Libsyn plans new advertising platform; and Inside Star Wars launches this week

• Libsyn plans to launch a new advertising platform created specifically for podcasters; and is looking to expand its business outside the US, according to their quarterly investor phone call..

  • In possibly-related news, Libsyn say there’ll be a special app-only episode of their The Feed podcast tomorrow, with an exciting announcement.

• Spotify has added sleep timers to its Android app. They’ve been present on iOS for some time. Their “Daily Drive” feature - a mix of news and music for your commute - will have little radio-like jingles, too. Here are the generic ones, and if you live in LA, Dallas, San Francisco, Philadelphia or Chicago, you get your own more customised ones. /ht My Spotify Ideas

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 13 2023

• A free service, which apparently “uses machine learning” - feed Podcast Transcribe with an MP3 file, and it’ll transcribe it for you within ten minutes. We fed it this episode, and it took less than a minute to transcribe it like this. (Our podcast features an aloof British accent, which can throw automated voice-to-text software).

Opinion and analysis

• Respected analysts Andreessen Horowitz have written a long and useful paper about investing in podcasting in 2019.

  
  Aug 13 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

  “Podcasts monetize at $0.01 per listener hour - ten times less than radio.”

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• Jack Rhysider also writes about Venture Capital, Funding, and Acquisitions in Podcast-land, helpfully pulling together all the activity in this space.

  I’m very curious how much Gimlet paid for Science Vs or The Pitch, how much Luminary paid to get exclusive shows, or how much some podcasts were acquired for. Then if we knew how many listeners that show has we could then start understanding how much a podcast is worth.

• Miranda Sawyer from The Guardian notes, rather exasperatedly, the differences between radio and podcasting in her weekly podcast review…

  I sometimes wonder what BBC audio producers are thinking when they make these shows. They must listen to the same great podcasts as we do. Can’t they hear how the best ones cut out all extraneous chatter? How listeners don’t need to have their hands held if the audio is compelling enough? Stop explaining, stop setting up, stop patronising us. … BBC audio producers, especially executive ones, need to take a week out to listen – really listen – to successful podcasts.

• Jeanine Percival Wright from Simplecast writes Why your podcast needs a trademark.

  The best practice is actually registering your trademark with the USPTO. This puts EVERYONE on notice regarding your trademark ownership and gives you a presumption that it is yours and can’t be copied.

• How do podcasts and music work together? A writeup of a panel at Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit conference in New York. (Music licensing isn’t mentioned.)

  “Why isn’t Dave Grohl doing a podcast about his new barbecue? Not only is it super-serving the fan, but it’s also an opportunity.”

Podcasts

Reported in February and from the people behind Inside Psycho and Inside JAWS comes Wondery’s Inside Star Wars, which launches on Wednesday. We wrote something quite geeky but ultimately illegible in the graphic above for fun.

A Very Fatal Murder is back from The Onion, and gets a great review in The Outline. “In order to listen to the whole show, I had to sign up for a free trial with Luminary that I will inevitably forget about.”