Bob Pittman quizzes Charlamagne tha God at POSSIBLE
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The POSSIBLE conference is taking place in Miami. Here's a glimpse in video form. Among the speakers were Black Effect's Charlamagne the God, being interviewed by iHeart CEO Bob Pittman for a live recording of Math & Magic. The two started the conversation with rapid-fire personal questions, with Charlamagne revealing Jay-Z is his favorite artist of all time, before moving into a wide-ranging discussion on how influence is built in a media landscape shaped by constant content, platform fragmentation, and AI-generated everything. The audience also heard from Liz Plank, the host of Boy Problems, about Gen Z masculinity.
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Libsyn has announced that it can now distribute video to Spotify, and that video functionality is available across all Libsyn hosting plans.
Submission to Spotify uses the Spotify Distribution API, which was announced in January. Spotify video distribution is available on Libsyn plans starting at $25/month. All Libsyn customers can still upload manually on Spotify's website.
"Video functionality" refers to MP4 video episodes, which the company has always made available (and is supported in apps like Pocket Casts and Apple Podcasts); though the company gives a limited amount of monthly storage for uploads - 162MB for the $8 plan, or 540MB for the $25/month plan. (the company has confirmed this is for audio only; all non-Pro customers get 100GB of video storage per month.)
The latest episode of The New Media Show is an interview with Brendan Monaghan, the President and CEO of Libsyn, where he talks about Libsyn's future. This episode's video file is 3,198MB (48MB per minute).
Spotify released its Q1/26 financial report. Auction-based revenue (the Spotify Ad Exchange and Spotify Ads Manager) is now nearing 25% of all ad revenue, which declined -5% year-on-year and -25% q-on-q. The company now has 761 million monthly active users (+12% y-on-y), and paying subscribers increased +9%. Shares fell 14% after a disappointing income forecast.
The slides show how comparatively insignificant Spotify's ads business is, with gross profit from ads contributing just 8.4% of total profit. Gross margins for each suggest that ad revenue is also around half as profitable as premium subscriber revenue.
Meanwhile, Spotify's audiobooks service is not really having much impact to audiobook listening, says some new research; Mediavision suggests that audiobooks only represent 5% of listening on the service, a quarter of that of podcasting.
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