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Amazon Music Adds Entire Music Catalog, Ad-Free Podcasts & 6 Other Stories
Episode 33
This week: Amazon Prime users get ad-free podcasts and music, Buzzsprout combats email spam, new ad placements at Apple cause brand safety issue, and a roundup of the three new podcast research studies. Amazon Music adds entire music catalog, ad-free podcasts. Manuela: On Tuesday David Pierce, writing for The Verge, covered the changes coming to Amazon Prime subscribers. Previously, Amazon Prime members had access to a limited batch of 2 million songs from Amazon Music’s extensive library. Now they have access to all 100 million songs in a limited shuffle-only capacity, similar to how a Spotify free account currently works. The big change makes the Amazon Prime music offerings comparable to a free Spotify account. However, Amazon Prime members also get ad-free access to a fair few major podcasts. This includes podcasts produced by Amazon-owned companies like Wondery, as well as podcasts produced in partnership with outside companies, including NPR, ESPN, and the New York Times. “Amazon is also working on podcast discovery. It’s rolling out a new feature called Podcast Previews, which seems to be something like trailers for podcast episodes. You’ll be able to listen to “a short, digestible soundbite” before deciding to dive into an episode, which Amazon thinks could help discovery.” Pierce says the feature is billed as being “swipeable” and summarizes it as ‘Tinder for podcasts.’ Sounds Profitable asked several large publishers and hosting platforms for their percentage of downloads from Amazon Music. All were below 1% of monthly volume. Giving Amazon’s over 250 million Prime subscribers ad-free access to podcasts might bring that percentage up soon. In addition to the Prime members, those who pay the $9 monthly subscription fee for Amazon Music Unlimited but do not have Prime get access to the ad-free podcast listening and Podcast Previews tool. Buzzsprout ‘fighting back against email spam.’ Shreya: This Monday, Buzzsprout posted a short update announcing a significant update to how they’re distributing RSS feeds. “Email spam has increasingly become an issue for podcasters. Spammers and bots routinely scrape RSS feeds to collect podcasters' email addresses and send them junk emails.” The inclusion of a producer’s email in the RSS feed has been a mixed bag in recent years. As Buzzsprout says, making it easily available leaves the door open for companies scraping data to create massive databases of email addresses specifically to cold-call in hopes of selling something relevant to podcasters. On the other hand, anyone who has produced a podcast knows the RSS email is an integral part of the process, with many platforms sending an email to that address with a verification link to prove the person claiming they own the RSS feed is legitimate. Buzzsprout’s solution to that issue is simple: a new button has been added to the dashboard that puts the account owner’s email back into the RSS feed for 24 hours, enough time to verify the podcast Barring any teething troubles with the 24 hour temporary email addition process, it seems like Buzzsprout has found an elegant solution to an inelegant problem. Apple’s new ad placements immediately caused a brand safety crisis Manuela: As covered in past episodes of The Download, Apple has been interested in expanding advertising offerings on its platforms. This Monday Insider Intelligence’s Daniel Konstantinovic posted coverage of a brand safety speedbump Apple encountered when rolling out new ad locations on the App Store. One of the new ad spot
Published on 2 years, 6 months ago