Why has music streaming stopped growing?

• Music streaming is stalling, according to research covered by Will Page in Billboard, looking at audio music streams in the US. While 55,000 new tracks are being uploaded every day, music streaming hasn’t grown since mid-July. Is podcasting replacing it?

• “Alexa - play the Joe Rogan Experience from Spotify”. Spotify podcasts are now available on Amazon Echo devices. You can also make it your default podcast provider.

  • We prefer “Play the latest news from Podnews podcasting news”, which works on any speaker: Echo, Google Assistant, or a HomePod.

• Sad news from Sydney - the Audiocraft Podcast Festival will not be returning for 2021. The folks behind it have said that organisation has become “too much of a stretch for our small team”.

• The folks who make audio for Blinkist have posted their gift guide - gadgets, fun things, and vaguely audio-related gifts for the podcaster in your life. (Podnews’s address? Why, it’s here.).

• Triton Digital’s Omny Studio is now available in German and Italian - making the platform available in six languages.

• Getting bored of recording in the smallest room in the house? Get out of the closet with this fabulous Portable Vocal Booth, which a Podnews reader saw mentioned recently.

• We understand that Google Play Music’s infrastructure for podcasting is finally being turned off today: the app hasn’t been available for most users for the last month. Now’s the time to check your website and switch the Google Play logo for a Google Podcasts one. Orange was so 2020.

• Kerri Hoffman, the CEO of PRX, writes in NiemenLab that she’s concerned at the future of podcasting’s open ecosystem.

• Spotify reckon the music you listen to is connected to your personality.

Tips and tricks - with Podpage

• Why podcasting is on the rise: 8 trends publishers cannot ignore is a useful data-dump from Damian Radcliffe about the industry

• Still the best set of articles we’ve read on the subject, advertising a podcast from Fable and Folly is a three-part article on how to stand out and build an audience.

Podcast News - with Fable & Folly

Fable and Folly presents Harlem Queen. Get ready for 1920s Harlem where the underworld of speakeasies, illegal gambling, and mobsters clashes against the sophistication and elegance of the Harlem Renaissance. “Policy Queen” Stephanie St. Clair, takes on crime bosses Dutch Shultz and Lucky Luciano.

Good luck in asking for /^[a-z0-9_-]{3,16}$/ on your smart speaker. It’s a podcast all about regular expressions. Of course it is.

Ghost Gate Road has made it to the number one slot in the Apple Podcasts chart in Australia, we’re told by Whooshkaa. It’s about Vince O’Dempsey, who has self-confessed to 33 killings.

Podland this week includes our Editor interviewing Kate Bradley Chernis from LatelyAI, and Adam Curry getting annoyed that I stole his boom-chick-a-wow-wow-namespace talk.