The Ambies nominees announced, Will Spotify overtake Apple?, Interview with Kal Amin Sounder, Women's History Month

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Join James Cridland and Sam Sethi on this week's show

INTERVIEW:

-  Kal Amin - co-founder and CEO of Sounder.FM, a podcast management and monetisation platform, has raised $2.15m in a seed round.  They've raised $4m in the past 14 months

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NEWS:

• The nominees for The Ambies, the awards for excellence in audio, are to be announced today at 12pm, New York Time. Podnews.net have a full list with analysis tomorrow: if you’re a Podcast Academy member, you’ll get a vote to choose the winners.
  
  
• eMarketer claims that Spotify will overtake Apple Podcasts by US total listeners (if not downloads) this year. No methodology or source for this data is given, though. Meanwhile, The Hustle publishes “Spotify’s plan to monetize podcasts, explained”.
  
  
• Who owns who in podcasting? Evo Terra and Anne Baird have published a list.
  
  
• Google has unveiled a new audio codec, called Lyra, which the company describe as a “high quality, very low bitrate speech codec”. How low is “very low”? Just 3kbps. There are some examples to listen to; the company plans to make it open source.
  
  
• The Podcast Index is now publishing their full podcast database index on IPFS, updated every 24 hours. (Listing 1.3m podcasts, today’s dump is a 192MB .tgz file, which expands to 647MB. You can use DB Browser for SQLite to examine it).
  
  
• The Techmeme Ride Home podcast has achieved a potential first this week - the first podcast episode released as an NFT - a non fungible token. A form of collectable digital art, host Brian McCullough, above, seems quite keen on it. (What’s an NFT?)

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