Tag: Radio

Spotify’s New Publishing Tool Makes It Easy To Turn Broadcasts Into Podcasts

April 13, 2023

At the end of 2021, Spotify announced the acquisition of Whooshkaa, an Australia-based podcast technology platform that let radio broadcasters turn their existing audio content into on-demand podcast content. Today, we are excited to share that this technology is now available for any publisher with a Megaphone account. Megaphone is our podcasting platform for enterprise publishers and professional podcasters, and it offers a comprehensive set of tools that helps them publish, measure, and monetize their podcast businesses.

This technology, which we are calling broadcast-to-podcast (B2P), gives broadcast publishers—whether they’re already in the podcast game or new to the medium—an easy-to-use tool that allows them to leverage existing content to reach new, younger audiences and extend their revenue potential.

For the Record spoke to Emma Vaughn, Global Head of Advertising Business Development & Partnerships at Spotify, to learn more about this technology and what it means for broadcast creators.

First, can you share how radio listening habits are changing?

Radio listening has been gradually shifting from over-the-air to streaming as consumers increasingly choose to listen through their digital devices. In fact, the time people spent listening to broadcast radio online in the U.S. grew by 50% from 2019 to 2022. 

Similar to TV, busy consumers want to listen to their favorite audio content on their own schedule. This partly explains the tremendous growth of the podcast industry—creators, publishers, and platforms are responding to the demand from audiences. At the same time, there are more ways for people to listen thanks to a high adoption of devices like smart speakers, smartwatches, and more. 

Does this new B2P tool require extra effort or technical knowledge to use?

No! The ease of use and automation are major benefits to this product. After a simple, one-time setup process in Megaphone, broadcast-to-podcast will automatically create new podcast episodes from previously broadcasted content, making it easier than ever for broadcast publishers to reach new audiences with their content. It’s honestly so cool.  

It typically takes publishing teams approximately 30 to 60 minutes to manually convert each individual broadcast episode to a podcast. This includes downloading the episode off the radio platform, removing the ad spots, placing ad markers, and uploading the episode to a podcast platform. 

This amount of friction does not work at scale when converting hundreds of episodes per day across a network. B2P helps automate this entire process for publishers.

NPR Host Ari Shapiro Goes Beyond the Airwaves With His Memoir, ‘The Best Strangers in the World: Stories From a Life Spent Listening’

March 20, 2023

photo credit: Victor Jeffreys

As one of the hosts of NPR’s flagship program, All Things Considered, Ari Shapiro has a voice that’s instantly recognizable to many radio listeners in the United States. Since 2015, Ari has shared heartwarming and heart-wrenching stories on the show, which is one of the most listened-to news programs in the country. In 2020, the format expanded with Consider This, a 15-minute, six-times-weekly podcast—also hosted by Ari.

But journalism is just his day job.

Ari is also a singer, performer, and speaker. He moonlights as a vocalist with the band Pink Martini, and joined forces with actor Alan Cumming for a stage show called Och & Oy! A Considered Cabaret. Now, the award-winning reporter and former White House correspondent is adding author to his resume.

The North Dakota native’s memoir, The Best Strangers in the World: Stories From a Life Spent Listening, hits shelves this week. In the book, Ari not only details his experiences reporting stories around the world, but also reflects on his upbringing in Portland, Oregon.

Ari created a playlist exclusively for Spotify that’s the perfect accompaniment to his memoir. From The B-52’s to the New York Philharmonic, the curation is as varied as the tales that come to life on his pages. We caught up with the host-performer-author to learn more about the inspiration for his book, and the ideas behind the playlist.

What made you decide to write a memoir? 

Covering the news every day sometimes feels like sprinting on a treadmill, where if you pause to look at the hot guy walking by, you will fall on the floor. And so, I’ve never been a person who nostalgically looks back at my favorite conversations and stories I’ve told. But I realized that after more than 20 years as a journalist, some of those stories, and some of those people, have sort of snagged on me as they flew by in the current, and changed the person I am—not just as a journalist, not just a storyteller, but as a human. 

In a way, this book is a memoir told through the stories of others. It covers a really wide range, from going on Air Force One with the president to being in warzones to singing with a band at the Hollywood Bowl. But, ultimately, I think of the book as kind of an answer to a question that I get from friends a lot, which is “How do you stay optimistic in the face of everything?” And the answer is the stories that are in these chapters.

How did your experience as a journalist impact your story?

Being a journalist has certainly attuned me to the finer details, so I feel like I can take someone along and tell a story that hopefully transports them and sticks with them. But the thing that made it really challenging is—as a journalist—stories are not supposed to be about me. I’m never supposed to be the focus.

So switching gears and telling stories that are fundamentally about me was unfamiliar and scary and foreign and definitely a learning curve. And as I look back at the drafts of these chapters and the way they evolved, that’s the biggest change that I see: learning how to write about myself in a way that doesn’t feel like a betrayal to who I am as a journalist.

Can you share a story from your book?

I have to tell you about the first time I ever sang with a band. For my debut performance, I was a singer with a band called Pink Martini, a little orchestra from Portland, Oregon, with more than a dozen members. In 2009, they asked if I would record a song for an album they were working on. After, the band leader, Thomas Lauderdale, said, “Well we need to find a time for you to perform this live with us. So why don’t you come to the Hollywood Bowl?” 

Now, the Hollywood Bowl seats 18,000 people. But what made it the most terrifying was not the size of the audience. It’s that backstage, before you walk out in front of those thousands of cheering people, you see all these huge, framed, black-and-white photos of the legends who have performed there over the decades. There’s Aretha Franklin; there’s The Beatles; there’s Judy Garland—all pictured on the stage you are about to stand on. And then the time comes, and you walk out in the footsteps of those giants and the spotlight follows your path. 

It is so exhilarating because as a radio reporter, it doesn’t matter how many millions of people might be listening to any given story I do. It’s a very intimate conversation between me and the one person who happens to be hearing it. But with a live performance, everybody is sharing that experience collectively, at the same time. There is something so electric about live music because it only ever happens once in that particular way. And so, to be a part of that is a thrill unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in journalism.

What was the experience like reading your story aloud for your audiobook?

First of all, I loved recording my audiobook because my comfort zone is telling stories. That’s what I do every day, and so, in some ways, recording the audiobook felt much more easy, comfortable, and familiar than writing the book. But it’s exhausting to speak aloud for hours on end. Even though I host a two-hour daily news program, I’m not talking for most of it. I read an introduction to a reporter’s piece and then I sit quietly for four minutes. Or if I’m doing an interview, I ask someone a question and then sit quietly while they answer. By the end of the day of audiobook recording, I could barely talk to my husband. I have so much admiration for people who do this professionally.

You created a musical playlist for your memoir. How did you pick the songs?

Above all, I wanted the playlist to feel optimistic and joyful because that’s what I want people to walk away from the book feeling. Even though the book takes you to warzones and refugee crises, the book is full of people who give me hope. It’s also global because the book is global. So there’s a track from the South African trumpet player Hugh Masekela, and a track from the Japanese singer Saori Yuki.

The playlist begins with a song that I hope sets the tone for everything else, which is “Roam” by The B-52’s. I think that’s the best road trip song ever written. And I want to give people the feeling that we’re going somewhere exciting. It’s gonna be fun, and it’s gonna be an adventure.

There is also a healthy dose of Queer camp because that is part of who I am, and there are songs that take me back to specific moments. It includes an obscure ’90s cover of “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” by Nicki French. The summer I came out of the closet, that was the track that was playing in the gay club every single weekend. I also included the overture to Candide, which was the song that my husband and I walked down the aisle to at our wedding.

What do you think continues to attract listeners to talk formats like a radio show or podcast?

One of NPR’s founding mothers, Susan Stamberg, has a quote I love, which is “The pictures are better on the radio.” There is something about the human voice that is so personal and intimate. It engages the brain and bypasses the preconceived notions we might have about the person who’s talking, and allows us to have an experience that feels more personal than printed words on the page or talking heads on a TV broadcast. 

How have the people you’ve met over the years and the experiences you’ve had influenced you?

Musically, I have been so lucky to collaborate with people who are curious and omnivorous. Pink Martini records in dozens of languages, with collaborators ranging from the great Mexican ranchera singer Chavela Vargas to the great grandchildren of Maria and Captain von Trapp. So being able to travel with Pink Martini to Morocco and Hungary and Lebanon and France and sing in all these different languages helps me appreciate something that my parents taught me from a very young age: The more you know about the world, the more interesting life becomes. And there’s something very subtle and powerful about music. 

With everything that I do—whether it’s journalism, singing with Pink Martini, writing this book, or performing with Alan Cumming—my goal is to help people see the world through the eyes of someone else. My goal is to help people break out of their bubbles and build empathy and increase understanding. Music is one of the most powerful tools I know that can do that.

The chapters in this book that are not about music still contain a piece of that. I hope they increase curiosity and empathy, and allow readers to experience all these different people and places, and see the similarities and connections we all share.

 

If you’re interested in hearing Ari tell his stories in person, check out the details of his book tour here. In the meantime, listen to the playlist Ari made to complement his memoir, below.

 

Amplifying Artist Input in Your Personalized Recommendations

November 2, 2020

Listeners enjoy Spotify because we introduce them to music to fall in love with—including music they might not have found otherwise. In fact, Spotify drives 16 billion artist discoveries every month, meaning 16 billion times a month, fans listen to an artist they have never heard before on Spotify. We’re proud of that and are actively refining our algorithms to enable even more fan discoveries of new artists each month.

We’re able to make great personalized recommendations because of complex, dynamic systems that consider a wide variety of inputs about what you like—which we refer to as signals—and balance those signals in many possible different pathways to produce an output: the perfect song for the moment, just for you. 

This might sound complicated—and it is! Our personalized recommendations take into account thousands of types of signals: what you’re listening to and when, which songs you’re adding to your playlists, the listening habits of people who have similar tastes, and much more. In order to create algorithms that truly deliver the right song for the right time, we’re also taking into account less obvious factors: things like time of day, or the order in which you’re listening to songs or podcasts, or the release date of a song. 

Artists tell us they want more opportunities to connect with new listeners, and we believe our recommendations should also be informed by artists—their priorities and what they have to say about their music. And soon, we will roll out a test of a service that gives artists a say in how their music is discovered. 

In this new experiment, artists and labels can identify music that’s a priority for them, and our system will add that signal to the algorithm that determines personalized listening sessions. This allows our algorithms to account for what’s important to the artist—perhaps a song they’re particularly excited about, an album anniversary they’re celebrating, a viral cultural moment they’re experiencing, or other factors they care about. 

To ensure the tool is accessible to artists at any stage of their careers, it won’t require any upfront budget. Instead, labels or rights holders agree to be paid a promotional recording royalty rate for streams in personalized listening sessions where we provided this service. If the songs resonate with listeners, we’ll keep trying them in similar sessions. If the songs don’t perform well, they’ll quickly be pulled back. Listener satisfaction is our priority—we won’t guarantee placement to labels or artists, and we only ever recommend music we think listeners will want to hear. 

We’re testing this to make sure it’s a great experience for both listeners and artists. To start, we’ll focus on applying this service to our Radio and Autoplay formats, where we know listeners are looking to discover new music. As we learn from this experiment, we’ll carefully test expanding to other personalized areas of Spotify. 

We believe this new service will unlock more discoveries than ever before. Our recommendations rely on signals from you, so keep on listening to what you love!

‘National Lampoon Radio Hour: The Podcast’ Comes to Spotify Ahead of 50th Anniversary

December 10, 2019

Are you a National Lampoon fan? Then we’ve got news for you: National Lampoon Radio Hour: The Podcast, will be released on Spotify December 19—and starting with the third episode on December 26, Spotify users will have exclusive access to new episodes of the show —just in time for the 50th anniversary of National Lampoon magazine.

The comedy radio show, which started in 1973 and ran for over a year, now has the opportunity to entertain a new generation of listeners through its rebirth as a podcast. New and old fans alike can get excited for the revival of the program, which kicked off the careers of comedic greats including John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, and Harold Ramis, among others.

National Lampoon Radio Hour: The Podcast brings brand-new programming featuring comedic talent such as Cole Escola, Jo Firestone, and Brett Davis. Spotify listeners will also get exclusive access to original content from the 1970’s radio show from stand-up legends. 

So, to all the Debbie Downers out there: we’ve got something to cheer you up. Tune into the twisted “National Lampoon’s Christmas Podcast” episode with a special guest (the one and only Debbie Downer herself, Rachel Dratch) and get ready for the National Lampoon revival you didn’t know you needed with an amalgam of hilarious sketches, characters, tunes, and more.

Listen to the trailer below, and check back in for the launch on December 19.