Spotify has pulled a number of comedy albums from its service, after claims they weren’t licensed correctly. Jeff Price has announced a $3.5m investment round for his Word Collections company, which “focuses on getting comedians and other spoken-word performers paid for the use of their works for the first time”.
NEWS:
The Infinite Dial 2021 for the UK was released last week. The headline was 41% of the UK population (16+) listens to podcasts every month - around 23m people. The data is directly comparable to the US (41%), Canada (38%) and Australia (36%). The data was paid-for by Bauer Media and Spotify.
A Sky News investigation in the UK has discovered antisemitism, racism and white supremacist material in podcasts on Spotify. Spotify has removed 150 hours of content after the news channel’s report. “In some cases, explicit slurs could be found in episode titles and descriptions while album artwork displayed imagery adopted by white supremacists,” the story says. The podcasts are still available on Google Podcasts.
Spotify may owe millions from missing licenses and may have gained millions from missing podcasts? | Podnews Weekly Review podcast - Listen or read transcript on Metacast