Comedy albums pulled from Spotify :sadface:

• Spotify has pulled a number of comedy albums from its service, after claims they weren’t licensed correctly. Meanwhile, Jeff Price has announced a $3.5m investment round for his Word Collections company, which “focuses on getting comedians and other spoken word performers paid for the use of their works for the first time”.

  • Jeff Price will be interviewed for Podland later this week.

• YouTube video creators had 729 million copyright claims in the first half of the year, almost all automated. There were 2.2m mistaken copyright claims, overturned on appeal by the creator. (The number of incorrect copyright claims that creators didn’t bother trying to appeal, or didn’t know how to, is unknown)

• Podtrac has published their top podcast publishers for November. Total global downloads for the top 20 podcasters were flat, the company says, both month-over-month and year-over-year. iHeartRadio is still #1 for podcasts; it measures participating publishers only.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 9 2023

• The team behind No Such Thing As a Fish has been interviewed for the new PodBible magazine.

• Imagine Entertainment, a film and TV company, is launching an audio division tied to an exclusive deal with iHeartMedia.

• Australian broadcaster SCA has acquired Kinderling, a kids podcaster. No terms were given; Kinderling had previously been using part of the company’s DAB+ spectrum for a kids radio station.

• Our November ranker, covering companies and people mentioned in Podnews , has been released. Spotify’s still the #1 company: no surprise, given we receive an average of 37 stories a month from Spotify’s PR teams. 36% of the mentions we gave of people were to women, a fall of 1% from last month.

Thank you to the Gmail subscriber who became subscriber number 21,000 at 11.08pm GMT yesterday. We appreciate your support (collective 'you’).

Moves and hires - with Pod People

• Mark Halliday is to join Global’s digital ad exchange DAX as Director. He was Chief Digital and Data Officer at Manning Gottlieb OMD in London, and also worked for the agency for five years in Singapore.

This link is no longer available, as at Sep 9 2023

Podcast News - with Blue Wire

In Blue Wire's limited series WR1 presented by WynnBet, legendary NFL wide receiver Cris Carter interviews legends of the WR position as well as the next generation of superstars to understand what makes this position so unique, as so many personalities and stories come from outside of the hash marks. Guests include Julian Edelman, Adam Thielen, Mike Evans, Calvin Johnson, and many more.

If you enjoyed yesterday’s dive into music licensing, the latest episode of Insult My Intelligence with Tim Dowling explains the confusing and messy state of copyright law. Guesting are Law Professor Jennifer Jenkins, and YouTuber Tom Scott. - read more
Sep 9 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

Ghostwriter is a new “podcast movie” from C13Features, starring Adam Scott and Kate Mara. It’s the studio’s second release, and follows Kate Michaels (Kate Mara), a former journalist who reluctantly accepts a job ghostwriting a new murder mystery novel for an eccentric billionaire; but there’s more to him than meets the eye.