Industry on Generative AI Podcast Content
In last Thursday’s issue of Soundbite, Ashley Carman examines how generative AI podcasts — colloquially dubbed “podslop” — are distributed across the podcast ecosystem. One hosting platform with safeguards in place is RSS.com, which does not allow freely hosted podcasts to opt into programmatic ads. To qualify, a podcast must have a paid subscription and at least 10 listeners in the past 30 days. Co-founder Alberto Betella tells Bloomberg RSS.com truly cares about podcasting and real podcasters. “If we miss something, it’s a scale problem, not a policy one.” Betella discusses AI slop content further in Podnews Weekly Review. Spotify has rolled out Verified by Spotify badges, to mark artist profiles as verified humans through automated detection and human review. Profiles with the badge have internal markers indicating they fit activity and engagement profiles, as well as signals indicating they aren’t AI. On the other side of AI podcasting, Podnews reports both Buzzsprout and Transistor saw significant portions of their April downloads come from web browsers, largely attributed to AI scrapers that appear as web browsers in analytics.
John Spurlock has rolled out a list of video podcasts that use the alternate enclosure HLS tag, which enables both video and audio to be distributed in the same RSS feed. According to Podnews reporting, the alternate enclosure tag is not yet supported by Apple Podcasts but is supported by Transistor, Fountain, Disctopia, RSS.com, Flightcast, and PeerTube. Apps like Fountain, Podcast Guru, Podcast Addict, and Truefans support playback of alternate enclosure tagged-feeds. Meanwhile, in the world of HLS podcasting, Buzzsprout announced this morning its video distribution to Apple Podcasts is out of beta and available to all users. Uploading a video to Buzzsprout automatically sends it to Apple Podcasts while distributing the audio across all platforms.
Digital Audio Saw Fastest Growth Rate In Consumer Spending Last Year
Inside Audio Marketing reports PQ Media data on audio’s 2025 growth. While consumers spent $2.4 trillion on media content and technology, radio saw the least spending. Satellite radio and streaming music subscriptions reached $33.8 billion globally, with podcasts and ad-free music streaming driving growth.
How Creator Businesses Stack Up
Scalable looks at the state of businesses run by content creators, such as Beast Industries founded by Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson. Beast Industries now has around 750 employees, putting it in the less than 1% of companies with over 500 employees in the U.S. (according to U.S. Census Bureau data). Creator-led companies span the country: Dude Perfect (Texas), Beast Industries (North Carolina), Audiochuck (Indianapolis), and Complexly (Montana). California remains the core state for creator companies, home to CrunchLabs, Unwell, Mythical Entertainment, and Dhar Mann Studios.
As for the rest of the news…
- Ad Results Media has a new blog covering lessons learned at POSSIBLE Miami 2026 about the future of audio advertising.
- Triton Digital has published its March 2026 Canada Podcast Ranker.
- Livewire Labs has a new edition of Top Podcast Hosting Companies by Episode Share, this time looking at April 2026, tracking around 1.9 million individual podcast episodes.
- SuperAwesome has partnered with Tinkercast to become the Wow in the World producer’s exclusive advertising seller.
- Podcraft by Alitu has a new episode today featuring Sounds Profitable Partner Tom Webster discussing data from the recent Audio Primes study, including how independent creators can work to reach valuable Audio Prime listeners.
