Earshot, India’s first Dolby Atmos-enabled podcast platform, has won the Best Podcast Publisher prize at the prestigious ‘India Audio Summit & Awards’ hosted by Radioandmusic.com, an initiative of IndianTelevision.com. Earshot received two more awards in the Science and News & Politics categories at the award function held in Mumbai, on January 24.
The awards honoured individuals and organisations who have significantly contributed to the audio industry in radio, podcast, audiobooks, and technology verticals.
India has the third largest podcast listenership in the world, behind the US and China. The nation’s monthly podcast listenership had crossed 95 million in 2021, according to research firm RedSeer, and is projected to grow to 176.1 million in 2023 according to consulting and audit firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Earshot, which has produced more than 10,000 hours of original content in Hindi, English, Bengali, Assamese and Bhojpuri, also won the award for the best show producer in the Science category for its series, ‘Listen to the Forest’. The Earshot audio series, ‘India’s Transgender Judges’, was selected as the ‘Best Show’ in News & Politics.
The organisation’s leadership team – Co-founders Rohit Upadhyay, Abhijit Majumder and Gaurav Choudhury, and executive editor Nagendar Sharma – personally received the awards.
“We tell stories in the most engaged, immersive manner in the world’s oldest and most potent mode of communication: audio. Earshot is making podcasting Indian; telling stories from the ground in the language of the people. And we produce these stories with the sleekest technology. You can almost see the sounds and the stories that our podcasts tell,” said Abhijit Majumder, Co-founder and Editor-in-chief of Earshot Digimedia Private Limited.
“Podcast listening will continue to grow rapidly in India. It is also emerging as a very effective communication tool for thought leadership, brand messaging, and in the areas of learning and development. India’s linguistic and cultural diversity, coupled with rapid smartphone penetration, offers enormous opportunities for podcasting to expand much beyond the metropolises into hinterland, aided by the fact it is a non-screen medium, keeps one’s hands and eyes free, allowing for content consumption while multitasking,” said Gaurav Choudhury, Co-founder and CEO of Earshot Digimedia Private Limited.