Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 256, dated April 28, 2020.
Pandemic watch. Going by Stitcher’s pandemic timeline, it’s now Week 9, or eight weeks into life under widespread lockdown. Last night’s coronavirus update from Podtrac saw the first unambiguously positive note in a while: The week of April 20–26 saw growth in overall download numbers (up 4 percent) and audience numbers (up 2 percent) for the first time since the week of March 2–8.
As the audience picture continues to stabilize and sort itself out over the medium term, podcast publishers still have to make big decisions about how to approach new project launches in the weeks and months to come. To what extent will we see new podcast releases, originally meant for the summer, pushed back deeper into the calendar year? What kinds of projects are being deemed too “risky” to drop in the short term, amidst the uncertainty and instability of the next few months? And what kinds of…