Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 201, published March 26, 2019.

Spotify to acquire Parcast, and a Gimlet union update. There are two Spotify stories worth noting:

(1) Spotify announced this morning that it’s moving to acquire Parcast, the Los Angeles-based company, founded in 2016 by Max Cutler, that trades in a genre-oriented, high-volume portfolio with broad titles like Serial Killers, Cults, and Unsolved Murders. (My dude Jonah Bromwich at The New York Times has described the company’s fare as “pulp nonfiction” whose “lurid storylines play out like snackable television,” which is a fair assessment, I think.) The terms of the deal were not disclosed, and it’s expected to close in the second quarter of this year. This will be Spotify’s third podcast acquisition, having picked up Gimlet and Anchor for a combined $340 million earlier this year, and it presumably eats into what Spotify has described as the $500 million budget it has set aside for acquisitions this year.

Parcast currently has 18 shows on the market, with apparent plans to roll out 20 more this year. The company currently has 20 employees, and its audience is said to be 75 percent female (which is consistent with more general findings about true crime). You should probably take note of this quote from Spotify chief content officer Dawn Ostroff, who joined the company last summer, in the associated press release: “The addition of Parcast to our growing roster of podcast content will advance our goal of becoming the world’s leading audio platform. Crime and mystery podcasts are a top genre for our users and Parcast has had significant success creating hit series while building a loyal and growing fan base. We’re excited to welcome the Parcast team to Spotify and we look forward to supercharging their growth.”

So between Anchor, Gimlet, and Parcast, you could say that Spotify now has a technology platform for third-party podcasts, a production company built on a prestigious brand, and a production company that works in sheer volume. Interesting.

One more thing to note: Parcast was previously associated with Endeavor Audio, the new audio division of the media conglomerate Endeavor. At Endeavor Audio’s launch announcement last September, the Parcast network was said to be delivering 9 million downloads a month. It’s unclear if that’s raw downloads or unique monthlies.

(2) So, as we reported in Thursday’s Insider, Gimlet Media’s management declined to formally recognize the union last Tuesday. The union’s organizing committee took to Twitter yesterday to ramp up public pressure, laying out the situation from their perspective: “Last week, Gimlet effectively declined voluntary recognition. Instead, Gimlet’s lawyer came back with a surprisingly aggressive counter-proposal. The company is trying to unilaterally cut 30 people from our proposed unit. Additionally, @Gimletmedia’s leadership is demanding a revote, but the 30 people who were cut would not be able to vote.”

You can see the full Twitter thread here.

We asked @Gimletmedia for voluntary recognition two weeks ago. Last week, Gimlet effectively declined voluntary recognition. Instead, Gimlet’s lawyer came back with a surprisingly aggressive counter-proposal.

— Gimlet Union (@GimletUnion) March 25, 2019

I’ll be monitoring the situation. In the meantime, some questions to keep in mind: How will broader Spotify management approach the situation? How strong is the coalition that the organizing committee has built among the workers? Also: what’s the argumentation around the aforementioned 30 people?

All right, moving on for now.

Acast’s French expansion [by Caroline Crampton]. The Swedish podcast company, which launched back in April 2014, is officially pushing into France. CEO Ross Adams hinted at the move when I spoke to him back in December, around the time of their $35 million Series C funding round, and said expansion into non-English-language markets was a big part of the strategy for the next two years. Adams, who helped to launch Spotify in the U.K. back in 2008, has brought on another exec from the (also Swedish) music streaming giant to spearhead this expansion: Yann Thébault, former managing director of Continental Europe for Spotify, joins to lead operations there.

“Last year was a tipping point for podcast consumption,” Thébault told me. “Right now in France, there are about 4 million people listening on a monthly basis. It’s not a fully developed market yet, but it’s growing very quickly…there have been a lot of new show launches in the past year.” That data point, by the way, comes from Médiamétrie’s Écoute des Podcasts report from April 2018, which francophones should check out.

France has traditionally had a strong radio sector, which is very much reflected in the podcast output there. “About 85 percent of the market is dominated by [radio] replays, which means that about 15 percent is [podcast] native and growing quickly.” That’s the market segment Acast is banking on — they’re hoping that by entering early, they’ll be the monetization platform of choice once the space has expanded and matured. This approach has certainly worked for them in the U.K., a comparison that Thébault referenced in our discussion too: “I see the French market — I mean, in so far as we can compare market to market — as like the U.K. two years ago.”

One of the biggest trends in original French podcasting, he said, was feminism, and there are also several new and influential women-run podcast production houses in France. We profiled one of them, Louie Media, last summer, and they, along with House of Podcasts, were also recently written up by the Bello Collective. Beyond women and LGBTQ-centred shows like La Poudre, Thébault said that “food,” “crime,” and “social justice” were also content areas rapidly growing in popularity.

Acast France seems to be starting small. The branch just finalized the contract with their third employee, a director of sales, who starts work in April, and Thébault notes that he already has a director of content working on staff. They plan to increase their headcount more rapidly “once we secure our first publisher agreement to sell and monetize their content.” The goal for now, Thébault explained, is to get podcasts on their platform, both from established media houses and independent producers. The aim is to spot “tomorrow’s talents,” he said, with the hope of monetizing these smaller shows once they grow in the future.

Thebault says French advertisers are already fairly well informed as to the benefits of advertising on podcasts — the logic being they’re used to commercial internet radio stations and streaming platforms like Spotify and Deezer. (Whether you buy into this logic is your call.) “In France, the digital audio market represents around 12 million euros,” he said. “That’s not a huge market, but it’s growing very fast.” The strong representation of feminist and women-centric podcasts works well with commercial deals too, with luxury good, fashion, and beauty all interested in that segment of the podcast audience.

A small start for Thébault and Acast France, but they’re betting hard on seeing a similar podcast growth trajectory there as in the U.K. and elsewhere. It’s long been reported that Acast is looking at eventually going public on the Swedish stock market; going into new markets like France (and possibly Germany and Spain next, I’d imagine) is likely a move to lay down a substantial European division which could give them a growth narrative with some runway.

Platform neutral [by Caroline Crampton]. Well, that’s interesting: The BBC has pulled its podcasts from parts of the Google Podcasts ecosystem, meaning that the People’s Programming is no longer accessible via Google Assistant on Google smart speakers and devices. In a blog post published this morning, Kieran Clifton, the BBC’s director of distribution and business development, explained the move thusly:

Last year, Google launched its own podcast app for Android users — they’ve also said they will launch a browser version for computers soon. Google has since begun to direct people who search for a BBC podcast into its own podcast service, rather than BBC Sounds or other third party services, which reduces people’s choice — an approach that the BBC is not comfortable with and has consistently expressed strong concerns about. We asked them to exclude the BBC from this specific feature but they have refused.

This refers to the integration of the Google Podcasts app with Google search and the rest of the Google ecosystem. Since Google’s much-publicized re-entry into podcasting last year, it’s been the case that when you search for a show using Google, you get a “recent episodes” component to your search results with play buttons beside each one that uses the architecture of the Google Podcasts app. As Podnews noted in its early reporting on this story, the BBC is now using robots.txt on its podcast server to prevent Google indexing any episodes published after March 19 in this way. You could read this as a classic publisher-platform dispute: The BBC now considers Google a competing distributor, one that uses its search dominance to push users towards their own podcast product. (I mean, welcome to the internet, I guess?).

For background on this, we should look at the rules that govern how the BBC distributes its content. Clifton references the BBC’s Distribution Policy, which doesn’t address this topic directly but sets out the conditions under which the BBC allows its output to be made available on other companies’ platforms. The broad headings are: prominence, editorial control, branding/attribution, quality, data, free access, and value for money. This policy appears to agree with the BBC’s regulator, Ofcom, the body which scrutinises the BBC’s operations to make sure all is as it should be.

Given that the BBC is funded by the public through the license fee — read my explainer on how that works here — how the corporation creates and distributes content is constantly monitored to make sure that it’s providing value for money while being as accessible and representative a broadcasting service as possible. In light of this public remit, it’s a big deal for the organization to pull a substantial part of its audio output from a platform as huge and widely used as Google.

But just how big a deal is it, though? Smart speakers (and audio distributed via Google Podcasts) are a small segment of the audio market so far, but Google Podcasts is now preinstalled on many Android phones, giving the platform vast theoretical reach. Ofcom will no doubt be looking into this decision in detail, and for what it’s worth, its guidelines do allow for the BBC to stop working with a third-party platform in cases where there is “an objective justification” for doing so. “Objective justification,” of course, is where the rub lies.

Meanwhile, there’s another strand to this: the BBC Sounds strategy. As I’ve covered extensively over the past few months, the BBC’s bespoke audio app — their biggest product launch in a decade — has had a somewhat rocky start since its launch in autumn 2018, with mixed reviews and experiments with show exclusivity that proved unpopular with some listeners. But the BBC has consistently doubled down on the app’s benefits, putting out statements about how “the response to BBC Sounds has been overwhelmingly positive.” Essentially, the BBC seems to believe it’s worth more to try to move podcast listeners into its own app than to reach them on whatever platform they currently use. For what it’s worth, Chris Kimber, a BBC product manager working on BBC Sounds, tweeted that the removal of BBC shows from Google was “unrelated to any exclusivity trial,” which makes sense — this is a more fundamental issue of how the BBC interacts with third parties over its own app.

Just to clear up some inaccuracies in that article: (1) Google are not merely linking out to content (2) licence fee income was 3.8b not 5b (3) Sounds is available outside the UK via web (4) this is unrelated to any exclusivity trial

— Chris Kimber (@chriskimber) March 25, 2019

The part I think is particularly relevant to this matter with Google first emerged in an interview that BBC Sounds launch director Charlotte Lock gave about the negative audience reaction to the Fortunately… with Fi and Jane podcast going temporarily Sounds-exclusive back in January. Lock made the point that when listeners consume BBC audio content through the BBC Sounds app, rather than via RSS feed on a third-party platform, the BBC is able to capture more audience data. She spun this as a positive for listeners, because it enables the BBC to offer better “tailored recommendations,” although at the time I was a bit skeptical that “a corporation wants more data about you” was going to be a strong motivator for listeners to use the app.

This line of argument has now been applied to this Google dispute. The key section:

We also want to make our programmes and services as good as they can possibly be — this means us getting hold of meaningful audience data. This helps us do a number of things; make more types of programmes we know people like, make our services even more personalised and relevant to people using them, and equally importantly, identify gaps in our commissioning to ensure we’re making something for all audiences.

My reading of this situation is therefore as follows: The BBC wants Google to direct listeners straight to BBC Sounds (which has a web version which is accessible internationally; the app is U.K.-only), rather than prioritizing the fact that they can play the shows through Google search or on other Google platforms. Google, unsurprisingly, refused to make this substantial exception to its own business model. As a result, the BBC deployed robots.txt and is now presenting this move as a beneficial one for listeners, who will give the BBC more data by using Sounds instead, thus influencing the long-term direction of BBC audio content. Clifton’s blog even describes the BBC’s actions as having been taken “for the good of listeners.” “For the good of BBC Sounds, internally thought to be good for listeners” might be more accurate.

Unfortunately, I don’t think this reasoning quite stacks up. It’s logical enough for the BBC, which is desperate to make BBC Sounds work after all the resources and effort that’s been poured into it. But I think the benefits are more on its side than on listeners’, who now have fewer outlets where they can access BBC material. The BBC’s gamble is that listeners love their content enough to follow it to the Sounds app, but I’d guess that a reasonable proportion — especially those who do the bulk of their listening on a Google Home for accessibility reasons, say, or through Android Auto while driving — will just switch to other podcasts that are available on their platform of choice.

As a strategy, this would be fine if the BBC was a profit-making private company: You sacrifice some listeners in order to get greater value from the really loyal ones willing to use your app. But the BBC has this obligation to be as open and accessible as possible, and so far I’m not convinced that “we can do better recommendations if everyone uses BBC Sounds” trumps the necessity of distributing their audio as widely as possible — although ultimately that will be for Ofcom to adjudicate. It’s worth remembering, too, that BBC Sounds has been cited by BBC execs as a way of re-engaging younger audiences turning away from BBC radio in favor of other streaming platforms. I’ll await the regulator’s view on that with great interest too, especially since that the corporation’s failure to reach young people was a major part of Ofcom’s latest performance report for the BBC.

This wrangle between the BBC and Google is by no means over, though, and this could all still change. Clifton notes in his post that “we are in discussions with Google to try and resolve the situation and will continue to work with them to try and come to a solution that’s in the best interests of all listeners.” I can’t help feeling that this is just an early skirmish in the chess game: The BBC called a bluff and pulled their shows. Your move, Google.

On accessibility [by Caroline Crampton]. Podcasts and the question of accessibility is a vital, important topic. This recent article by the writer Robert W. Kingett — about how he experiences podcast websites via his screen reader and how poorly many are set up for visually impaired people — really grabbed my attention. I got in touch with Kingett to find out more about his thoughts on accessibility and the podcast industry, and what changes he believes need to be made to improve matters. (This interview has been edited and condensed.)

You can support Robert W. Kingett’s writing on Patreon or visit his website.

Tracking

• Shoutout to all the political and daily news podcast producers out there who worked overtime this weekend. Your contributions will be downloaded.
• Stitcher announced its spring slate last week, which includes a new season of Headlong, LeVar Burton Reads, and Bad With Money, among others. A second season of the company’s podcast collaboration with Marvel, Wolverine: The Lost Trail, is also forthcoming. (First episode here.) Additionally, Stitcher is continuing its Stitcher Premium exclusives pipeline; one upcoming project is The Wokest, from comedian-writer-director Edgar Momplaisir. Full release here.
• From Digiday, reporting on Advertising Week Europe: “Podcast, rather than voice opportunities, sparked the most interest from advertisers at the event…but podcast advertising is still a new enough medium to encourage advertiser investment without much proof of a return on investment.”
• From the U.K.’s Press Gazette: “Regional publishers team up to develop local news podcasts backed by Google money.”
• Over at the Inside Podcasting newsletter, Skye Pillsbury got her hands on a demographic breakdown of Luminary’s upcoming portfolio. On a related note: If you listen closely, you can start hearing Luminary host-read ads on certain podcasts. Keep an ear out.
• Meanwhile, Slate has published a deep, deep dive into The Joe Rogan Experience, courtesy of Justin Peters: “Joe Rogan’s Galaxy Brain: How the former Fear Factor host’s podcast became an essential platform for ‘freethinkers’ who hate the left.”
• On a related note, Westwood One has picked up The Jordan Peterson Podcast.
• Sarah Larson’s latest at The New Yorker: “‘Case Closed,’ Reviewed: Do We Really Want a True-Crime Podcast with Answers?”