Spotify’s Changes And What They Mean For You

0:01In the club today, Spotify make it easier to earn and Global spends big on Gary Neville's network. Lots of podcast upheaval, but our podcasts at risk of losing money through a bad actor. Thomas Curry, exec at BBC Studios, takes us through the week's deals. Also on the show, should we spend double what we do for the World Service? And should the government pay for it? Rebecca Cooney from Broadcast tells us more. All that, plus who's playing Hugh Edwards in the new Channel 5 drama? What changes are being made at Virgin Radio? And in the Audio Network Media Quiz, we run down the biggest charts of the year.

0:37That's all happening in this edition of the Media Club. Come on in.

0:46Rebecca Cooney. Hello. Welcome back to the Media Club. Hello. It's lovely to be here. Insider at Broadcast Magazine. No stranger to the shifting TV landscape. But who are you inducting into the club this week? I am going to induct Claudia Winkleman. She's had a fabulous week. Obviously, the traitors has continued to ride high. the new sort of civilian series is back and doing very well but also she now has her own show the Claudia Winkleman show which the BBC announced recently and yeah that's pretty exciting well she'd make a party fun she would indeed good addition fringe and all absolutely I mean interesting place for her she obviously left Strictly yes clearly of of her and and her co-host Desire not following anybody else's rules top of the game with traitors got her own chat show, she can kind of do no wrong.

1:39She's in control. Yes. No, she's had a very good few years and it just keeps getting better and better. And like you say, you want her at the party and you want to watch her invite people into her party and, you know, do it on TV for you. So it seems great to me. It seems a great idea. And it's Graham Norton's production company of ITV Studios that are going to be making it. Would you think it would be the same team that do Graham's show or a different squad? I think very possibly. I mean, I think, you know, Graham Norton's show, So the thing I always admire about it is how good they are at the social media stuff.

2:08You get these incredible clips, these great stories of people telling these really funny, brilliant stories about themselves. But just, you know, they will come up on social media and do really well. And I think bridging that gap between social and TV, they do something very well. So I think they'd be in a good position if that was the case. And amazing guest booking. Yes, indeed. Guest booking and just the research of how they get those stories out of people. I find fascinating. Does it also give them a sort of succession strategy for Graham's big red chair? Potentially, potentially. And next to Rebecca, we have Head of Production and Development at BBC Studios audio team and a former Audible exec, it's Thomas Curry.

2:43Hello. Hello, good to see you again. Happy New Year. Who would you like to add to our club roles this week? Well, mine's a little less well known than Claudia. The person I'm bringing with me is Charlie Baker, who runs a magazine called The Fence, which is just glorious. It's so funny. It's kind of like a naughty cousin of the New Yorker. Very, very British sensibility. They've just done a successful Kickstarter round so that they can invest in lots more investigative features. It's beautifully illustrated. Very, very dry. I highly recommend it. It's a print or where? It's a print. Yeah, yeah.

3:20Very old school. Good. Indie magazine. So, yeah. A good addition, print and digital. Okay, in a moment, how Spotify and Global are changing the podcast playbook. I'll see you in a sec.

3:41Welcome back to the Media Club. So Spotify are moving the goalposts for making money on their platform. And Thomas, to kind of stretch that metaphor a little more, the goal is sort of widening. Not a football fan. Basically, it's a good thing. So now you just need 2 ,000 hours of consumed audio or video from your listeners and 1 ,000 engaged audience members over the last 30 days and probably about 2 ,000 listener viewers. And that's down from 10 ,000. So it's a big change. You're going to bring more people into the party. That's got to be a good thing, hasn't it? Yeah, yeah, I think so. I must admit I was probably a bit too cynical when I read the press release way way way back before I started in audio production I was a publicist and the ambiguous viewing has doubled with no indication of what it has doubled from but once you get past that I think this is kind of fixing maybe some teething issues that Spotify were having with video when they first started there was a bit of backlash as i understand it from creators because uh spotify was very rigid in the way that it was monetizing video um but this feels like it's a change that brings it more in line with youtube and other video distributors i mean what it kind of means for for creators is it's like another revenue source right so um the partnership program means money comes from spotify sort of from their subscribers so it's sort of from the subscriber pot rather than the advertising pot so it's got new cash maybe on top of ads that you make from audio or other or other places it's quite a complex world for a for a creator now in the old days you just like sit in your bedroom record some audio and then a cast and send you a check now you've got to be in a lot of different places yeah i think uh you're uploading to spotify which has a slightly different and proprietary mechanism to the way that you update upload from youtube which is again different from how you upload for RSS.

5:48I think one of the changes they're making as part of this reducing the barrier to entry, if you like, is integrating with a lot more of those platforms to try and help address that issue. But yeah, it's incredibly complicated. Distribute many. Exactly. And Rebecca, this is very video focused for Spotify. They're known for audio, but video is very much the future for them, it seems. And we're seeing a lot of TV broadcasters as well kind of joining what used to be a kind of podcast only party and channel four putting content on there as well aren't they yes no absolutely and obviously um channel four have the partnership with them which is still kind of you know obviously when they announced it it was still very early days they're not really putting you know channel four aren't sort of saying this is our target in terms of numbers or cost or anything like that so it's still pretty early days but i think it is something that you know a lot more tv producers are looking at it going well we can do video we're good at this let's let's see what we can do about um uh you know about just getting this extra revenue stream um and it's interesting i was actually on the the briefing call that spotify did about this um and obviously kind of the you know you mentioned sort of uploading to youtube that there is kind of a a bit of a they were sort of saying oh we think it's additive we're not in competition with youtube uh we're not in competition with youtube because we think it's additive we're bringing more people in but a lot of the creators were saying they were making direct they had kind of creators answering questions and they were making quite direct comparisons of like oh this is better than youtube or this isn't or you know um so i thought that was quite interesting that it is sort of yeah traditionally an audio medium is moving into video because that's where you know sort of the interest is i saw i saw that briefing as well and to me it seemed like it was a sort of unprompted response from the creators that you're getting making money on youtube is quite hard and they're doing much better on spotify um and it just shows that there's a lot of different things to think about for for any for any creator i mean thomas when you think about your shows um and you think about new commissioning and thinking where this stuff's going do these sorts of changes or platforms make you change your views on that uh truthfully i was feeling a little guilty when you were talking about individual creators having to work all this stuff out because my default response for this is like we have a distribution team they are excellent uh they know the ins and outs of all of this stuff um but but yeah greg um alana india helen you know all of my colleagues on distribution are really staying on top of this kind of stuff so that they know how we're monetizing different types of content on different platforms and what's to our advantage and what can we test and which which shows um the thing that i i can't quite wrap my head around and it feels like maybe everyone is just in an experimentation phase is how this overlaps with Spotify licensing a bunch of stuff to Netflix maybe we're still just in the phase where even the tech platforms are kind of testing out how audiences are responding to all this stuff everyone is making a bunch of different bets and in two three years time everyone's priorities will start to settle down a little bit more and we'll know what goes where and for which type of content I mean you've got a situation where ringer shows on spotify uh video shows will now be on netflix as well but no longer on youtube yeah and you got not all ringer shows because amy polar you know it's just it's such a complicated and then you've got netflix podcast video podcast so something like the jimmy car podcast yeah the big pitch that's right that was one of us but that's not on netflix that's on youtube but filmed in such a way that if Netflix did decide they wanted to put it on Netflix it's all ready for them to go all formatted I mean you sort of feel like if the people that own the platforms aren't entirely sure what they're doing maybe it's okay for the rest of us also it's quite interesting that you mentioned it there some of the other platforms like Acast and Audioboom are going to integrate with this so you upload once I mean historically some of those platforms and Acast in particular been a bit nervous about Spotify's involvement and where they fit in because with the video creators they no longer get ads from acast so as soon as you upload your video version you stop getting the the audio ads from from acast which has given them pause but the acast boss was on the call wasn't he being very chirpy very very enthused by it they're very happy to be working together and very excited so yeah we'll we'll see what comes that as you say is that thing of you know what's happening with the advertising who's getting to see the advertising or listen to the advertising so yeah i guess we'll see i mean i'm still and i know i've complained to you guys about this before that like i used to quite enjoy the days of podcasting where i could turn up looking like something somebody had scraped off their shoe onto the side of a rock you know but say something oh shit so say something moderately competent and like people could just fill in how i looked and now i'm like gosh put some makeup on for this thing okay um so i you know i'm i'm and there is like a real age sort of isn't there of of who wants to just listen to their podcast because i like podcasts while i do the dishes and then and then I'll sit down and watch TV.

10:47So it's really interesting that those boundaries are blurring and, yeah, my tastes are not universal, it turns out. Who knew? Well, in the pod space over at Leicester Square, the newly created Global Studios have announced another big acquisition that's taken place. Rebecca, last year it was The Fellas. Who have they grabbed now? So this is Gary Neville's company, The Overlap, or a series of YouTube shows, The Overlap, which was him, Roy Keane, Scott Melvin and yeah that's kind of you know it's one of these things that you know some football pundits set up a podcast and you know were known as pundits and in some cases players previously and you know it's been very very popular and Global have gone yeah we'll have some of that A podcast network and YouTube network Yes, yes and it's interesting fellow studios being kind of very strong in YouTube I mean Global are really going for it They are, they are definitely And I think it's, you know, this will be a big chunk of what is going to represent Global Studios.

11:46So and yeah, it just it makes sense that so many more media companies, as we say, are investing in these visualized podcasts and in podcasting more generally. Which was another thing that kind of came off the Spotify call that one of the creators was sort of saying, forgive me, I forget which podcast he was from. But he was sort of saying like, actually, if you'd asked me a few years ago, I kind of was saying, well, the podcast market probably we're over the hump now. It's all downhill from here. And that's not been the case. it just is it does seem to be expanding and i think global are making the bets on that yeah they just um i've just seen that joe copeman who was one of the big bosses at a cast who left last year is going to be the commercial director of studios they haven't announced uh an md i hear they are on the lookout for one and a big hitter um people that have left recently people on my list we saw steve ackerman left sony we saw uh craig strachan left novel uh as did willard foxconn this week.

12:39Do you think they'd be interested in one of those or someone else? Yeah, good question. I think probably the kind of experience you need for that role is really, really narrow, because you've got to have an editorial understanding, real commercial now experience running a network. There aren't very many of those people, especially when you think about the UK. In the US, I think the pool is bigger but the market is obviously very different in the us you know the way that listeners engage with the content um so yeah i don't envy them trying to yeah the international youtube and youtube experience as well probably to um someone told me that the headhunters are offering a sizable salary for it so i think they really are after after a big hitter i mean with this with these sort of acquisitions and of course news agents and other things that global has I mean they're pushing themselves up to be one of the biggest networks in the UK probably after Goldhanger, after the BBC they're probably up there Thank you for that I was thinking about this and tell me if it's too sort of 30 ,000 foot but the thing that really interests me about this is that it feels like it says something really profound about commissioning that instead of risking much much smaller pots of money on a load of different shows to see which ones become hits actually a lot of that well i'm assuming it's commissioning budget maybe they're separate but a lot of that money is now being invested in acquiring shows that already have audience so you as the commissioner don't have to take any risks at all anymore and it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy where nobody is ambitious enough or risk-taking enough to commission something original i think a lot of established broadcasters journalists you know creators are getting frustrated maybe within existing organizations so they are leaving doing stuff on their own growing that audience and then getting a it's just do you know what i mean it's kind of like and it's different obviously and the scale is is is nothing to be compared but it feels like it's similar to what netflix is thinking about when they're acquiring warner brothers in the u.s that actually we're at a place now where everyone just wants to acquire security in a way.

14:59And that's what this acquisition felt like to me. Same with Fellas. I think they need scale to be one of the big boys. They need scale. I mean, you could say since the news agents, they haven't had a kind of a smash hit show. A lot of kind of smaller ones, but nothing really big. So buying rather than building seems the way to go. Yeah, sort of fewer, bigger proven, isn't it? Rather, fewer, bigger, better. Yeah. Yeah, that kind of thing. And we've sort of seen that a lot in TV in the last 12 to 18 months as well, haven't we? With broadcasters, commissioners saying, we want a big idea. Yes, yeah, we want a big idea, but preferably with talent already attached.

15:36And yeah, we want to take risks on something we know is going to do well. It's very much been the vibe. But yeah, it is that fewer, bigger, better mantra that kind of, I think, we were interesting. I forget what context, but I was looking up like, oh, the history of sort of fewer, bigger, better. Oh, it's for a big piece we did last year about sort of whether or not the commissioning process needs sort of revamping and whether it's broken. And I looked on the broadcast website for the first mention of Fewer, Bigger, Better. And I think it was 2010, but it's worth saying it's probably because the website doesn't go back that much further than that.

16:07I don't think that's why, but I think that's, you know, it's not a new one, but it certainly has taken off. And yeah, it's that warning security. Finally, just before the break, is someone taking your podcast revenue? PodNews reported this week on a curious new app called Podcast Adblock, which it alleges is copying podcasts, stripping the ads, and then selling them back to subscribers. Thomas, did you see this? Oh my God. I mean, the story is obviously dreadful, but James Cridland, the editor of PodNews, has a really acidic way of writing about some stories. And if there's anything enjoyable about this particular article, he points out that the creator of this particular app, as I understand it, It uses AI to scrape existing podcasts, remove all of the advertisers from them, and you pay, I don't know, two, three pounds a month for the privilege.

16:58Which isn't a super hard thing for technology to do. Right. They're in blocks. Probably the show notes will help you with some of these things. You probably have a sting to identify when to come in and out of the ad break. But the creator of this particular app also has another product for musicians, which includes some kind of poison pill into, you can tell, I really know what I'm talking about on the technology side of things. So you're just simplifying it for us. Exactly, yeah. On any music that they make so that AI can't scrape it and repurpose their content. And it's like, I don't understand how you as a creator can make both of these tools.

17:38I'm fully supportive of ad-free, subscription-based. I think that's a really interesting model. I think we should be spending as much time thinking about that as a lot of people are thinking about video but to do it stealing other people's content, charge and not make any of those payments back to the publishers it's astounding, it really is Also particularly when there are, for quite a lot of podcasts, ad free versions I think it's not a thing which doesn't happen If you don't want to have the ads you can opt out of them and pay someone, just not this dude Maybe the creator, yeah I went on to Reddit.

18:13So there's like a podcasting subreddit. And the people there were unhappy about this. Obviously, creators were unhappy. And basically, they were sort of saying, here's how you can do like takedown notices to like the hosting company of this guy and all these things. I'm intrigued whether creators themselves ensure that it stops. It sounds like one of those fun projects that gets launched that is quickly killed by the lawyers. yeah so it was interesting that the piece pointed out that like stripe that all these all these um payments are processed through stripe and stripe say look you can't be doing anything that's going to steal from copyright to process money through us so it'd be interesting to see if they come back and say yeah actually no but yeah it just it's so depressing because it's like well how are people supposed to have a business to run the content i understand finding ads annoying i understand not necessarily wanting to subscribe but like how do you how do you expect people to have jobs doing podcasting do you just want to listen to posh boys chat do you just want to listen to posh boys chat or do you want to actually hear a um you know hear the content from from a whole host of your favorite creatives like the thing that if i'm honest really worried me about it is i can probably see a world where people who don't work in the media or don't work in podcasting are like sure that makes sense i'll use that uh and that i think is very uh disorienting yeah i think that is what what worries me about it so much is that i do think there's a market for it because i mean we get it all the time with sort of paywalls where people go but this is quite an important story so do you think you put it in front of the paywall and you sort of think okay we'll just we'll leave the rubbish behind the paywall that nobody wants and you can pay for that like yeah it's it's uh yeah it's a difficult one uh okay when we return uh why media geeks are braced for Martin Clunes as you've never seen him before.

20:03I'll see you in a sec.

20:11Hello, Media Club listeners. Patrick here from Podcast Discovery, the podcast marketing company, where this week we've been thinking about 2026. It's already a big year for podcasting and we're only a week in. The Spotify Partner Programme just became much more accessible for creators like you and video integration is coming to the platform for ad networks like Acast and Audioboom. Untangle the web of podcast monetisation by getting in touch at podcastdiscovery.com. That's podcastdiscovery.com. If you want to take advantage of a shifting media landscape, then you really should contact Podshop Studios, where we record the media club every week.

20:49Each studio has its own distinct look and feel. This week we are back in Studio 3, the Instagram set, complete with matching sofas and coasters. there's a set for every style of podcast all professionally designed and fully equipped for broadcast quality video recording check out the whole range at podshoponline.co.uk and they're offering Media Club listeners 25 % off their first booking just head to the website and use the code MEDIACLUB, that's podshoponline.co.uk welcome back here's a few stories we've been talking about in the club this week all change at Virgin Radio as News UK have brought in Geoff Lloyd to host weekday evenings and post Hughie Morgan Morgan's weekend show from Six Music.

21:29Morgan's been at the beep for over 20 years. And Channel 5 has announced a two-part drama on the downfall of Hugh Edwards. The BBC's former newsreader will be played by Martin Clunes and covers the years when The Sun revealed Edwards had paid a teenager for sexual pictures. Links to all those stories are available on our weekly substat. You can get it for free at themediaclub.com. You also get our free newsletter from a Monday called Brief, to which reviews all the things that all the other media podcasts have been talking about. Sign up for free at themediaclub.com. So Rebecca and Thomas are still with me.

22:05Rebecca is Channel 5 sticking the knife into the BBC with this new production? I mean, it's a very Ben Frow commission, isn't it? It's very... So the head of content at Channel 5, Ben Frow is... He likes to... There's a kind of a cheeky side to him, let's say. Yes. so I mean I think there's an argument that this is you know this is quite uncomfortable subject matter because of you know what Hugh Edwards was convicted of but as a commission it's pretty good isn't it it's pretty attention grabbing I mean Wonderhood this is I believe this is their first drama so this is pretty big for them and they're a sort of very reptile very good company so like it's it's going to be interesting to see what comes of it and yeah it just does feel like there's a kind of just a little you know um uh not Machiavelli I don't know what the word I'm looking for is but just like devilish kind of yes uh troublemaking yes uh sense that um uh ben frow has here they issued a picture of um martin clunes did you see this pic yeah did you see it what did yes it oh so it's it's very much like the um the archetypal because there are not um because obviously pre-downfall we did feature hugh edwards at one point in the uh in the magazine and like there aren't actually that many photos of him knocking around but it was that one that you have definitely seen of Hugh Edwards, if you've seen a story about Hugh Edwards, sort of looking like, like leaning across the desk in the BBC studios.

23:27And they've kind of mocked up that. So it's got the kind of slight sort of one raised eyebrow. It's got the hair slicked back. It's, I mean, Martin Clones doesn't especially look like Hugh Edwards. He doesn't not look like Hugh Edwards. You know, they are probably the same type of human being in all the types of human being, you know, physically in appearance. And, but yeah, I think the thing that I actually have to kind of credit my colleague, marion mccue for pointing this out she was like i don't think the bbc tv studios have ever been that dark it's quite a dark photo so it's trying to kind of make it seem a bit sinister whereas you know this man was the most trusted face of news in britain i thought he looked more like andrew marr in the picture oh i see it i see it it's yeah it's the it's the forehead and the eyebrow and yeah i can kind of see that uh would you be watching then yeah i think so i think definitely um you know they were sort of saying that we've done a lot of research we've done a lot of interviews with um with people involved so i'll be curious to find out i honestly think it's going to be quite a tricky one to do though because a lot of it is stuff that was happening online and that's always difficult to try and convey on screen we're going to do on screen whatsapp messages we are like popping up or like yes sort of um probably the camera pans across the room a dark room and just the face is lit from the laptop screen or something um because the stuff that's going on screen, we obviously don't want to show.

24:47So I think it's going to be interesting to see how they handle that and how they try and make it transfer onto TV screen. And probably on a relatively tight budget. I don't know off the top of my head, but I think Channel 5 has kind of been making a bit of a niche for itself of trying to make drama at lower price points than other channels. So we will see. And it'll be a drama that's not on a cruise ship as well. It will, yes. Staying with the BBC Director General for the moment, Tim Davey and World Service Chief Jonathan Munro spoke to MPs on Thursday. Tom, this is the Public Accounts Committee, funding at the World Service is down 21 % in four years.

25:26What sort of changes do they talk about making? So as I understand it, this is obviously public service colleagues rather than their studio side, but there's been savings of about 49 million thereabouts over the last four or five years. and I think as a result of that a drop in listenership by about 13-14 % so there's a clear correlation that the more funding that's taken out of that part of the World Service you know the bigger the impact on audience numbers it's tricky because obviously you know we know there are an awful lot of pressures on government spending at the moment and I can't obviously answer the question as an impartial observer But to make these kind of cuts now at a time when or to have continued making these cuts for such a sustained period at a time where there is so much global conflict.

26:20You think about Ukraine. You think about all of the dreadful things that we've been witnessing in Palestine. You think about the Venezuelan news that broke, you know, just on Sunday or Saturday. I think about the work that colleagues are doing. we make a show with BBC News and BBC World Service called The Global Story. You know, that team is working incredibly hard to turn out some really insightful episodes about what's happening in Venezuela, what it means for Greenland. It's a shame, you know, I understand that there are pressures on the budget, but of course I'm going to advocate for, you know, more funding for the World Service.

26:58I mean, Tim Davies suggesting it should be doubled. Sure. Great. Let's do that. Is he deem up happy? He's like, I'll just say whatever I like. I mean, I'm sure there will have been calculations done with commissioners to try and work out what the appropriate level of spending is. But yeah, I'm not sure how they've arrived at those numbers. Rebecca, the government wants the World Service to exist. They want sort of a lot of soft power to be used. Surely let's just pay for it. I mean, yes. That's not a very interesting podcast answer, but yes. I think that soft PowerPoint is huge. Like, you know, it is so trusted as a brand.

27:36It does so much for us as a country where we perhaps don't have the best international relationships elsewhere. Having that voice in the middle of the night that just is telling you stories from all around the world is incredible and is really important. And yeah, I mean, like you're saying, they've made 48 million pounds worth of savings. They're kind of getting a little bit of a slap on the wrist for not making, I think it was something like 54 million pounds worth of savings. And you just think, actually, that's that's quite a lot of saving already yeah um you know i don't know they should get gold star for i don't know but it just it just feels like the idea that we can just keep cutting things to the bone and expect to still have something quality and to expect to still get the bonuses out of the the the plus points and the benefits of something um i just seems completely bonkers to me and and it's just it's depressingly common across media but also i always think from the government there's lots of sort of sudden requests can there be a service which goes to x and can And there'd be a certain excuse to work.

28:31And often that has extra funding, but you also need the infrastructure and the skill to be able to pop that up and to spend that money to reach a certain area. I mean, if you take away any flexibility, you don't have any of the options to do those things anymore. Yeah, and it's the relationships that the organisation has around the world that is, you know, is valuable and really hard to measure, but exists because they are doing this work, you know, outside of when they're being particularly asked to. you know I think yeah but yeah I think the point about Tim Davy asking for double like I wasn't I wasn't watching the committee a colleague of mine was but she just came off and went he is very spicy he just was just batting stuff back going no I'm not I don't care anymore yeah I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and no I'm not I hate all these meetings you forced me to do yeah and who can blame him yeah and Tom what's been happening at your neck of the woods what have you and your colleagues been working on at the moment ah well our PR team would probably kill me for announcing too much but um we are on the cusp of signing uh what is going to be an absolutely enormous show uh when we can announce that it'll run for about two years uh it's a big big format that uh kind of straddles uk and us i think it's going to be incredibly exciting i wish i could say it's history why don't we uh why don't we start there but audio audio and video it's audio yeah audio for now uh video tbc um but that will be really exciting and literally as we were on our way here.

29:59Good. Broadcasters here for all your press. Of course. Oh, one more I should say. I don't know if anyone listened to a show made by a colleague of mine, Ghost Story, by Annie Brown. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Things Fell Apart by producer Sarah Shebbia. I didn't list that, but it's on my list. It's excellent. The two of them have teamed up with Helena Merriman, who did Tunnel 29. On Monday, we're going to be releasing a political thriller called The History Bureau, which looks at some apartment bombings in Russia. I've listened to the first four episodes. It's astonishing. It's so gripping. It's brilliant.

30:37One to listen out for. OK, just enough time for the Audio Network Media Quiz.

30:45Three media stories connected by one theme and then shoehorned into the format of an existing media property. This week, it's top of the charts. the new year, bring some interesting consumer data from 2025, as well as the return of one of the BBC's longest running brands, Top of the Pops, for a one-off special. So I'll give you the description of a 2025 show in the style of Mark Goodyear. You tell me what the show is. And once again, Alex from Audio Network has taken that brutally weak brief from producer Matt and created a playlist to score today's game. It's the best of three. So buzz in with your names if you know the story so Rebecca you will say Rebecca and Thomas you will say Tom let's play top of the charts apologies Mark Gadeer in a number one with an audience of 15 million this celeb series beat fireworks in a one take wonder Rebecca yes uh celebrity choices yep uh tv's most watched show in the UK last year um uh Netflix's adolescence was up there as well two million fewer viewers.

31:49Matt, can I just say, I've completely forgotten how to play the game because I nearly offered it to Rebecca when I could see you. I just said, I was like, wait, I do that. Not how you're supposed to do it. It's a new year, we're all friendly. That's okay. And obviously the regular version back at the moment, which has had some ratings have just kind of come in for week one and they're pretty good as well. Yeah, yeah, it's looking pretty strong. It's not dropping off anytime soon. Okay, here's chart number two. This one is the BBC Sounds podcast chart. So Tommy might have an advantage here. A new entry just behind Newscast and AmeriCast, this story collection.

32:25Tom, yes. This is brilliant because I have a soft spot for fiction podcasts. This was a series of Sherlock Holmes short stories narrated by Hugh Bonneville, lightly sound designed. They are brilliant. Very, very traditional, cosy crime. So it's a noisy show. It is, yeah, an acquisition by sound. It's quite interesting, like there are some shows which exist in the sort of public's perception. And it sort of, it was available on RSS with Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And then it's sort of been acquired by sound and kind of gets a second life. I guess that's, there's different audiences kind of coming to things at different times.

33:05Yeah, I can't quite put my finger on it. I think if you're, maybe this is unfair to Edison, but a lot of those trackers of the most popular seem to remain fairly static. This felt like it burned quite bright, shot up the RSS charts and has obviously performed really well on sounds but maybe not quite enough of a sustained listenership to really punch through that Edison top 15. There's also something about Sherlock Holmes just being perpetually popular so people aren't necessarily talking about it but people will click on it. You know, Goldhanger has a Sherlock Holmes sort of modern adaptation as well and there's so many different...

33:39I've never listened, is it? It's fun, actually. Yeah, there's a couple of bits where they're obviously spinning out the stories a little bit for the episodes. But it is actually quite good fun. Great. And is Sherlock Holmes sort of back in public ownership? So there was a thing for a while where, because Conan, this is really geeky, but where Conan Doyle, as he got a bit older, and I think his son died, and he just got a bit, he softened Sherlock Holmes up. He made him a bit kinder in some of the later stories. and there was a period where the earlier stories where he's quite brutal and quite severe were in public domain and the later ones weren't.

34:17So if your Sherlock Holmes was too nice, you were in trouble with the corporate bros that owned the copyright. I don't know. I think that might have run out now, but there was a period where if you had a nice Sherlock Holmes, you were in trouble. Otherwise, you were fine. I love that combination. Brilliant. Okay, one more to go. this is the streamers chart as compared by Deadline. Amazon Prime's got a new entry in the charts at five but with 6.2 million tuning in it's no laughing matter. Oh, oh, Rebecca. This is Last One Laughing. Yes. It's just done phenomenally well and is, I think, was one of those ones where you kind of went yeah, it could be fun and then it just, and particularly like, you know, when you work in TV or you write about TV you kind of hear about these shows as they come up and it's when your friends start going oh have you seen this?

35:08and they just mention it spontaneously do you know who Bob Mortar is? also Amazon Prime doesn't tend to have a lot of breakout hits no and particularly in this format this kind of comedy entertainment format which I think people have been a little bit worried about for various can you see it as a slightly deconstructed panel show maybe I think there's a version they could have done where it was just two panels opposite each other would I lie to you style you know so that there is it's kind of got the dna of a slightly older show that perhaps people you know were more of a schedule filler for the more traditional shows so it's quite surprising for a lot of reasons that it's done quite well but it's because it's just a lot of fun and it's back soon i guess it is you know when uh i don't off the top of my head it is relatively soon i know it's got bob mortimer is returning to defend his crown so that'll be a lot of fun uh um do you know what the other entry from Amazon in the chart was?

35:58I want to say it's like I'm going to get the title completely wrong it's called like Good Girls Gone Bad or some The Summer I Turn. It's not that it's Clarkson's Farm. Oh no way. Of course yeah. Quickly we forget. And with young people in particular Clarkson's Farm does so well I think was the surprise that with that 16 to 34s it consistently just performs really, really well. I don't know what I'm watching. Well, that makes Rebecca our winner. Congratulations. You get to take the early out-of-copper episodes of the Media Club and turn those into a big new drama series. The ones where you were really mean, Matt.

36:35Yeah, only the mean Matt's allowed. I'm nice, nice, fluffy. Who are we casting as Matt? Bob Mortimer. Of course, Matt. My thanks to Rebecca and Tom. Thanks again to Alex at Audio Network for supplying today's music. Remember, Audio Network can do this for you too. Just head to audionetwork.com and there's a link in the show notes as well. So how can people keep up with your good work? God, it sounds so dull. I'm mostly on LinkedIn, I suppose. A little bit of blue sky, but not really. Rebecca? So you can find me at broadcastnow.co.uk, LinkedIn, blue sky, Instagram. And a personal plea, I feel like I'm always coming on this going, please feel, but that's because I do a lot of surveys with my job.

37:16So this one's the big one. It's the indie survey. open today. So this is our annual survey of all the production companies, or as many production companies as we can in the industry. And we ask kind of how they're doing, but also, you know, what their opinions are about the industry. And it's a huge piece of work. It's, you know, we get the more we get, the better it is, and the more sort of interesting it is to read. So please, please do visit broadcastnow.co.uk and sign up to that because we'd love to hear from you. Yes, if that's you, broadcast now.co.uk. Thanks for listening and watching. My name's Matt Deegan.

37:50The producer was Matt Hill. It was a Rethink Audio production with video support from Podcast Discovery. We'll see you next week.

38:05So retrospectors, what historical events are we ticking off on this week's run of Today in History? On Monday, the anniversary of the treason scandal that divided France. On Tuesday, we explain how America fell in love with ice rinks. On Wednesday, they didn't come from Harlem and they didn't travel the world, but the Harlem Globetrotters still broke the mould. On Thursday, Britain's first black member of parliament, who was surprisingly pro-slavery. And on Friday, long before the national mourning for Princess Diana, the nation stopped for Lord Nelson's funeral. That's Today in History with the Retrospectives, 10 minutes each weekday, wherever you get your podcasts.