Apple make over 100 changes to podcast categories

• Apple announced a surprise re-organisation of podcast categories in an email sent to podcasters. No podcast hosting provider appear to have been consulted or informed about this change. There are over 70 new categories, and around 30 categories have been removed or renamed; we have a full comparison of the old, and new, categories.

  • Apple also announced that “show and episode pages will display images of hosts and guests” for top shows in English later this year. No more details have been released about how this might work.

• Our Editor has written his thoughts on this sudden Apple category re-organisation over on Medium.

• Meanwhile, Apple is censoring podcasts within China. Unlike the rest of the world, Apple says “only shows from select partners are available in the Chinese Apple Podcasts store”, and there are reports that a number of shows have been removed from the service at a sensitive time for China.

• Plink is sharing top 10s of most shared podcasts using its smart-links service. The #1 this week is Masters in Business.

• A brand new iOS podcast app, Majelan, is a personal podcast player from a French company that has raised $4.5m in funding. It offers customised recommendations, and includes over 20 premium podcasts (for a monthly fee of €1.99 per podcast, or €4.99 for everything).

• In Canada, 50% of podcasts that Canadians listen to are from the US. Only 40% are from Canada, according to research.

• Spotify is beginning to test curated podcast playlists, says The Verge.

• Audioburst has launched Audioburst Studio, allowing developers and website owners to integrate the company’s short-form audio search into their own products.

Podcasts

Congratulations to Podnews readers Graham Cluley and Carole Theriault for winning 'best security podcast’ for Smashing Security for the second year running at the EU Security Blogger awards. Jack Rhysider’s Darknet Diaries won best newcomer.

When We Got To The Seventh is a new fiction podcast about reaching the seventh thing… it could be a marriage, a planet, a house guest, a victim, an answerphone message - anything at all. Every podcast episode tells a new story featuring a different character. (Anchor)

Comedic fictional podcast This Sounds Serious is back for a second series. This time Gwen is searching for Melissa Turner, the country’s most missing person, who has disappeared under extremely strange circumstances. (Kelly&Kelly / Castbox / Megaphone)

The Two Princes, an LGBTQ+ fictional podcast from Gimlet, was released today as a box set.