• Oxford Road and Veritone One are to combine to form the world’s largest podcast agency. For now, both companies will continue to trade independently. “With Veritone One’s industry-leading tech and data platform, in combination with Oxford Road’s innovation on behalf of brands, we’re creating an agency that sets a new standard,” says Dan Granger, who is CEO of the newly combined organisation.

• A number of podcasts hosted on archive.org have gone silent, after an attack on the service. The Internet Archive, which is funded by donations, has been badly affected, and user data has been leaked. Podcasts on Librivox, an audiobook network, are all unavailable.

• The podcast boom is “far from over”, says Spotify’s Karin Bäckmann, speaking at Lyddager in Oslo, Norway, at the end of last week. The event also saw PrixNorge, an audio industry awards. The podcast Historier fra virkeligheten from Norwegian public service broadcaster NRK was made Podcast of the Year. Podnews’s Editor, James Cridland, was a speaker – speaking on podcast trends and audio tools.

• The winners of Guldörat, an audio awards in Stockholm, Sweden, were announced yesterday. Podcast of the year went to Alla goda ting är tre, a comedy podcast hosted by Acast. The day also included Power of Sound, an event for advertisers, and Guldörat’s conference for audio creators. Podnews’s Editor, James Cridland, spoke at both events.

• After the success of Goalhanger’s The Rest is Politics tour of the UK, The Rest is Entertainment has announced a live show in the Royal Albert Hall on Oct 4. The show, presented by Marina Hyde and Richard Osman, is one of the UK’s top 25 podcasts.

• YouTube sent out error messages via email to many podcast creators who use the RSS ingestion tool, asking creators to “please make sure your media files are not corrupt”. This appears to have been a fault at YouTube’s end; all affected episodes have now been ingested correctly.

Enter The Webbys. Create Your Mark in Internet History.

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The 29th Annual Webby Awards Early Entry Deadline is in TWO DAYS, Friday October 25th, 2024!

The Webby Awards have been honoring the very best of the Internet since 1996, celebrating everything from independent audio experiments to tentpole podcast sensations.

By participating in The Webbys, you place your work on the same stage as boundary-pushing podcasters and companies, like past Webby Winners Michelle Obama, Audible, Crooked Media, iHeart Podcasts, PRX, Jason & Travis Kelce, The New York Times, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Wondery, and Keke Palmer to name a few.

This year’s categories cover a wide range of topics, including News & Politics, Sports, Business, and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging, across Limited-Series & Specials, Shows, and Individual Episodes. And for the first time, The Webby Awards will also honor History in Individual Episodes.

Enter the 29th Annual Webby Awards before the Early Entry Deadline on Friday, October 25th, 2024 for the best pricing!

Tips and tricks – with Memberful

• Wanting to leave X, for whatever reason, and to try BlueSky? Justin Jackson has made a starter pack of people in podcasting to follow. You can follow Podnews there, too: @podnews.net

  • However, we’d recommend open social media in the fediverse, like Mastodon, rather than going from one closed platform to another. Just like podcasting, you can use different apps, and choose a hosting server to suit you. Podnews is updates@social.podnews.net over there, and you can see who follows us as a good starting point. (If there would be any interest in social accounts on the Podnews server, perhaps for our supporters, please let us know).

Podcast News returns tomorrow. (For a clue as to why, see stories 3 and 4!)