Podcast News Roundup | International Women’s Podcast Festival 2022 & More!
Welcome back to HeadStuff’s Podcast News Roundup, your go-to place for podcast news and recommendations. This week’s roundup looks at the International Women’s Podcast Festival in the UK, the return of Graham Norton’s book review podcast, the result of Spotify’s podcast investments, and a new partnership between Adobe and Crooked Media.
The International Women’s Podcast Festival 2022
Content is Queen, a UK-based podcast network, have announced the programme to the International Women’s Podcast Festival 2022, in partnership with Pinterest. This festival aims to celebrate women’s voices in the world of audio, radio and podcasting. The event will take place live at Kings Place in London, but will be streamed worldwide for international audiences to attend. The one-day event will feature a broad line-up of speakers, workshops, live shows and more. You can check out the list of speakers here.
The International Women’s Podcast Festival will take place on Saturday June 18th. Check out what’s on offer here. Tickets are on sale now.
Graham Norton’s Book Club podcast returns for series three
The Graham Norton Book Club podcast has returned for a brand new series. Series three of the book-centric podcast launched on Audible yesterday, June 9th. Host Graham Norton returns with alternating co-hosts journalist Alex Clark and author Sara Collins.
Together, they interview special guests, give reviews of the books they have read and offer recommendations for their listeners across ten episodes. According to The Bookseller, guests in this new season include Jonathan Van Ness, Minnie Driver, Sheila Hancock, Indira Varma, Sara Cox, Will Wheaton and Reverend Richard Coles.
The Graham Norton Book Club is an Audible exclusive show and is available now.
On the new series, Graham Norton said: “I’ve so enjoyed returning to my book club for a third series. There are some new clubbers joining the old gang and the range of authors we talk to is brilliantly mixed. From Jilly Cooper to Bryan Washington, Ann Cleeves to Sheila Heti. It really doesn’t matter what sort of book worm you are, you’ll find something juicy in this club.”
Spotify invested $1 billion in podcasting
Spotify have been working tirelessly in the last number of years to promote podcasts on the platform. Speaking at Spotify’s investor day presentation in New York earlier this week, Spotify’s chief content and advertising business officer, Dawn Ostroff, summed up exactly how much investment the streaming platform has put into podcasts.
Spotify invested around $1 billion (€930 million) on podcasts, with a return in revenue of around $215 million (€200 million). “Our bet in this space is already starting to pay off, beginning with improvements in ad products and, in turn, monetisation,” Ostroff said during the presentation.
The company is still in “investment mode” and Spotify’s chief financial officer, Paul Vogel said that, despite a negative impact on gross profit, losing approximately $110 million (€103 million), “this drag will not last,” and expects profits to increase over the next year or two.
New Partnership between Adobe and Crooked Media helps accessibility for podcasts
Podnews has reported a new partnership between Adobe and Crooked Media. Crooked Media will use Adobe’s Speech to Text feature within Premiere Pro across their platforms to caption some of their most popular videos and podcasts, including Pod Save America, Lovett or Leave It, Offline and more.
Principal product marketing manager at Adobe, Meagan Keane, said “Making amazing podcasts is Crooked Media’s bread and butter, and we’re big admirers of their work. It’s so exciting for us to see Speech to Text in Premiere Pro being used by a company that produces some of the most informational and entertaining podcast content available today, and we are proud to know that it’s helping to make their shows more accessible so that more people can partake in the experience.”
Creating transcriptions and captions for podcasts and videos can be time consuming, but providing such features to audiences increases accessibility to a variety of media.
The senior director of Crooked Media, Matt DeGroot stated that “Speech to Text in Premiere Pro allows us to put high-quality captions on all our video content, opening the door for more people to participate in the podcast experience.”
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