'Making headlines, not podcasts'

Thank you to more than 600 new subscribers in February so far; including from people at Ausha, Netflix, Amazon, Claritas, Sybel, Apple, APM and Hessischer Rundfunk. If you’re finding us useful, please tell your colleagues to subscribe too!

• “Spotify’s splashy deals with stars from Ava DuVernay to Kim Kardashian made headlines, not podcasts.” So says Business Insider, with scuttlebutt from inside the company’s “internal tumult”. In December, we published a list of announced, but un-made, Spotify shows.

• Who’s interested in buying Audioboom? According to This Is Money, joining Amazon and Spotify as potential purchasers of the podcast company are Sony, Acast, and Liberty Global.

• Last Podcast on the Left, which announced a switch from Spotify to SiriusXM/Stitcher last year, is launching its SiriusXM radio show today. Called Open Lines, the show invites listeners to open their mind to questions of the mysterious and the paranormal; it’s tonight at 7pm ET on SiriusXM’s Faction Talk channel 103, a comedy and uncensored talk channel.

• Padverb is a new service that acts as a matchmaking tool for finding guests and hosts; it also allows listeners to follow peoples’ appearances (eg Russell Brand).

  
  Sep 11 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Another new service, Scale Your Podcast Marketing, offers to produce graphical assets for your show’s social media, transcripts, sound bites and tweets.

  
  Sep 11 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Rob Greenlee has been announced as a speaker at Radiodays Europe in Malmö in Sweden. Podnews’s Editor will also be there, in an as-yet unannounced thing that presumably we can’t talk about yet.

• Host your show with Podbean? Use their podcast websites? They’re retiring old themes on Mar 1; you’ll be switched to a new theme called “elegant” at that point if you’ve not chosen a different one.

Moves and hires

• Rishi Jaitly and Kyle Reis have been appointed as new board members at PRX. Jaitly is founding CEO of Times Bridge, an investment group owned by The Times of India; Reis is a Senior Director for TechSoup, a social enterprise technology company.

This link is no longer available, as at Sep 11 2023

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Is there a better, easier way to help podcasters “claim” their podcast on different apps? Currently, that process is a clunky method of hoping someone has access to the email address in the RSS feed, and then sending them an email. We think there might be something rather easier. Here’s some proposed documentation of how it might work: feedback is very welcome.

• Noting a significant increase in access from KaiOS phones, we’re now serving them our podcast in Opus audio format, saving those users bandwidth. You’re listening to our 16kbps Opus file if you hit the “LISTEN” link on our website in Google Chrome on desktop/Android; all KaiOS phones support Opus files.

• We have also added analytics data about which format we’ve served, and which episode was downloaded, to our analytics pages. That includes our AWS Cloudfront costs, if you’re interested.

• Related to the above, PodKast is a new, open source podcast app for KaiOS.

• The OPAWG RSS useragent data is now updated with more scraper names, and an acceptsopus flag.

Tips and tricks

• Cameron Poter talks to Courtney Kocak about how to sell ads as an indie podcaster.

Podcast News - with Quill

Produced by Quill: Contributors features provoking conversations about how to take your organization one step further by prioritizing more than just the bottom line. Hosts Marnie Niemi Hood and Russell Evans from the CAAT Pension Plan sit down with leaders who are contributing to the well-being of the country and global stage by innovating industries and leading change.

Listened to The Trojan Horse Affair and think you know everything about the Midlands of England? Made in the Midlands will help you think again: Loftus Media has worked with the city of Coventry to give you a glimpse into some of the most successful Midlanders about how their home helped them succeed. - read more

Tinx is a creator with millions of followers on TokTok and Instagram, and It’s Me, Tinx is a brand new podcast, signed with SiriusXM’s Stitcher. She’ll also be getting her own satellite radio show in March on the Stars channel, and will host on SiriusXM’s TikTok Radio as well.