#when he moves out to la he just gets too busy. Updates become shorter and stretched further apart

[dryersheetbear]

i know at least by the finale he doesnt think troys coming back but i have decided abed keeps a note in his notes app of things to watch with troy/stuff to tell him juuuuust in case. the note is so fucking long by now.

I think britta told him to start it at one point, not too long after troy left and abed didnt really care to much to do it but eventually it becomes a habit. something cool happens? something mundane that troy still would’ve been happy to hear happens? someone said something funny? etc., its in the note

at one point he just starts putting all of his thoughts about every new episode of inspector spacetime into it. he adds small details like “got a new shirt” next to bigger Shenanigans like “ran out of gas in an RV in the middle of nowhere with a giant hand strapped to the top of it. flashing back didn’t help.”

anything he’d would’ve told to or experienced with troy he adds to the note. eventually britta notices that he regularly pulls out his phone and Types for a While and she is so impressed with herself because of it

[whattimeisitintokyo]

Somos Familia Chapter 34: PART 1

So I’ve been writing the next chapter to Somos Familia and it’s become clear to me that this chapter is going to be... longer than usual. Like it’s already 4000 words and it’s not even half done. But since it’s been so long since I last updated I decided to post the first part here and then post it on AO3 and FF,Net when it’s actually done. So enjoy the first part of the new chapter.

Chapter 34: No Me Dejas

 Julio tenderly held onto Coco as she wept brokenly into his arms. Despite his firm grip on her he was unable to stop the terrified trembling that shook her entire body. Probably because he could not stop shaking himself. He had been there in the audience when it had all happened. Sitting next to his mother-in-law, both in elegant formal wear, he leaned his cheek onto his hand as he dreamily watched Coco dance and sing with her godfather. However, when the final song came on his brow had furrowed with confusion. Having seen the previous rehearsals, he had fully expected Coco to join Ernesto in Remember Me, only to watch Coco slink in between the other dancers and join them as Ernesto sung by himself.

What he didn’t expect was for the giant bell prop to snap from the overhead fixture and crash down on top of the escalator, right where Ernesto had been standing and belting out the last triumphant note, leaving behind a giant crater underneath the bell and a fluttering blue sombrero.

While Mamá Imelda had gasped and was frozen in horrified shock, Julio was up and out of his seat immediately dashing for the stage, barely making it past the heavy curtains as they hurriedly slid close to hide the grisly site. Passing screaming, hysterical dancers he made his way to his wife and grabbed her by her shoulders as she sank to the ground in horror. Frantically he asked her if she was all right, flinching back as Coco let out a piercing scream as she stared up to the top of the escalator. Following her gaze he saw several stage hands crowd around the bell hesitantly, unsure of what to do or even how to begin to move the giant obstacle from the celebrity.

All except Héctor.

Julio watched open-mouthed as his father-in-law flung himself across the bell and fruitlessly try to push and then pull the bell off of Ernesto, with Vicente right behind him trying to pull him off the bell. On top of all the frantic screaming and shouting coming from the people backstage, Héctor’s rang the loudest at a blood-curdling level. But not the clearest. Besides of few cries of ‘Ernesto!’ Julio was able to pick up, Héctor’s words were an indecipherable mess of wails and screams. His face was horrifying as he strained against the bell and screamed as loud as he could, tears streaming down from his wild and crazed eyes.

Héctor looked like he had lost his mind.

“Papá!” Coco cried out, snapping Julio’s attention back at her and trying to pull her away from ascending the escalator. “Papá! Tio Nesto!”

“Coco, no!” Julio pulled his wife to his feet and tried to drag her away. “Don’t go up there!”

“Papá-!”

“Coco, go with Julio now!”

The young couple were startled to see Imelda marching over to them with her skirts hiked up and a dangerous, no-nonsense look in her eyes. Julio was amazed that Imelda had managed to force her way through the thick curtains with no issue, but not really surprised. Mamá Imelda was a force to be reckoned with even in the most peaceful of times.

“Julio, take her backstage and away from all of this. I’ll deal with Héctor.”

Julio didn’t need to be told twice. He easily led Coco away from the stage, barely glimpsing as Imelda started to race up the ruined escalator towards her husband and hearing the anguished cries of Héctor fade away as they wove their way back to Coco’s dressing room. That was where they had been for the last half hour, with Julio gently holding his wife as she wept as much as she could until she was finally able to find her words again.

“Oh Julio!” she hiccupped and buried her face into his shoulder. “I can’t believe it! Poor Tio Nesto!”

Julio gave a sweet kiss against Coco’s hot, wet cheek and whispered to her in a soothing manner. “I know, I know. It’ll be alright.”

“He could be alright, right?! He could just be inside the bell, right?!”

“I don’t know, Coco.”

“Oh, Julio!” Coco’s face shot up and she stared wild-eyed at her husband. “I was supposed to be up there with him!”

“But you weren’t-”

“Only because I changed my mind at the last second!” she screeched and dissolved into another wave of hysterical sobbing. “I’m so sorry Julio! I could have died and you would have seen it! And Mamá and Papá! And Victoria would have lost her mamá forever! I’m sorry! So sorry!”

Julio couldn’t help the shudder that went down his spine nor the sick clenching of his stomach. With a hard shake of the head he dashed away the image of his wife’s lifeless body from his mind and held her closer, as if the reaffirm that she was well and truly safe in his arms. “Don’t worry about that, mi amor. I’ve got you… I’m here.”

“I quit.”

The whisper was so soft and broken by her trembling voice that Julio almost didn’t register it. With a slow blink his brain paused to register what Coco had said and what she had truly meant. “Que?”

“I quit, Julio.” With a trembling breath she pulled away from his embrace to look him square in the face. “Acting. Show business. I can’t take it anymore.” With each word she said Coco looked like she was gaining more strength and confidence. He shoulders squared and she nodded to herself in slow affirmation. “I just wanted to dance, but… It’s not worth it. I’ve wanted to quit for a long time! It has brought me nothing but trouble with the public and estrangement from my family. I’m becoming a stranger to my own daughter! I’ve neglected you as a wife! And now this! I could have-!... I want to come home to you and Victoria. To Santa Cecilia! Perdonome, mi amor! Por favor…”

This was not the time to be smiling. Coco had just possibly seen her godfather get crushed to death. She was reeling from a near death experience herself. It was selfish of him to feel the euphoric triumph of his wife finally deciding that even though she was an international star, she was just not made for the spotlight after all. But he couldn’t help it. As the terrible weight of the past year finally lifted from his chest and seeing his Coco looking at him with those large, watery eyes full of love, his face split into a huge grin.

He cupped her face and kissed her gently on the lips, both of their eyes closing and tears spilling down their cheeks. “Mi Coco. All I’ve ever wanted was for you to do what you loved. What made you happy.”

Coco looked down at her lap, ashamed. “I thought that dancing would make me happy on the big screen… But it’s nothing compared to dancing with you in Mariachi Plaza.”

They sat there hugging for a few more minutes, Julio kissing his wife and letting her cry out a few more tears as he whispered sweet words to her. Wiping underneath her eyes and sighing deeply to get a hold of her emotions, she nodded determinedly to Julio. “It’s done then. As of right now, I quit.”

“I think not.”

A harsh, no-nonsense voice broke through and startled Julio and Coco from their moment of peace. Theresa stood there with arms crossed and a raised brow as she smugly smiled at her client. At her prey. “You signed a three-year contract with Rivera de la Cruz Productions. You’ve still got two years to go. And besides that, no one will let you leave without resigning. You are in too high demand.”

“The hell with that!” Julio shot to his feet and glared at the pompous woman who had been the bane of his existence for the past year. Never in his life did he ever feel like he could hate someone so much, much less a woman significantly shorter than even his admittedly small stature. But tonight was the last straw, and he was not holding back anymore. “You have a lot of nerve coming here, to face my wife, after what could have happened under your suggestion! She would have been under that bell and you would have been to blame!”

Theresa merely rolled her eyes and clicked her tongue. “There’s was no way that I could foresee a stage mishap, Señor Magallanes.” Dismissing him with a wave of her hand she walked towards Coco and gave a simpering smile. “But I can foresee a great opportunity in this, Coco. You can be the star witness in the tell-all story of the death of Señor de la Cruz.”

Coco gasped and her eyes filled with tears again. Bringing a hand up to her mouth, she whispered. “So, he really is dead?”

Theresa paused a little, and if Julio didn’t know any better it looked like she was deliberately trying to build up the tension of the situation. “Unfortunately. The bell was raised just a short while ago. Señor Rivera saw the whole thing and collapsed. He’s being taking to the hospital right now.”

Coco gasped again with fright. “Dios mio, Papá!” Frantically she began ripping off the elaborate decorations in her hair and flung them to the ground. “Julio, we need to go to the hospital now! Papá has been so sick lately! I need to be there for him! Help me get out of this costume!”

Before she could start to take off her jewelry, Theresa roughly grabbed her wrists and commanded her attention. “That can wait, the doctors will take care of him. Coco, we need to take advantage of this! The world needs to hear your statement while the moment is still new and raw. Your exact feelings at this exact moment!”

Coco gaped and sputtered, her mind in turmoil. “How?!... I can’t possibly!- Not now!”

“Get your hands off of her!” Julio growled and drew Coco towards him and away from the shrew. “Her godfather just died and her father is sick and in shock! The world can wait for her pinche statement any other day!”

Theresa scoffed. “You have no idea how show business works! The news will be stale by tomorrow morning! I need her statement to give to press and I need it now!”

“Well then why don’t you write it?”

The three of them turned their heads to the new voice. Vicente stood there like a towering figure, a welcome presence in this toxic atmosphere. His face was drawn and tight as well as slightly pale with a slight sheen of sweat. He had been there when the bell had finally managed to be lifted from the top of the escalator. He had seen... what was left of the most famous singer in all of Mexico. He was the one who had caught Héctor as he collapsed towards the ground, screaming until his eyes had rolled over white and he became silent.

It seemed like time had slowed down as he had tried to shake Héctor awake. His employers’ breathing was slow and stuttering, his lungs trying to hack up fluid even in his unconscienced state. When he was finally whisked away by a medical team with his wife hovering by his side, his brain finally started to work again, and his first thought was to get away from the gory site before he ended up fainting too. His second thought had been to see if Coco was alright.

He wasn’t sure why he sought out the room he knew that Theresa had been using as a makeshift office instead of Coco’s dressing room. Maybe he figured that Theresa would have managed to snatch her talons on her as soon as possible in order to capitalize on the excitement. He knew now that her husband had gotten to her first, but he was glad he went to that room anyway. For he had seen on the desk something that had been very interesting to him for the past few months now: Theresa’s ever-present clipboard with a thick, bulging packet of notes that she was always scribbling into. How sloppy of her to leave something so precious lying around. Despite the horrible circumstances, Vicente Calles was not about to leave a golden opportunity like this to be let go.

So he had picked it up and quickly read through it. And oh, what a prize it had been.

“I mean after all,” Vicente said as he held up the clipboard and waved it for them to see. “You’ve seen to have plenty of practice doing that anyway.”

Theresa’s smug expression faded into panicked horror and her face drained to a sickly gray color as she saw what he was holding. “Where did you get?!-”

“Coco, remember that interview you don’t recall ever giving to that magazine two months ago. You know, where you describe your dream man and what you look for in a relationship that was the exact opposite of your own husband and marriage?” Vicente flipped through a few pages and stopped at a certain spot. “Well either Theresa has taken up the habit of copying your interviews word for word, or this is the rough draft of the whole thing. And when I flip the page here’s the revision. And drafts of several other of your other interviews that you never did that made it to print.”

“Give that back!” Theresa roared as she lunged for the clipboard. But Vicente used his height to his advantage and easily sidestepped out of the way.

“And you know your stalker Emilio Aguado?”

“He;s not a stalker! He’s the President of the Coco Fan Club!” Theresa screamed.

“… Your stalker Emilio Aquado? Well here several listings in her agenda to set up meetings with a certain Emilio A. Along with several other well-known paparazzo with money signs next to their names. Dating back several months! Theresa has been milking you for all your worth, Coco.”

It would have been comical to see Vicente leaping and hopping all over the furniture as he dodged the irate manager whilst reading undisturbed through the clipboard, but Coco was staring in jaw-dropped shock as her trust in her manager was well and truly broken and destroyed with every word that came out of Vicente’s mouth. And Julio was slowly seeing red.

“Theresa…” Coco whispered in horror. “Is that true?”

Theresa gave up her fight for the clipboard, especially when she discovered that not even her feeble punches could knock Vincente nor the board down, and drew back up straight after catching her breath. Smoothing back her disheveled hair, she tried to muster up any amount of dignity and sway that she might still have. “Coco… I was only trying to increase your star appeal. That’s what a manager does.”

“But Emilio…” Coco said with a shudder. “And the paparazzi… They chased us so often. Even in places that were supposed to be safe… Victoria scraped her knee…”

“Fired…”

The growled out word shook Coco to her core. She had never heard her husband speak in such a threatening and intimidating way, nor did she ever see such intense hatred in his eyes. But even if she was a little scared seeing her normally timid, gentle husband look so savagely angry, a part of her couldn’t help but feel a little… titillated.

Theresa blinked in perplexed astonishment as the word finally registered to her. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Fired…” Julio strained out the word again through tightly clenched teeth and slowly walked towards the woman with fire in his eyes.

Theresa huffed haughtily and crossed her arms. “You have no authority to fire me, Señor Magallanes.”

Vicente chuckled. “Oh, I think it safe to say that you are without a doubt fired from not only being Coco’s manager, but also from Rivera de la Cruz once Héctor learns what you’ve been up to. I hope you made a pretty peso selling out your client, your going to need every bit of it once we take you to court.”

“You can’t!”

“The only reason…” Julio said as he stuck a finger in Theresa’s pale face. “… That I don’t throttle you on the spot is because I promised my Mamá on her deathbed that I would never hurt a woman.”

“I don’t mind, querido.” Coco piped in.

Vicente nodded. “Si, knock yourself out amigo.”

Julio paid them no mind. As he bore down on the detestable woman, he pointed out the door and snarled into her pug-nosed face, “Get…. OUT!”

Theresa backed away like a cornered animal, nervously glancing at all three of them, before bolting out of the room and down the hall like the coward that she was. Julio went out into the hall to make sure she was out of their sights and huffed out a harsh sigh of relief. It wouldn’t be the last time he would see her, because Vicente was right. There was no doubt that she would go to court to face what she had done. But for now, the toxic harpy that had been preying on his wife for a year was gone, and his family was safe for good.

Letting his heart rate get back down to normal and his breathing under control, he walked back into the dressing room… And did not like what he saw.

“So, there’s nothing that can be done about my contract?” Coco looked up at Vicente helplessly with both of her hands in his.

Vicente hummed thoughtfully. “Well you did sign a three-year contract, and despite what your father might say in your defense there are several teams of lawyers who will make sure that you stay for the full term…” Looking down at Coco’s stricken face he paused and then smiled warmly. “But I don’t see why you can’t fulfill your obligations by just making a few short films for the war effort with several, very long vacations in between. I think you’ve earned some rest and relaxation, especially after what’s happened tonight.”

Coco smiled brightly and gratefully hugged Vicente. “Gracias Vicente! For everything you’ve done, with Papá and with Theresa. You are so kind.”

Vicente smiled softly and returned the hug. “Well, it’s my job to help the Rivera’s. And even if it wasn’t, I would always try to help you Coco. With anything.”

That’s it!

“Ahem, Coco.” Julio gritted out, trying to keep his voice as soft as possible. “We should really head for the hospital now. You should get dressed into your regular clothes.”

“Ah, si!” Coco stepped out of the embrace and wiped her eyes. “I’ll get changed and then we’ll leave at once.”

“We’ll wait outside.” Vicente said and left the room to step out into the hall with Julio. With a long, exhausted moan he ran his hand through his hair and leaned against the wall. “Ay Dios mio…I cannot wait for this night to be over. I feel like I aged twenty years just within the last hour… But you really showed that puta what for, eh amigo? I’m really impressed-”

“I’m only going to say this once, cabrón.”

Vicente’s good natured-grin froze on his face with a little twitch and his brow furrowed. “… Que?”

“Coco is my wife, Señor Calles.” Julio snapped out. “And it was not an easy task to get her to marry me, let me assure you. I am not a handsome man. I am not tall. I do not bring in enough money to even compete with the enormous wealth that the Riveras make. And for the longest time Coco didn’t even like being in the same room with me. I had to earn her love through literal blood, sweat and tears. And I’m not about to let some dashing pendejo come in and take her away from me. I will fight anyone who tries to.”

Vicente’s eyes widened in comprehension, and a weak chuckle escaped his throat. “Señor Magallanes, I can assure you that I-”

“I know that in this business, in this city even, that the sanctity of marriage means nothing to big shots like you.” Julio said. “But it does to me. It does in Santa Cecilia. And you can ask any person living there that despite all the money, glitz and glamor you can try to entice Coco with… It pales in comparison to the love that I feel for her… I love her, Vicente... Please tell me you understand… that you and her will never, ever be.”

For several moments the two men stared at each other: Julio with bold determination, Vicente with wide-eyed astonishment. Just as Julio was certain he would have to try to convince him further that his sights on his acquiring Coco was fruitless, Vicente sighed deeply and nodded sadly.

“Si… You are right, Señor Magallanes. I understand.” He placed his hand over his heart and Julio was just a little saddened to see the pain flit over Vicente’s face. “Coco loves you… despite my valiant efforts to prove myself to her. Your love is truly one of a kind and from now on… I will respect that and keep my relationship with her purely professional.”

Julio sighed in relief and nodded: The man sounded truly genuine. He let his tense frame relax finally and held out a hand towards the poor suitor. “Gracias… No hard feelings?”

Vicente smiled a little and took the offered hand. “Never. All that matters is that Coco is happy and well loved. I wish you and your family all the best.”

It wasn’t long before Coco finally came out of the dressing room and changed into her street clothes. “I’m ready, mi amor. Let’s go… And gracias again for everything, Chente.”

“De nada, Coco. Go on down to the hospital. I’ll be down there as soon as I can.” Vicente kept the soft smile on his face as he watched Coco and Julio hurry down the hallway arm-in arm. It was only when they rounded the corner and were out of earshot that he let himself collapse against the wall, slowly slide down it until he was crumpled on the floor, and break out into hysterical, barely suppressed…

Laughter.

“AY DIOS MIO! HA HA HA!... Pinche idiota!”

Maybe it was the shock and the stress of the day that had finally broken him, as normally he would have never let himself dissolve into such maniacal tittering. But the whole situation was just too funny, and he had played the part of the heartbroken, lovesick fool extremely well if he didn’t say so himself. Maybe he should have been and actor instead of getting into business!

Julio actually believed that he was in love with Coco!

No, scratch that!

He believed he was in love with a woman!

“Ay, joder!” Vicente giggled as he wiped the tears from his eyes. “Gracias, Señor Magallanes! I really needed that!” Panting as his laughing spell finally passed he slumped against the wall and closed his eyes, his smile slowly fading as the more tragic aspects of the day came back into mind.

Ernesto de la Cruz was dead.

Héctor Rivera was in the hospital probably fighting for both his life and his sanity.

And the fate of the whole company was anybody’s guess at this point, with hundreds of jobs on the line.

As he sat in the hallway pondering all these dreadful things that had been thrown at him within the last hour, all Vicente wanted to do was curl up in his bed with a bottle of tequila and in the arms of his beloved Javier.

THAT’S PART 1. The next part will focus on Héctor. Hopefully I’ll get to to it soon.

[technicalsolutions88]

Having established itself as a top streaming service with now over 200 million users, Spotify this year is preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts. The company plans bring its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better recommendations, update its app’s interface so people can access podcasts more easily, and broker more exclusives with podcast creators. It’s also getting into the business of selling ads within podcasts, as a means of generating revenue from this increasingly popular form of audio programming.

In fact, Spotify has already begun to dabble in podcast ad sales, ahead of this larger push.

Spotify, we’ve learned, has been selling its own advertisements in its original podcasts since mid-2018 year, including in programs like Spotify Original “Amy Schumer Presents: 3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “The Joe Budden Podcast,” “Dissect,” “Showstopper,” and others. With more exclusives planned for the year ahead, the portion of Spotify’s ad business focused on podcasts will also grow.

The company appears to be taking a different approach to working with podcasters than it does with it comes to working with music artists.

Today, Spotify gives artists tools that help share their work and be discovered – it invested in distribution platform DistroKid, for example, and now lets artists submit tracks for playlist consideration. With podcasters, however, Spotify wants to either bring their voices in-house, or at least exclusively license their content.

“Over the last year, we become very focused on building out a great podcast universe,” said Head of Spotify Studios Courtney Holt, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. “The first step was to make sure that we’ve got the world’s best podcasts on Spotify, and integrated the experience into the service in a way that allowed people to build habits and behavior there,” he said.

“What we started to see is that the types of podcasts that really were working on Spotify were ones where they were really authentic voices…so we just decided to invest more in those types of voices,” Holt added.

Spotify’s collection of originals has been steadily growing over the past year. Last August, for example, Spotify nabbed an exclusive deal with the “Joe Budden” podcast, which is aimed at hip-hop and rap culture fans, and launched its first branded podcast, “Ebb & Flow,” focused on hip-hop and R&B. Its full original lineup today also includes “Dissect,” Amy Schumer’s “3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “Mogul,” “The Rewind with Guy Raz,” “Showstopper,” “Unpacked,” “Crimetown” (Its first season was wide, second season is exclusive to Spotify), “UnderCover,” and “El Chapo: El Jefe y su Juicio.”

At CES, Spotify announced the addition of one more –  journalist Jemele Hill is coming Spotify with an exclusive podcast called “Unbothered,” which will feature high-profile guests in sports, music, politics, culture, and more.

In growing its collection of originals, the company found that podcasters who joined Spotify exclusively were actually able to grow their audience, despite leaving other distribution platforms.

For example, the Joe Budden podcast had its highest streaming day ever after joining Spotify.

This has led Spotify to believe that influencers in the podcast community will be able to bring their community with them when they become a Spotify exclusive, and then further grow their listener base by tapping into Spotify’s larger music user base and, soon, an improved recommendation system.

There are other perks for Spotify, too – when users come to Spotify and begin to listen to podcasts, they often then spend more time engaged with the app, it found.

“People who consume podcasts on Spotify are consuming more of Spotify – including music,” said Holt. “So we found that in increasing our [podcast] catalog and spending more time to make the user experience better, it wasn’t taking away from music, it was enhancing the overall time spent on the platform,” he noted.

While chasing exclusive deals to bring more original podcasts to Spotify will be a big initiative this year, Spotify will continue to offer its recently launched podcasts submission feature to everyone else.

With this sort of basic infrastructure in place, Spotify now wants to help users discover new podcasts and improve the listening experience.

One aspect of this will involve pointing listeners to other podcast content they may like.

For instance, Spotify could point Joe Budden fans to other podcasts about hip-hop and rap. It will also leverage its multi-year partnership with Samsung to allow listeners pick up where they left off in an episode as they move between different devices. And it will turn its personalization and recommendation technology to podcasts – including the ads in the podcasts themselves.

“Think about what we’ve done around music – the more understand you around the music you stream, the more we can personalize the ad experience. Now we can take that to podcasts,” said Brian Benedik, VP and Global Head of Advertising Sales at Spotify, when asked about the potential for Spotify selling ads in podcasts.

The company has been testing the waters with its own podcast ad sales since mid 2018, Benedik said. The sales are handled in-house by Spotify’s ad sales team for the time being.

Benedik had also appeared on a panel this week at CES, where he talked about the value of contextual advertising – meaning, ads that can be personalized to the user based on factors like mood, behavior and moments. This data could be appealing to podcast advertisers, as well.

But to scale its efforts around podcast ads, Spotify will need to invest in digital ad insertion technology. We’re hearing that Spotify is currently deciding whether that’s something it wants to build in-house or acquire outright.

Spotify’s rival Pandora went the latter route. It closed on the acquisition of adtech company Adswizz in May 2018, then introduced capabilities for shorter, more personalized ads in August. By November, Pandora announced it was bringing its Genome technology to podcasts, which allowed for a recommendation system.

Now Spotify aims to catch up.

The addition of podcasts has reoriented Spotify’s focus as company, Holt said.

“We’re an audio company. We’re trying to be the world’s best audio service,” he told the audience at CES. “It’s a pure play for us. We’re seeing increased engagement; there’s great commercial opportunities from podcasting that we’ve never seen on the platform…And, obviously, exclusives are to give us something that makes the platform truly unique – to have people come to Spotify for something you can’t get anywhere else is the sort of cherry on top of that entire strategy,” Holt said.

Image credits: Spotify

from Mobile – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2THfdWS ORIGINAL CONTENT FROM: https://techcrunch.com/

[sheminecrafts]

Spotify’s increased focus on podcasts in 2019 includes selling its own ads

Having established itself as a top streaming service with now over 200 million users, Spotify this year is preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts. The company plans bring its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better recommendations, update its app’s interface so people can access podcasts more easily, and broker more exclusives with podcast creators. It’s also getting into the business of selling ads within podcasts, as a means of generating revenue from this increasingly popular form of audio programming.

In fact, Spotify has already begun to dabble in podcast ad sales, ahead of this larger push.

Spotify, we’ve learned, has been selling its own advertisements in its original podcasts since mid-2018 year, including in programs like Spotify Original “Amy Schumer Presents: 3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “The Joe Budden Podcast,” “Dissect,” “Showstopper,” and others. With more exclusives planned for the year ahead, the portion of Spotify’s ad business focused on podcasts will also grow.

The company appears to be taking a different approach to working with podcasters than it does with it comes to working with music artists.

Today, Spotify gives artists tools that help share their work and be discovered – it invested in distribution platform DistroKid, for example, and now lets artists submit tracks for playlist consideration. With podcasters, however, Spotify wants to either bring their voices in-house, or at least exclusively license their content.

“Over the last year, we become very focused on building out a great podcast universe,” said Head of Spotify Studios Courtney Holt, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. “The first step was to make sure that we’ve got the world’s best podcasts on Spotify, and integrated the experience into the service in a way that allowed people to build habits and behavior there,” he said.

“What we started to see is that the types of podcasts that really were working on Spotify were ones where they were really authentic voices…so we just decided to invest more in those types of voices,” Holt added.

Spotify’s collection of originals has been steadily growing over the past year. Last August, for example, Spotify nabbed an exclusive deal with the “Joe Budden” podcast, which is aimed at hip-hop and rap culture fans, and launched its first branded podcast, “Ebb & Flow,” focused on hip-hop and R&B. Its full original lineup today also includes “Dissect,” Amy Schumer’s “3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “Mogul,” “The Rewind with Guy Raz,” “Showstopper,” “Unpacked,” “Crimetown” (Its first season was wide, second season is exclusive to Spotify), “UnderCover,” and “El Chapo: El Jefe y su Juicio.”

At CES, Spotify announced the addition of one more –  journalist Jemele Hill is coming Spotify with an exclusive podcast called “Unbothered,” which will feature high-profile guests in sports, music, politics, culture, and more.

In growing its collection of originals, the company found that podcasters who joined Spotify exclusively were actually able to grow their audience, despite leaving other distribution platforms.

For example, the Joe Budden podcast had its highest streaming day ever after joining Spotify.

This has led Spotify to believe that influencers in the podcast community will be able to bring their community with them when they become a Spotify exclusive, and then further grow their listener base by tapping into Spotify’s larger music user base and, soon, an improved recommendation system.

There are other perks for Spotify, too – when users come to Spotify and begin to listen to podcasts, they often then spend more time engaged with the app, it found.

“People who consume podcasts on Spotify are consuming more of Spotify – including music,” said Holt. “So we found that in increasing our [podcast] catalog and spending more time to make the user experience better, it wasn’t taking away from music, it was enhancing the overall time spent on the platform,” he noted.

While chasing exclusive deals to bring more original podcasts to Spotify will be a big initiative this year, Spotify will continue to offer its recently launched podcasts submission feature to everyone else.

With this sort of basic infrastructure in place, Spotify now wants to help users discover new podcasts and improve the listening experience.

One aspect of this will involve pointing listeners to other podcast content they may like.

For instance, Spotify could point Joe Budden fans to other podcasts about hip-hop and rap. It will also leverage its multi-year partnership with Samsung to allow listeners pick up where they left off in an episode as they move between different devices. And it will turn its personalization and recommendation technology to podcasts – including the ads in the podcasts themselves.

“Think about what we’ve done around music – the more understand you around the music you stream, the more we can personalize the ad experience. Now we can take that to podcasts,” said Brian Benedik, VP and Global Head of Advertising Sales at Spotify, when asked about the potential for Spotify selling ads in podcasts.

The company has been testing the waters with its own podcast ad sales since mid 2018, Benedik said. The sales are handled in-house by Spotify’s ad sales team for the time being.

Benedik had also appeared on a panel this week at CES, where he talked about the value of contextual advertising – meaning, ads that can be personalized to the user based on factors like mood, behavior and moments. This data could be appealing to podcast advertisers, as well.

But to scale its efforts around podcast ads, Spotify will need to invest in digital ad insertion technology. We’re hearing that Spotify is currently deciding whether that’s something it wants to build in-house or acquire outright.

Spotify’s rival Pandora went the latter route. It closed on the acquisition of adtech company Adswizz in May 2018, then introduced capabilities for shorter, more personalized ads in August. By November, Pandora announced it was bringing its Genome technology to podcasts, which allowed for a recommendation system.

Now Spotify aims to catch up.

The addition of podcasts has reoriented Spotify’s focus as company, Holt said.

“We’re an audio company. We’re trying to be the world’s best audio service,” he told the audience at CES. “It’s a pure play for us. We’re seeing increased engagement; there’s great commercial opportunities from podcasting that we’ve never seen on the platform…And, obviously, exclusives are to give us something that makes the platform truly unique – to have people come to Spotify for something you can’t get anywhere else is the sort of cherry on top of that entire strategy,” Holt said.

Image credits: Spotify

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://tcrn.ch/2THfdWS via IFTTT

[fmservers]

Spotify’s increased focus on podcasts in 2019 includes selling its own ads

Having established itself as a top streaming service with now over 200 million users, Spotify this year is preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts. The company plans bring its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better recommendations, update its app’s interface so people can access podcasts more easily, and broker more exclusives with podcast creators. It’s also getting into the business of selling ads within podcasts, as a means of generating revenue from this increasingly popular form of audio programming.

In fact, Spotify has already begun to dabble in podcast ad sales, ahead of this larger push.

Spotify, we’ve learned, has been selling its own advertisements in its original podcasts since mid-2018 year, including in programs like Spotify Original “Amy Schumer Presents: 3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “The Joe Budden Podcast,” “Dissect,” “Showstopper,” and others. With more exclusives planned for the year ahead, the portion of Spotify’s ad business focused on podcasts will also grow.

The company appears to be taking a different approach to working with podcasters than it does with it comes to working with music artists.

Today, Spotify gives artists tools that help share their work and be discovered – it invested in distribution platform DistroKid, for example, and now lets artists submit tracks for playlist consideration. With podcasters, however, Spotify wants to either bring their voices in-house, or at least exclusively license their content.

“Over the last year, we become very focused on building out a great podcast universe,” said Head of Spotify Studios Courtney Holt, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. “The first step was to make sure that we’ve got the world’s best podcasts on Spotify, and integrated the experience into the service in a way that allowed people to build habits and behavior there,” he said.

“What we started to see is that the types of podcasts that really were working on Spotify were ones where they were really authentic voices…so we just decided to invest more in those types of voices,” Holt added.

Spotify’s collection of originals has been steadily growing over the past year. Last August, for example, Spotify nabbed an exclusive deal with the “Joe Budden” podcast, which is aimed at hip-hop and rap culture fans, and launched its first branded podcast, “Ebb & Flow,” focused on hip-hop and R&B. Its full original lineup today also includes “Dissect,” Amy Schumer’s “3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “Mogul,” “The Rewind with Guy Raz,” “Showstopper,” “Unpacked,” “Crimetown” (Its first season was wide, second season is exclusive to Spotify), “UnderCover,” and “El Chapo: El Jefe y su Juicio.”

At CES, Spotify announced the addition of one more –  journalist Jemele Hill is coming Spotify with an exclusive podcast called “Unbothered,” which will feature high-profile guests in sports, music, politics, culture, and more.

In growing its collection of originals, the company found that podcasters who joined Spotify exclusively were actually able to grow their audience, despite leaving other distribution platforms.

For example, the Joe Budden podcast had its highest streaming day ever after joining Spotify.

This has led Spotify to believe that influencers in the podcast community will be able to bring their community with them when they become a Spotify exclusive, and then further grow their listener base by tapping into Spotify’s larger music user base and, soon, an improved recommendation system.

There are other perks for Spotify, too – when users come to Spotify and begin to listen to podcasts, they often then spend more time engaged with the app, it found.

“People who consume podcasts on Spotify are consuming more of Spotify – including music,” said Holt. “So we found that in increasing our [podcast] catalog and spending more time to make the user experience better, it wasn’t taking away from music, it was enhancing the overall time spent on the platform,” he noted.

While chasing exclusive deals to bring more original podcasts to Spotify will be a big initiative this year, Spotify will continue to offer its recently launched podcasts submission feature to everyone else.

With this sort of basic infrastructure in place, Spotify now wants to help users discover new podcasts and improve the listening experience.

One aspect of this will involve pointing listeners to other podcast content they may like.

For instance, Spotify could point Joe Budden fans to other podcasts about hip-hop and rap. It will also leverage its multi-year partnership with Samsung to allow listeners pick up where they left off in an episode as they move between different devices. And it will turn its personalization and recommendation technology to podcasts – including the ads in the podcasts themselves.

“Think about what we’ve done around music – the more understand you around the music you stream, the more we can personalize the ad experience. Now we can take that to podcasts,” said Brian Benedik, VP and Global Head of Advertising Sales at Spotify, when asked about the potential for Spotify selling ads in podcasts.

The company has been testing the waters with its own podcast ad sales since mid 2018, Benedik said. The sales are handled in-house by Spotify’s ad sales team for the time being.

Benedik had also appeared on a panel this week at CES, where he talked about the value of contextual advertising – meaning, ads that can be personalized to the user based on factors like mood, behavior and moments. This data could be appealing to podcast advertisers, as well.

But to scale its efforts around podcast ads, Spotify will need to invest in digital ad insertion technology. Benedik told us Spotify is currently deciding whether that’s something it wants to build in-house or acquire outright.

Spotify’s rival Pandora went the latter route. It closed on the acquisition of adtech company Adswizz in May 2018, then introduced capabilities for shorter, more personalized ads in August. By November, Pandora announced it was bringing its Genome technology to podcasts, which allowed for a recommendation system.

Now Spotify aims to catch up.

The addition of podcasts has reoriented Spotify’s focus as company, Holt said.

“We’re an audio company. We’re trying to be the world’s best audio service,” he told the audience at CES. “It’s a pure play for us. We’re seeing increased engagement; there’s great commercial opportunities from podcasting that we’ve never seen on the platform…And, obviously, exclusives are to give us something that makes the platform truly unique – to have people come to Spotify for something you can’t get anywhere else is the sort of cherry on top of that entire strategy,” Holt said.

Image credits: Spotify

Via Sarah Perez https://techcrunch.com

[toomanysinks]

Spotify’s increased focus on podcasts in 2019 includes selling its own ads

Having established itself as a top streaming service with now over 200 million users, Spotify this year is preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts. The company plans bring its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better recommendations, update its app’s interface so people can access podcasts more easily, and broker more exclusives with podcast creators. It’s also getting into the business of selling ads within podcasts, as a means of generating revenue from this increasingly popular form of audio programming.

In fact, Spotify has already begun to dabble in podcast ad sales, ahead of this larger push.

Spotify, we’ve learned, has been selling its own advertisements in its original podcasts since mid-2018 year, including in programs like Spotify Original “Amy Schumer Presents: 3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “The Joe Budden Podcast,” “Dissect,” “Showstopper,” and others. With more exclusives planned for the year ahead, the portion of Spotify’s ad business focused on podcasts will also grow.

The company appears to be taking a different approach to working with podcasters than it does with it comes to working with music artists.

Today, Spotify gives artists tools that help share their work and be discovered – it invested in distribution platform DistroKid, for example, and now lets artists submit tracks for playlist consideration. With podcasters, however, Spotify wants to either bring their voices in-house, or at least exclusively license their content.

“Over the last year, we become very focused on building out a great podcast universe,” said Head of Spotify Studios Courtney Holt, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. “The first step was to make sure that we’ve got the world’s best podcasts on Spotify, and integrated the experience into the service in a way that allowed people to build habits and behavior there,” he said.

“What we started to see is that the types of podcasts that really were working on Spotify were ones where they were really authentic voices…so we just decided to invest more in those types of voices,” Holt added.

Spotify’s collection of originals has been steadily growing over the past year. Last August, for example, Spotify nabbed an exclusive deal with the “Joe Budden” podcast, which is aimed at hip-hop and rap culture fans, and launched its first branded podcast, “Ebb & Flow,” focused on hip-hop and R&B. Its full original lineup today also includes “Dissect,” Amy Schumer’s “3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “Mogul,” “The Rewind with Guy Raz,” “Showstopper,” “Unpacked,” “Crimetown” (Its first season was wide, second season is exclusive to Spotify), “UnderCover,” and “El Chapo: El Jefe y su Juicio.”

At CES, Spotify announced the addition of one more –  journalist Jemele Hill is coming Spotify with an exclusive podcast called “Unbothered,” which will feature high-profile guests in sports, music, politics, culture, and more.

In growing its collection of originals, the company found that podcasters who joined Spotify exclusively were actually able to grow their audience, despite leaving other distribution platforms.

For example, the Joe Budden podcast had its highest streaming day ever after joining Spotify.

This has led Spotify to believe that influencers in the podcast community will be able to bring their community with them when they become a Spotify exclusive, and then further grow their listener base by tapping into Spotify’s larger music user base and, soon, an improved recommendation system.

There are other perks for Spotify, too – when users come to Spotify and begin to listen to podcasts, they often then spend more time engaged with the app, it found.

“People who consume podcasts on Spotify are consuming more of Spotify – including music,” said Holt. “So we found that in increasing our [podcast] catalog and spending more time to make the user experience better, it wasn’t taking away from music, it was enhancing the overall time spent on the platform,” he noted.

While chasing exclusive deals to bring more original podcasts to Spotify will be a big initiative this year, Spotify will continue to offer its recently launched podcasts submission feature to everyone else.

With this sort of basic infrastructure in place, Spotify now wants to help users discover new podcasts and improve the listening experience.

One aspect of this will involve pointing listeners to other podcast content they may like.

For instance, Spotify could point Joe Budden fans to other podcasts about hip-hop and rap. It will also leverage its multi-year partnership with Samsung to allow listeners pick up where they left off in an episode as they move between different devices. And it will turn its personalization and recommendation technology to podcasts – including the ads in the podcasts themselves.

“Think about what we’ve done around music – the more understand you around the music you stream, the more we can personalize the ad experience. Now we can take that to podcasts,” said Brian Benedik, VP and Global Head of Advertising Sales at Spotify, when asked about the potential for Spotify selling ads in podcasts.

The company has been testing the waters with its own podcast ad sales since mid 2018, Benedik said. The sales are handled in-house by Spotify’s ad sales team for the time being.

Benedik had also appeared on a panel this week at CES, where he talked about the value of contextual advertising – meaning, ads that can be personalized to the user based on factors like mood, behavior and moments. This data could be appealing to podcast advertisers, as well.

But to scale its efforts around podcast ads, Spotify will need to invest in digital ad insertion technology. Benedik told us Spotify is currently deciding whether that’s something it wants to build in-house or acquire outright.

Spotify’s rival Pandora went the latter route. It closed on the acquisition of adtech company Adswizz in May 2018, then introduced capabilities for shorter, more personalized ads in August. By November, Pandora announced it was bringing its Genome technology to podcasts, which allowed for a recommendation system.

Now Spotify aims to catch up.

The addition of podcasts has reoriented Spotify’s focus as company, Holt said.

“We’re an audio company. We’re trying to be the world’s best audio service,” he told the audience at CES. “It’s a pure play for us. We’re seeing increased engagement; there’s great commercial opportunities from podcasting that we’ve never seen on the platform…And, obviously, exclusives are to give us something that makes the platform truly unique – to have people come to Spotify for something you can’t get anywhere else is the sort of cherry on top of that entire strategy,” Holt said.

Image credits: Spotify

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/10/spotifys-increased-focus-on-podcasts-in-2019-includes-selling-its-own-ads/

[davidcarner]

Hotel California Ch 12, You Can Check Out Anytime you like

A/N: The hits keep coming...my wife is in the hospital and probably will be the rest of the week. This will probably be the only thing I update this week. As long as she doesn't have to have surgery, I should be able to post at least three next week to try and make up. Sorry. If I have a chance in a few days, I'll get the next chapter of this one up. It's been a heck of a few months around my house.

A/N 2: Hey, welcome back. I fear our stay at the hotel is coming to a close. I'm not for sure if the next chapter is the last or the one after that will be. This one is a little shorter, I'm dealing with some issues from the wreck I wasn't expecting but I wanted to get some things on paper heading into the home stretch.

We have a few things to clean up, take care of, *ahem*, tuck in. I'd like to warn you I use some language in this one I never have, but frankly, when I got there, I knew of nothing else to say but what was said.

Welcome to Hotel California Ch 12, You Can Check Out Anytime You Want

Disclaimer: I don't own Chuck, and admit it, you kinda like the 50s slang thing that made it's way into this fic(it was not pre-planned, I swear)

He was snapping the cufflinks on his coat. He hated wearing this tux, but it was for the hotel, it was for work, and it did make Sarah very happy, and that's all he was really worried about. She walked out of the bathroom and he turned toward her, fighting to keep his mouth off of the ground. She was wearing a black strapless dress. She was stunning, absolutely stunning.

"Wow," she said softly. "Aren't you the cat's pajamas?"

"Going for your own thing there, Missy?" she grinned at him and began to straighten his already straight suit. "You do know that I know everything on me is wrinkle-free?"

"Mmmhmm, I do my best," she hummed.

Chuck blushed. "So you're just touching me because you want to?" She gave him a look of pure innocence. "I just want everything to be straight, Chuck."

"Woman," he said low, his eyes darkening. She smirked.

"Bartowski, you used to be this easy-going guy but you've become a little more," she cut off with a gasp as he grabbed her gently and pulled her toward him, "handsy," she said breathlessly.

"Well," he said his breath hot on her lips millimeters from his. "I apologize."

"Oh, don't." Her grin was huge. "So, I can't believe I'm about to do this, but we need to talk."

"Oh, you're being the cube."

"I need you to not do that right now."

"You do know I don't deliberately do that, it's just being around you makes my brain go mushy."

"Same, except it's other parts of my body," She replied. Chuck reddened more. "You're too easy." Chuck shrugged. Sarah threw back her head and laughed. She let go of him and tried to fan her face and not laugh too hard; she'd start crying and ruin her makeup. When she got control of herself, Chuck stepped in front of her, looking nervous, a box in his hand. She gave him a questioning look.

"So, this has been the weirdest month, and frankly the last two weeks have been crazy and amazing. I am in love with you. I didn't think that was possible, but it is, even if it shouldn't be." He took a deep breath and grinned at her amused smile. "I got you something for Christmas but I was too scared to give it to you because I thought it was too much, but then….whew!….then you gave me the key, and I got overwhelmed."

A worried look crossed her face. "Are we going too fast?" Chuck's head was shaking no almost as soon as she started talking.

"No, Sarah, no. My emotions...feelings so deep, so fast...I just wasn't prepared for everything, and then Bryce showed up-"

"You knew?!"

Chuck grinned at her. "The ole go to their window, be drunk, and tell them how great we could be together, typical Stanford move." Sarah rolled her eyes, HARD. "But I was scared. I want you to have something. It's my family's." He held the box out to her. She opened it and saw it was a bracelet.

"Chuck," her eyes shone up at him. "Is this your mom's?"

He swallowed and nodded. He looked into her eyes, the pooling tears. "Yeah, it's my Mom's charm bracelet."

Sarah held her wrist out. Ever-so-softly, she pleaded, "Please, put it on me."

"Sarah, it doesn't go with that dress, it's not fancy enough."

"Well, it's the fanciest dress I have." Chuck started to speak and she shook her head. "Chuck Bartowski I will wear this charm bracelet where I damn well please and I damn well please to wear it right now." Her voice softened again. "It goes perfectly with my heart."

Chuck blinked and swallowed hard, trying to find his voice."Yes, ma'am." Chuck put the bracelet on her wrist. He stepped back as she turned it from one side to the other in wonder. "I hope you like it."

"I do!" She stepped forward and kissed him on the lips. The kiss told him she really did.

"Now, don't flip your wig." He stopped and rolled his eyes at himself. HARD.

She breathed out a sigh."Trying to seduce me, Bartowski? That's some fancy lingo. Some...cunning lingo. Almost a tongue-twister. You're working awfully hard."

"Well, I would, but we're late. And I can't help it, I'm just a silver-tongued devil." She grabbed his hand and was dragging him down the stairs. "Hey, I thought we needed to talk."

"Later!"

-ooooo-

It had been a long evening of mingling and doing the social thing. Sarah wasn't a social butterfly, but each time she had to talk to someone, there was Chuck to help her, be her backup, and sometimes, in relief, she just turned things over to him. He was amazing. He took care of her, protected her, and as she looked down at the bracelet she knew that talk she mentioned earlier had to happen. There was no getting away from it.

"Hey," she heard behind her. She spun and Chuck was there holding two champagne flutes. "Wanna sneak outside away from all of this for the countdown?"

"Chuck, no one is allowed out there." She was trying to sound like she was admonishing him, but the grin on her face told him otherwise.

He was grinning at her and she knew she was missing something. He handed her a flute that then he reached into his pocket to pull out his cellphone. "It's locked by a computer program." He was waggling his cellphone and she couldn't help but laugh out loud. "Come on, please."

"Bartowski," she replied a little breathlessly. "Don't you know by now I'd go anywhere with you?" The smile on his face could have lit up all of Los Angeles. She followed him to a door marked "Employees Only" and they entered it. They were giggling like teenagers. As he used his phone to unlock the door, Sarah realized how perfect this was. This night, this past week, this minute, and they all had one thing in common, Chuck Bartowski. He perfected them all.

They stepped out into the clear night sky, alone. Sarah knew it was time. She looked out over the city and then turned to him. "I need to stay some stuff and I need you not to freak out."

He gave her a smile that started small but grew until it made his nose crinkle. "That's kinda my thing."

She tried to give him flat look but it was pointless. "Move in with me."

Chuck looked confused. "Uh, you gave me a key less than a week ago, did you forget?"

She gave him and amused smile and tilted her head. "No, I didn't. I didn't forget at all." She saw Chuck's lip twitch. "You…" she slapped him on the shoulder. "You knew exactly what I meant!"

"Mayyyybbbee." She narrowed her eyes and he held his hands up. "I was trying to think of something to say so I didn't blow my cool by being all, OH, HELL, YEAH!" She began to smile. "Huh, may have blown it anyway."

She grinned salaciously. "Chuck, let's be real, if you were gonna run me off it would have been weeks ago."

"I thought I did."

Well, that sobered things up. She looked out over the city and then back at him. "Chuck, you made me feel things, you scared me. So I acted…"

"Crazy? Insane. Goofy as a pet coon."

She blinked a few times. "Do you know anyone with a pet coon?"

"No, but I'm sure it wouldn't take a lot of looking. This is LA." She threw her head back and laughed. "You want me to live with you, as a couple, together, all the time?"

"Yeah. That is exactly what I want."

"You know Ellie's going to explode, right?"

"I have super-duty ear plugs for both of us." They heard the New Year countdown begin.

"I love you, Sarah Walker. Yes, always yes."

"I love you, Chuck Bartowski." As the countdown reached zero the two kissed and realized that this year was going to be them, together. Theirs. The Year of Chuck and Sarah.

-ooooo-

It was four weeks later when the fairytale crashed….literally.

Everything had been great between Chuck and Sarah. Ellie and Devon had come over a few times for dinner. Ellie and Sarah were becoming extremely close, and Ellie was on the verge of exploding every time she saw the two of them together. On that last morning of January, Sarah had a doctor's appointment, so they took separate vehicles to work rather than riding together as usual.

It was getting later in the day, and Chuck had been busy helping Skip corral a new virus. They were in out in front of it, it was just going to take time. Skip had it under control and Chuck was scouring the system for anything they might have missed. It was over an hour later than when Sarah thought she'd return, but that was not that unusual, doctor's appointments, traffic, it could be another hour. That was when Chuck's phone rang.

"Hey Ellie," he answered seeing the ID.

"Chuck." Her tone…Chuck sat up straight in his chair. "Chuck, Sarah's has been in a car accident."

"WHAT?!"

"She's okay, but she's got some busted up ribs, and she might have issues with her hip."

"Okay, I'm on my way." He hung up, told Skip where he was going, when he crashed into Bryce coming downstairs.

"Hey, Chuckster, where's the fire?"

"Bryce, Sarah's been in a car wreck."

Bryce nodded like he had told him the weather. "That's terrible. When you see her tonight, you tell her that I said I hope she's better."

"Dude, I'm going now. That is my girlfriend, the woman I love, live with, in the hospital. I have to go see her, now." He began to walk past, when Bryce grabbed his arm. Chuck paused and looked down at Bryce's hand. "Bryce, I don't have time for your games."

"You're not going anywhere, you have a virus to take care of and you're the head of IT."

"Bryce, I'm going to the hospital now."

He started toward the steps when Bryce's voice shot out. "You leave, you're fired."

Chuck stopped and Bryce smiled. Checkmate, Bryce thought. What Bryce didn't realize was Chuck had reached the limit. Stealing the project at Stanford, getting him kicked out of Stanford, sleeping with Jill, the no-dating rule, and just Bryce being Bryce Larkin. Chuck turned toward him and looked him square in the eye.

"Fuck off, Bryce." Bryce's eyes went wide as Chuck rushed out of the room. Bryce never noticed Skip recording the entire encounter.

-ooooo-

Ellie was doing her best to keep her brother calm but Chuck Bartowski worried about Sarah Walker sent Chuck into a place she had never seen. "She's asleep, will you calm down? She's going to be fine, she's just banged up."

He ran his hand through his hair and stared at her, asleep. He hoped that's all it was. What if she had lost her memory and didn't know who he was? "Sis, are you sure, is there something you're not telling me?"

Sarah had heard their conversation for a few minutes. She loved her Chuck, she really did, and she knew when they started this his concern for her was going to be a bit much, but this was ridiculous….and a lot adorable. She felt her fingers laced through his. His palms sweaty from nerves. He was worried about her, she knew, and she had to do something or he was going to freak out all over the place.

"What she isn't telling you," she croaked. She had been dozing the last little bit from the pain medicine. "Is I can't wear the lacy gauzy things for a while because my leg and hip hurts. But don't you worry, cowboy, I'll be able to soon."

He kissed her hand, wrapped around his. "I don't care if you ever wear them again. Do you understand?"

Uh oh. She opened her eyes and looked into those brown pools of life. They were full of fear, worry, and intense love. It was almost too much, being loved like that. Almost, but not. She loved him the same way, she knew..

"Hey, I'm fine. I don't think the car is gonna make it."

Chuck gave her a flat look. "I could care less."

She smirked at him. "Of course, because it's my car."

"You can have mine." There was no hesitation in his voice. She gave him an amused smile.

"Like he needs it now," she heard Ellie mumble. Chuck gave her a look. Ellie rolled her eyes and started out of the room. "If he gets to be too much tell me, and I'll have him sedated."

"Ellie, if you don't mind, I'm keeping him." Ellie started to say something and Sarah grinned. "I've made up my mind." Ellie laughed and left. Sarah turned to Chuck.

"Mind carpooling with me for a while?" Chuck squeezed her hand. "In fact I'll even let you drive."

"But once your medically cleared, no more, right?" he asked with a grin. Sarah shrugged. "Whatever you need." Sarah nodded. She saw something past him, out in the hall. She watched but never betrayed herself with facial expressions.

"What I need is for you to go get something to eat, because I know you, Chuck." He nodded.

"Can I bring you anything?"

"No, unless you can get Morgan to smuggle me a pizza in here. Hey, lighten up. I'm okay. Hip is just sore, nothing broken." She winked at him. "It will be good as new quick."

"Sarah, you take as long as-"

"Bartowski, I said it will be good as new quick and I meant it will be good as new quick. Now go get something to eat. I can't have you passing out from lack of nutrients when I get up and limber." Chuck fled.

-ooooo-

Chuck reentered Sarah's room a little while later, something tickled his nose….a perfume he knew. It wasn't Sarah's it wasn't Ellie's but it was someone he knew. He just couldn't place it. He quickly pushed those thoughts out of his mind when he saw her. She was sitting up, watching TV, when he came in. She gave him a welcome-smirk.

"So, Chuck? What the hell did that exchange with Ellie mean? Anything happen at work today I should know about?" Chuck shifted in his seat, her eyes boring into him. "Chuck, for our relationship to work, we have to be honest, we have to tell the truth, otherwise…"

That pause sounded ominous. "Otherwise, what?"

"You know all those lacy, gauzy, thingys?" Chuck nodded, his mind drifting in the land of Sarah and lace and gauze and...

"Sarah, I'm not sure we should be having this conversation, you know, in your condition, and also my sister is nearby and could drop in at anytime."

"Chuck." She said softly, but intensely. He nodded. "I'll keep wearing them, but never take them off or let them be taken off, except to shower, and only by myself, with no one else around." Chuck gulped. "Do you understand how serious I am? How miserable you will be?" She paused. "How miserable I will be?" He nodded. "Chuck, no secrets, no lies."

"I told Bryce off." Sarah raised an eyebrow. She picked up her cellphone and played the video for him. "I like how his mouth drops at the end." She laughed carefully, trying not to hurt her ribs.

"Zondra and Carina both have talked to me, in fact you just missed Carina."

"Ah-ha! You had help." Sarah gave him a flat look. "And you never should have heard it from them, you should have heard it from me." She grinned and nodded.

"You're not fired, and you have a ton of sick days you're taking to help me around the house until I become more mobile." Chuck nodded. "Zondra has talked to the Larkins." Chuck sat forward in his chair. "They saw the video and were horrified. It's time to begin the Get Rid of Bryce plan, and Carina has an idea."

"One question, does it involve furry porn?"

Sarah threw back her head and laughed. Chuck was smiling at her, and in her heart, she knew. She knew what she had to do, and she would. Just as soon as she took care of Bryce Larkin and taught him not to mess with her man. No one was going to mess with her Chuck ever again.

A/N: Next, the take down you've been waiting for. And what other plans does Miss Sarah Walker have up her sleeve? Come on back, next time to the Finale, Ch 13, But You Can Never Leave.

"You make me crazy, you make me do these crazy things, say these crazy things. Do you think I've ever discussed dreams with anyone else?" Chuck got a goofy grin on his face. "I love that your brain reboots over me, I love that you made a joke about you making the safe word 'Chuck' to protect me, but I use it against you."

Hope you enjoyed it….Take Care…Reviews and PM are welcomed and always appreciated.

DC

[sheminecrafts]

Spotify’s increased focus on podcasts in 2019 includes selling its own ads

Having established itself as a top streaming service with now over 200 million users, Spotify this year is preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts. The company plans bring its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better recommendations, update its app’s interface so people can access podcasts more easily, and broker more exclusives with podcast creators. It’s also getting into the business of selling ads within podcasts, as a means of generating revenue from this increasingly popular form of audio programming.

In fact, Spotify has already begun to dabble in podcast ad sales, ahead of this larger push.

Spotify, we’ve learned, has been selling its own advertisements in its original podcasts since mid-2018 year, including in programs like Spotify Original “Amy Schumer Presents: 3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “The Joe Budden Podcast,” “Dissect,” “Showstopper,” and others. With more exclusives planned for the year ahead, the portion of Spotify’s ad business focused on podcasts will also grow.

The company appears to be taking a different approach to working with podcasters than it does with it comes to working with music artists.

Today, Spotify gives artists tools that help share their work and be discovered – it invested in distribution platform DistroKid, for example, and now lets artists submit tracks for playlist consideration. With podcasters, however, Spotify wants to either bring their voices in-house, or at least exclusively license their content.

“Over the last year, we become very focused on building out a great podcast universe,” said Head of Spotify Studios Courtney Holt, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. “The first step was to make sure that we’ve got the world’s best podcasts on Spotify, and integrated the experience into the service in a way that allowed people to build habits and behavior there,” he said.

“What we started to see is that the types of podcasts that really were working on Spotify were ones where they were really authentic voices…so we just decided to invest more in those types of voices,” Holt added.

Spotify’s collection of originals has been steadily growing over the past year. Last August, for example, Spotify nabbed an exclusive deal with the “Joe Budden” podcast, which is aimed at hip-hop and rap culture fans, and launched its first branded podcast, “Ebb & Flow,” focused on hip-hop and R&B. Its full original lineup today also includes “Dissect,” Amy Schumer’s “3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “Mogul,” “The Rewind with Guy Raz,” “Showstopper,” “Unpacked,” “Crimetown” (Its first season was wide, second season is exclusive to Spotify), “UnderCover,” and “El Chapo: El Jefe y su Juicio.”

At CES, Spotify announced the addition of one more –  journalist Jemele Hill is coming Spotify with an exclusive podcast called “Unbothered,” which will feature high-profile guests in sports, music, politics, culture, and more.

In growing its collection of originals, the company found that podcasters who joined Spotify exclusively were actually able to grow their audience, despite leaving other distribution platforms.

For example, the Joe Budden podcast had its highest streaming day ever after joining Spotify.

This has led Spotify to believe that influencers in the podcast community will be able to bring their community with them when they become a Spotify exclusive, and then further grow their listener base by tapping into Spotify’s larger music user base and, soon, an improved recommendation system.

There are other perks for Spotify, too – when users come to Spotify and begin to listen to podcasts, they often then spend more time engaged with the app, it found.

“People who consume podcasts on Spotify are consuming more of Spotify – including music,” said Holt. “So we found that in increasing our [podcast] catalog and spending more time to make the user experience better, it wasn’t taking away from music, it was enhancing the overall time spent on the platform,” he noted.

While chasing exclusive deals to bring more original podcasts to Spotify will be a big initiative this year, Spotify will continue to offer its recently launched podcasts submission feature to everyone else.

With this sort of basic infrastructure in place, Spotify now wants to help users discover new podcasts and improve the listening experience.

One aspect of this will involve pointing listeners to other podcast content they may like.

For instance, Spotify could point Joe Budden fans to other podcasts about hip-hop and rap. It will also leverage its multi-year partnership with Samsung to allow listeners pick up where they left off in an episode as they move between different devices. And it will turn its personalization and recommendation technology to podcasts – including the ads in the podcasts themselves.

“Think about what we’ve done around music – the more understand you around the music you stream, the more we can personalize the ad experience. Now we can take that to podcasts,” said Brian Benedik, VP and Global Head of Advertising Sales at Spotify, when asked about the potential for Spotify selling ads in podcasts.

The company has been testing the waters with its own podcast ad sales since mid 2018, Benedik said. The sales are handled in-house by Spotify’s ad sales team for the time being.

Benedik had also appeared on a panel this week at CES, where he talked about the value of contextual advertising – meaning, ads that can be personalized to the user based on factors like mood, behavior and moments. This data could be appealing to podcast advertisers, as well.

But to scale its efforts around podcast ads, Spotify will need to invest in digital ad insertion technology. Benedik told us Spotify is currently deciding whether that’s something it wants to build in-house or acquire outright.

Spotify’s rival Pandora went the latter route. It closed on the acquisition of adtech company Adswizz in May 2018, then introduced capabilities for shorter, more personalized ads in August. By November, Pandora announced it was bringing its Genome technology to podcasts, which allowed for a recommendation system.

Now Spotify aims to catch up.

The addition of podcasts has reoriented Spotify’s focus as company, Holt said.

“We’re an audio company. We’re trying to be the world’s best audio service,” he told the audience at CES. “It’s a pure play for us. We’re seeing increased engagement; there’s great commercial opportunities from podcasting that we’ve never seen on the platform…And, obviously, exclusives are to give us something that makes the platform truly unique – to have people come to Spotify for something you can’t get anywhere else is the sort of cherry on top of that entire strategy,” Holt said.

Image credits: Spotify

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://tcrn.ch/2THfdWS via IFTTT

[sheminecrafts]

Spotify’s increased focus on podcasts in 2019 includes selling its own ads

Having established itself as a top streaming service with now over 200 million users, Spotify this year is preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts. The company plans bring its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better recommendations, update its app’s interface so people can access podcasts more easily, and broker more exclusives with podcast creators. It’s also getting into the business of selling ads within podcasts, as a means of generating revenue from this increasingly popular form of audio programming.

In fact, Spotify has already begun to dabble in podcast ad sales, ahead of this larger push.

Spotify, we’ve learned, has been selling its own advertisements in its original podcasts since mid-2018 year, including in programs like Spotify Original “Amy Schumer Presents: 3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “The Joe Budden Podcast,” “Dissect,” “Showstopper,” and others. With more exclusives planned for the year ahead, the portion of Spotify’s ad business focused on podcasts will also grow.

The company appears to be taking a different approach to working with podcasters than it does with it comes to working with music artists.

Today, Spotify gives artists tools that help share their work and be discovered – it invested in distribution platform DistroKid, for example, and now lets artists submit tracks for playlist consideration. With podcasters, however, Spotify wants to either bring their voices in-house, or at least exclusively license their content.

“Over the last year, we become very focused on building out a great podcast universe,” said Head of Spotify Studios Courtney Holt, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. “The first step was to make sure that we’ve got the world’s best podcasts on Spotify, and integrated the experience into the service in a way that allowed people to build habits and behavior there,” he said.

“What we started to see is that the types of podcasts that really were working on Spotify were ones where they were really authentic voices…so we just decided to invest more in those types of voices,” Holt added.

Spotify’s collection of originals has been steadily growing over the past year. Last August, for example, Spotify nabbed an exclusive deal with the “Joe Budden” podcast, which is aimed at hip-hop and rap culture fans, and launched its first branded podcast, “Ebb & Flow,” focused on hip-hop and R&B. Its full original lineup today also includes “Dissect,” Amy Schumer’s “3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “Mogul,” “The Rewind with Guy Raz,” “Showstopper,” “Unpacked,” “Crimetown” (Its first season was wide, second season is exclusive to Spotify), “UnderCover,” and “El Chapo: El Jefe y su Juicio.”

At CES, Spotify announced the addition of one more –  journalist Jemele Hill is coming Spotify with an exclusive podcast called “Unbothered,” which will feature high-profile guests in sports, music, politics, culture, and more.

In growing its collection of originals, the company found that podcasters who joined Spotify exclusively were actually able to grow their audience, despite leaving other distribution platforms.

For example, the Joe Budden podcast had its highest streaming day ever after joining Spotify.

This has led Spotify to believe that influencers in the podcast community will be able to bring their community with them when they become a Spotify exclusive, and then further grow their listener base by tapping into Spotify’s larger music user base and, soon, an improved recommendation system.

There are other perks for Spotify, too – when users come to Spotify and begin to listen to podcasts, they often then spend more time engaged with the app, it found.

“People who consume podcasts on Spotify are consuming more of Spotify – including music,” said Holt. “So we found that in increasing our [podcast] catalog and spending more time to make the user experience better, it wasn’t taking away from music, it was enhancing the overall time spent on the platform,” he noted.

While chasing exclusive deals to bring more original podcasts to Spotify will be a big initiative this year, Spotify will continue to offer its recently launched podcasts submission feature to everyone else.

With this sort of basic infrastructure in place, Spotify now wants to help users discover new podcasts and improve the listening experience.

One aspect of this will involve pointing listeners to other podcast content they may like.

For instance, Spotify could point Joe Budden fans to other podcasts about hip-hop and rap. It will also leverage its multi-year partnership with Samsung to allow listeners pick up where they left off in an episode as they move between different devices. And it will turn its personalization and recommendation technology to podcasts – including the ads in the podcasts themselves.

“Think about what we’ve done around music – the more understand you around the music you stream, the more we can personalize the ad experience. Now we can take that to podcasts,” said Brian Benedik, VP and Global Head of Advertising Sales at Spotify, when asked about the potential for Spotify selling ads in podcasts.

The company has been testing the waters with its own podcast ad sales since mid 2018, Benedik said. The sales are handled in-house by Spotify’s ad sales team for the time being.

Benedik had also appeared on a panel this week at CES, where he talked about the value of contextual advertising – meaning, ads that can be personalized to the user based on factors like mood, behavior and moments. This data could be appealing to podcast advertisers, as well.

But to scale its efforts around podcast ads, Spotify will need to invest in digital ad insertion technology. Benedik told us Spotify is currently deciding whether that’s something it wants to build in-house or acquire outright.

Spotify’s rival Pandora went the latter route. It closed on the acquisition of adtech company Adswizz in May 2018, then introduced capabilities for shorter, more personalized ads in August. By November, Pandora announced it was bringing its Genome technology to podcasts, which allowed for a recommendation system.

Now Spotify aims to catch up.

The addition of podcasts has reoriented Spotify’s focus as company, Holt said.

“We’re an audio company. We’re trying to be the world’s best audio service,” he told the audience at CES. “It’s a pure play for us. We’re seeing increased engagement; there’s great commercial opportunities from podcasting that we’ve never seen on the platform…And, obviously, exclusives are to give us something that makes the platform truly unique – to have people come to Spotify for something you can’t get anywhere else is the sort of cherry on top of that entire strategy,” Holt said.

Image credits: Spotify

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://tcrn.ch/2THfdWS via IFTTT

[sheminecrafts]

Spotify’s increased focus on podcasts in 2019 includes selling its own ads

Having established itself as a top streaming service with now over 200 million users, Spotify this year is preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts. The company plans bring its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better recommendations, update its app’s interface so people can access podcasts more easily, and broker more exclusives with podcast creators. It’s also getting into the business of selling ads within podcasts, as a means of generating revenue from this increasingly popular form of audio programming.

In fact, Spotify has already begun to dabble in podcast ad sales, ahead of this larger push.

Spotify, we’ve learned, has been selling its own advertisements in its original podcasts since mid-2018 year, including in programs like Spotify Original “Amy Schumer Presents: 3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “The Joe Budden Podcast,” “Dissect,” “Showstopper,” and others. With more exclusives planned for the year ahead, the portion of Spotify’s ad business focused on podcasts will also grow.

The company appears to be taking a different approach to working with podcasters than it does with it comes to working with music artists.

Today, Spotify gives artists tools that help share their work and be discovered – it invested in distribution platform DistroKid, for example, and now lets artists submit tracks for playlist consideration. With podcasters, however, Spotify wants to either bring their voices in-house, or at least exclusively license their content.

“Over the last year, we become very focused on building out a great podcast universe,” said Head of Spotify Studios Courtney Holt, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. “The first step was to make sure that we’ve got the world’s best podcasts on Spotify, and integrated the experience into the service in a way that allowed people to build habits and behavior there,” he said.

“What we started to see is that the types of podcasts that really were working on Spotify were ones where they were really authentic voices…so we just decided to invest more in those types of voices,” Holt added.

Spotify’s collection of originals has been steadily growing over the past year. Last August, for example, Spotify nabbed an exclusive deal with the “Joe Budden” podcast, which is aimed at hip-hop and rap culture fans, and launched its first branded podcast, “Ebb & Flow,” focused on hip-hop and R&B. Its full original lineup today also includes “Dissect,” Amy Schumer’s “3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “Mogul,” “The Rewind with Guy Raz,” “Showstopper,” “Unpacked,” “Crimetown” (Its first season was wide, second season is exclusive to Spotify), “UnderCover,” and “El Chapo: El Jefe y su Juicio.”

At CES, Spotify announced the addition of one more –  journalist Jemele Hill is coming Spotify with an exclusive podcast called “Unbothered,” which will feature high-profile guests in sports, music, politics, culture, and more.

In growing its collection of originals, the company found that podcasters who joined Spotify exclusively were actually able to grow their audience, despite leaving other distribution platforms.

For example, the Joe Budden podcast had its highest streaming day ever after joining Spotify.

This has led Spotify to believe that influencers in the podcast community will be able to bring their community with them when they become a Spotify exclusive, and then further grow their listener base by tapping into Spotify’s larger music user base and, soon, an improved recommendation system.

There are other perks for Spotify, too – when users come to Spotify and begin to listen to podcasts, they often then spend more time engaged with the app, it found.

“People who consume podcasts on Spotify are consuming more of Spotify – including music,” said Holt. “So we found that in increasing our [podcast] catalog and spending more time to make the user experience better, it wasn’t taking away from music, it was enhancing the overall time spent on the platform,” he noted.

While chasing exclusive deals to bring more original podcasts to Spotify will be a big initiative this year, Spotify will continue to offer its recently launched podcasts submission feature to everyone else.

With this sort of basic infrastructure in place, Spotify now wants to help users discover new podcasts and improve the listening experience.

One aspect of this will involve pointing listeners to other podcast content they may like.

For instance, Spotify could point Joe Budden fans to other podcasts about hip-hop and rap. It will also leverage its multi-year partnership with Samsung to allow listeners pick up where they left off in an episode as they move between different devices. And it will turn its personalization and recommendation technology to podcasts – including the ads in the podcasts themselves.

“Think about what we’ve done around music – the more understand you around the music you stream, the more we can personalize the ad experience. Now we can take that to podcasts,” said Brian Benedik, VP and Global Head of Advertising Sales at Spotify, when asked about the potential for Spotify selling ads in podcasts.

The company has been testing the waters with its own podcast ad sales since mid 2018, Benedik said. The sales are handled in-house by Spotify’s ad sales team for the time being.

Benedik had also appeared on a panel this week at CES, where he talked about the value of contextual advertising – meaning, ads that can be personalized to the user based on factors like mood, behavior and moments. This data could be appealing to podcast advertisers, as well.

But to scale its efforts around podcast ads, Spotify will need to invest in digital ad insertion technology. Benedik told us Spotify is currently deciding whether that’s something it wants to build in-house or acquire outright.

Spotify’s rival Pandora went the latter route. It closed on the acquisition of adtech company Adswizz in May 2018, then introduced capabilities for shorter, more personalized ads in August. By November, Pandora announced it was bringing its Genome technology to podcasts, which allowed for a recommendation system.

Now Spotify aims to catch up.

The addition of podcasts has reoriented Spotify’s focus as company, Holt said.

“We’re an audio company. We’re trying to be the world’s best audio service,” he told the audience at CES. “It’s a pure play for us. We’re seeing increased engagement; there’s great commercial opportunities from podcasting that we’ve never seen on the platform…And, obviously, exclusives are to give us something that makes the platform truly unique – to have people come to Spotify for something you can’t get anywhere else is the sort of cherry on top of that entire strategy,” Holt said.

Image credits: Spotify

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://tcrn.ch/2THfdWS via IFTTT