Spotify Announces Memberships, The 2026 Signal Award Winners, & More

Today in the business of podcasting:

• Spotify has unveiled Memberships, letting creators offer exclusive content and community perks for a fee, with creators keeping 90% of earnings and shows needing 100 consumption hours, 100 listeners or viewers and three episodes to qualify.
• Bumper released a free tool for sharing YouTube engaged views with advertisers, after YouTube’s late-August change roughly doubled average podcast views without any audience growth.
• The Streaming Wars looks at Disney’s new company-wide partnership with Dude Perfect and what it says about paying for contracted revenue instead of speculative growth.
• The Signal Awards named their winners, with Good Hang with Amy Poehler taking gold and the listener’s choice prize for Best Host.
• Apple explained its Safari block on identity resolution companies, which affects LiveRamp, ID5, The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0, Permutive and Audigent.

To find links to these, and every article covered in today’s episode, click here. You can also subscribe to The Download’s newsletter to receive the full issue straight to your email inbox every day.