Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 209, published May 14, 2019.
The state of play, mid-2019. Last week, a good portion of the podcast community got glimmers of something they’ve long wanted: seemingly structural-level solutions to discovery, one in the form of playable Google search listings and one in the form of an upcoming Spotify app redesign. But you don’t get without giving, and some would argue these solutions entail the ceding of more power to the rising layer of active platformization — which brings a ton of theoretical changes to the relationship between publishers and audiences.
But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves — first, the details.
At Google’s I/O developer conference on Tuesday, the company made a quick mention that Google Search would soon begin indexing podcasts such that playable episodes would appear as actionable entries within relevant search results. “Soon” turned out to be an understatement; the feature…
