Though YouTube is a hotbed for video podcasts, the Google-owned platform hasn’t croaky straight-up audio shows just yet. YouTube podcasting throne Kai Chuk spoken Thursday that podcasts will be widow to YouTube Music soon.
“We will soon start to bring both audio and video-first podcasts to YouTube Music for users in the U.S., making podcasts increasingly discoverable and accessible, with increasingly regions to come,” a YouTube spokesperson told TechCrunch. “This will help make the podcasts that users once love on YouTube, misogynist in all the places they want to listen.”
Fear not — preliminaries listening will be misogynist for free, so plane if you lock your phone while listening, your show will not be interrupted. However, the self-ruling service will be ad-supported.
Announced at the Hot Pod Summit, this news follows other recent YouTube full-length updates like multi-language audio dubbing on videos and custom radio stations on YouTube Music.
YouTube is looking at ways to support RSS.
Initially, we’ll use RSS to bring shows into podcasting.
(Paraphrasing Steve McLendon, Podcasting Product Lead at Google.)
— Alban
NYC for Hot Pod Summit (@AlbanBrooke) February 23, 2023
According to reports from the event, YouTube isn’t particularly interested in signing sectional deals with podcasters, which has been a key strategy at Spotify. YouTube moreover theoretically wants to meld the wits of listening to podcasts on video and audio — so if someone is watching a podcast on video, they can switch to audio in the middle of an episode to listen on-the-go.
This user wits may reduce friction, but it’s worth noting that not all video podcasts can translate seamlessly to audio, and vice versa. But creators will have wangle to podcast tools in the YouTube Studio, making it easier to set videos as podcasts. Later in the year, YouTube told TechCrunch, creators will be worldly-wise to upload podcasts via RSS feeds directly to the platform.
As of November, YouTube Music and YouTube Premium have over 80 million subscribers, including customers on self-ruling trials. Spotify still retains the largest market share in paid music streaming, with over 205 million subscribers.
Podcasts are coming to YouTube Music by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
