The podcast industry is growing — something that thrills all of us working on the creation, discovery, and delivery of on-demand audio. But with growth comes change, sometimes lurching, as companies and organizations seek ways to thrive, expand, and capitalize on the interest of their market.
A few weeks ago, a group of people working in the business of podcasts gathered at Spotify in New York City to talk about key challenges and opportunities in our industry — and how we might work together to tackle them. Audiosear.ch began hosting these podcast business and technology summits in cahoots with Nick Quah of Hot Pod in the fall of 2015; the Spotify meeting was our fourth such gathering. We came up with the idea for the podcast summits because in the course of our work at Audiosear.ch and its sister product, Pop Up Archive, we spend a lot of time strategizing with numerous podcast industry constituents who face similar challenges around growing audience, monetizing audio content, and measuring listener behavior — and at the same time, we noticed a stark lack of opportunities for decision makers at those companies to compare notes and unite on strategies that would, as the metaphor goes, lift all boats.
Attendees at Spotify represented a variety of interests, including hosting platforms, ad networks, publishers, listening apps, podcast studios, public radio stations, and more. Here are some of the main themes we discussed.
