is changing.
As promised, YouTube now allows users to upload podcasts from their RSS feeds. YouTube is understood to currently be the most-used podcast platform, but its inability to ingest RSS feeds made it more difficult for podcasters to distribute on the streamer. It is another step in its goal to woo creators and corner the podcast market.
[support.google.com]
Playlists like Spotify’s RapCaviar were once a path to a hit song, and the curators in charge of them were key influencers in the music industry. That era appears to be on its way out.
Streams originating from top playlists are down anywhere from 30 to 60 percent as Spotify pushes listeners towards algorithm-powered personalized recommendations. Some playlists previously created by humans have been replaced with algorithmic versions, like Indie Pop and Housewerk.
France has introduced a new law that will tax music streamers 1.2 percent of their domestic revenue to support local music. Spotify’s music lead in France and the Benelux region has been railing against the move, and announced on X on Wednesday that the company will pull its sponsorship from two French music festivals.
Google mentioned the date in a support document about transferring your subscriptions away from Google Podcasts. You’ll have until July 2024 to migrate your subscriptions to YouTube Music or another service.
[support.google.com]
First spotted by Podnews, new SEC filings indicate that Spotify chief financial officer Paul Vogel and general counsel Eve Konstan exercised options and sold stock worth $9.38 million and $1.15 million, respectively.
On Tuesday, the day after the company announced a layoff of 17 percent of its staff, the stock price hit a high of $199.97, up 10.7 percent compared to its Friday closing price of $180.69. It is possible the sales were automatically triggered by the stock price hitting a certain level. Spotify did not immediately return request for comment.
Rapper/podcaster Danny Brown enters his Steam Deck review (not necessarily the OLED model, but still) as the ultimate in-flight companion device.
Spotify’s stock is currently up about 7 percent following the announcement that the company is laying off 17 percent of its staff. If CEO Daniel Ek is trying to appease investors with a new focus on efficiency, it is working. More than 1,500 of Spotify’s employees will be notified by tomorrow afternoon that they are out of a job.
Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast studio was once an industry darling, but has been gutted by three rounds of layoffs in the past year. Mia Lobel, former head of content at Pushkin, published a Substack post today that details the business decisions that pushed producers to make more shows than they could sustain and chase growth at all costs.
[freelancecafe.substack.com]
The first of three new Doctor Who episodes is about to premiere at 6:30PM GMT (1:30PM ET, and if you’re not in the UK or Ireland, you’ll find the new episodes on Disney Plus now). And after fans watch “The Star Beast,” for the first time, there will be an official post-show podcast (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts) to extend the experience.
The only odd thing about this is that Doctor Who didn’t have one before, and if you’re still wondering why every new show has a podcast, Hot Pod has tried to answer that very question.
After three rounds of layoffs this year, Pushkin staffers have unionized with Writers Guild of America East. The union has received voluntary recognition from Pushkin management, which recently went through a restructure as the studio behind Revisionist History has fallen on hard times.
[Writers Guild of America, East]
It’s been six months since James Corden left The Late Late Show, and now he is joining SiriusXM to host weekly celebrity chat show This Life of Mine with James Corden. Like Trevor Noah and Conan O’Brien before him, Corden is the latest comedian to abandon the late-night grind for what is surely a lucrative, lower-lift podcast deal. The show will be exclusive to SiriusXM subscribers in car and on the app.
The tech giant will premiere original podcast “The Pirate of Prague” on November 13. While the show itself is hardly groundbreaking (another scammer pod!), the fact that Apple is doing an original at all signals a shift in its approach. Apple has produced about a dozen such shows as it has lost earshare to Spotify and YouTube.
The boys are back in town, baby. Musk appeared on a special episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the first two hours of which are available on X (usually, the interview would be exclusive to Spotify, aside from clips). It’s mostly just bros being bros, but if you thought we were going to get out of this unscathed, Musk does throw in a little Soros conspiracy theorizing.