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Hello everybody, Caroline here. In contrast to yesterday’s deep dive on the Joe Budden situation, today I’ve got a real grab bag of news bites for you.
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NBA picks Audible to continue The Last Dance. The NBA has formed a partnership with Audible to create a podcast follow up to its hit documentary with ESPN, The Last Dance. Called fittingly enough Beyond The Last Dance, the show drops on 31 August, and there will be ten 40 minute episodes that take listeners through storylines from the Chicago Bulls’ 97-98 season. It’s a smart move — the TV documentary was an unexpected winner for the sports network while live sports were on hiatus, pulling in millions of viewers and finding an international audience via Netflix, so it makes sense to keep that audience engaged with more of the same in a quick-to-produce format.
And there could be more where this is coming from, according to a statement from David Denenberg, the NBA’s senior vice president of global media distribution and business affairs. “As we continue to reimagine our content and storytelling about our teams, players and history, ‘Beyond The Last Dance’ serves as a stepping stone as we pursue new opportunities in podcasting,” he said. Think of this as a trial run, then.
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Spotify, Podcasts and Instagram Live. As a connoisseur of solutions to podcasting’s “discovery problem”, I’m always interested when somebody tries something that I haven’t seen before. The latest idea to come to my attention is this, a tie up between Spotify and the model, host and activist Ashley Graham. It’s a (presumably paid?) Instagram partnership where Graham — who has over 11 million followers — runs three Live sessions on her account under the title “Listen Up with Ashley Graham”. For each one, she curates a Spotify playlist of podcast episodes on a particular theme (the first is on motherhood) in advance of going live for a discussion where her followers can ask her questions about her choices and request extra recommendations.
It’s an interesting way both of using someone with substantial influence to surface more podcast episodes for their engaged audience, and also of pointing people who are interested in podcasts generally towards Spotify as a listening destination. And of course, going live on Instagram has been such a staple of how celebrities have communicated with their audiences since March that it makes sense to try and harness that format to bring in some podcast listeners. I do wonder whether we should see this as something of a pilot effort — given Spotify’s new video capabilities within their app, if it goes well we might see something like this live within the platform itself in future as an enhancement to the custom playlists feature, perhaps.
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Apple expands search languages. Apple sent out an update to podcasters this week, explaining that their enhanced search should now work in ten languages in addition to English. It is now available in: Spanish, German, Japanese, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Swedish, Korean, French and Dutch. Apple Podcasts should be able to search titles, topics, guests and host names in these languages. The platform is also adding the new host and guest images for more markets.
Related: The always-interesting Jane Manchun Wong on Twitter points out that Spotify also seems to be trying out some search enhancement for podcasts, in the form of browsable “podcast topics”.
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APM moves into Spanish. American Public Media has announced a partnership with ReVolver Podcasts to produced Spanish language content. The first show to get a Spanish version will be the children’s science show Brains On!, and it “will feature Spanish-speaking scientists and kids, following the same concept as the original show”.
In the release, APM’s Tom De Napoli said that: “Honoring our growing multicultural audience at APM means more than translating our existing content,” and emphasised that the first step in this was featuring Spanish speaking experts rather than just revoicing the English speaking guests in the original show.
This makes me think it’s perhaps time we took a closer look at ReVolver, a company that has really carved out a niche in the multilingual/Hispanic facing space. Back in February, iHeartMedia announced a not dissimilar partnership to reach a Spanish speaking audience with their shows.
Also of note on this subject: this recent interview with Radio Ambulante founders Carolina Guerrero and Daniel Alarcón about the long years they’ve spent trying to convince US investors that Spanish language content is a growth area worth paying attention to.
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Revolving Door. Aisha Harris is joining the host line up at NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, which will become a daily show in October. Harris comes to the show from the NYT Opinion desk, and was previously a staff writer at Slate where she also hosted the Represent podcast.
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Calling out racism in media. The MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Festival becomes more interesting every year. This year’s speaker, David Olusoga, this week used his speech to call out the British media’s racism towards Black creators and talked about a “lost generation” of talent that had been lost because of discrimination. I had lots of people reach out after I wrote about this problem at the BBC recently; if this is something you care about, Olusoga’s address is worth watching in full.
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The Archers returns to studio production. Just in case you had “longrunning BBC radio drama resumes in studio recording” on your Nature Is Healing bingo card, you can now check it off. The actors on the British audio soap opera, which has been on the air since 1951 and regularly comes in high on the BBC’s podcast downloads chart, are returning to the studio albeit with social distancing measures in place. There will still be some scenes recorded remotely and they won’t be gathering groups larger than three for now, but fans will surely be delighted to dispense with the monologue-only style of show that has been the standard since lockdown began in March.
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Post Note. This Arctic Monkeys lyric from 2018 is all I can think about right now: "Everybody's on a barge / Floating down the endless stream of great TV..."
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