Luminary launches - without some popular podcasts

• Luminary, the self-styled “Netflix of podcasting”, launches officially today. As The Verge points out, Luminary doesn’t have The Daily from the New York Times in it - an in-app message grumpily recommends alternative podcasts. Podcasts from Spotify, Gimlet Media and Anchor are also unavailable. Perhaps surprisingly, it does contain BBC content. The Verge’s Dieter Bohn calls this “the upcoming podcast wars”.

  “Because Luminary’s business model is new, unproven, and frankly opaque in how it plans to monetize its free tier, we are being especially cautious regarding the potential to automatically distribute Anchor creators’ content, without knowing exactly how it will affect their podcasts.”—Michael Mignano, Anchor co-founder, explains why Anchor has not allowed Luminary to list their podcasts

• Available in Canada, the UK, Australia and the US, Luminary is priced at US$7.99/month (but a third cheaper for Australians oddly). We tested the website with a Brazilian IP address, where Luminary is not supported: every page, even for free podcasts, forwards to a page explaining Luminary is unavailable. (Add ?country=US to the end of the URL).

• Yes, your podcast is there already. Luminary links now appear in our podcast pages, like this for Gladiator, and our availability page now includes Luminary too. Here’s how to add your podcast if it isn’t there already. Luminary’s base directory was taken from Apple Podcasts before October 20th and podcasts since deleted from Apple’s database have not been removed from Luminary’s directory. There is no contact point for how to achieve removal of podcasts.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 12 2023

• Audioburst, a speech search engine, has received a further $10m of funding from an advertising agency and a car company. Hyundai’s investment will power “an engaging, screen-free and original-voice experience” in their vehicles.

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• A new show from the Australian ABC, Democracy Sausage, is “not on iTunes” - the curiously-titled program is only available “in the ABC Listen app”. This isn’t, though, a decision to trial exclusivity: as a very short-term made-for-radio program about next month’s Australian Federal Election, a spokesperson tells us “we consider it as catch-up radio rather than a podcast”, hence why it’s not appearing in (any) third-party podcast feeds. Aunty’s not gone mad.

• “How to break into podcast advertising” is a crash course for advertisers from Megaphone, including advice on style, sound and best practice. Megaphone have also posted a piece looking at Game of Thrones podcasts. There are many of them.

  
  Aug 12 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• 25% of all Brazilians listen to podcasts “regularly”, according to statistics quoted by IAB Brazil in an article discussing podcast advertising in the country.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 12 2023

Podcasts

Got an unfinished novel? Bruce Janu did: so he gave himself a kick and turned it into a podcast to help him finish it. The result is Lilac Wine - The Podcast. (Libsyn)

The audio fiction podcast Dreamland is part mystery, part dark comedy, which “follows a novice private eye as she hunts an imposter. The case leads her to some of Hollywood’s most colorful characters who test her in ways she couldn’t have predicted.” (Nerve Tank Media / Libsyn)

Design Tomorrow comes well recommended by followers of @podnews on Twitter. It’s a well-produced, interesting listen focusing on where design and humanity collide.

Bad boys, bad boys - wha’cha gonna do? Dan Taberski and the team behind Missing Richard Simmons are back - investigating COPS, the longest running reality show in TV history, and its cultural impact. Running from COPS launches today. (ART19)

UK reality TV star Lydia Bright returns for season two of The Brights, widely touted as the first reality podcast. (Somethin’Else/Acast)