Hong Kong, Jan. 17 -- Listening to podcasts exploded across the world. And the whole universe of sound has expanded as well, with more sophisticated headphones and smarter voice assistants heralding the widespread use of voice commands. Welcome to the age of social audio.

At the time, one could still meet on restaurant patios. And they were heated. That was a few years ago, in Paris, a thousand years ago. We were talking to Joel Ronez, who had just created Binge Audio, one of the first podcast studios in France. He already had the faith, but not yet the numbers to back it. It was in 2017. He was predicting the dazzling development that audio content creation was about to experience, freed from the constraints of radio programming. There ...