Heather McGhee hosts new Higher Ground podcast on Spotify

• NYT best-selling author Heather McGhee is to host The Sum of Us, a new podcast on Spotify from Higher Ground. The show is a road trip from rural Maine to the California coast, looking at the real impact of inequality and racism on everyday Americans. It’s one of the remaining shows on Spotify from the Obama’s production company; they signed a deal with Amazon’s Audible in June.

• Australian radio broadcasters Hamish and Andy have made their entire 12 year radio show archive available on Apple Podcasts. The archive, featuring 1,800 episodes from 2006 to 2017, is now available as an Apple Podcasts subscription for AUD$2.99 a month (US $2).

• Acast CEO Ross Adams was asked on the Podland podcast today a difficult question about the future of the company’s email marketing strategy. The episode will be available in the next few hours, if you’d like to learn what he said.

• The IAB Tech Lab has written a paper “to address emerging privacy mechanisms and their unintended impacts to the podcasting ecosystem”. It expresses concern about the rise of Apple Private Relay and VPNs, and how they might damage ad targeting, and content geoblocking. The paper calls for increased dialogue and more participation between the IAB and podcast platforms for a commitment for some form of geolocation to be passed to podcast hosting companies, and a way to better measure downloads and user numbers while respecting privacy.

• Pandora has added a charts website. It’s music only, though: perhaps tellingly, podcasts are absent.

• Podcast riches are often in niches, says Steven Goldstein, interviewing podcaster Bryan Orr from HVAC School.

• Triton Digital released the New Zealand Podcast Ranker for June. Studio71 is a new participating publisher; for the rest, total downloads are down 9.7%, listeners are down 5.2%.

• Thank you to Podvine, which has added a full unsubscribe function to their emails, following our coverage yesterday.

• Perhaps because of our story yesterday highlighting them as podcasting’s biggest spammer, Backtracks has quietly stopped being a financial supporter of our newsletter. (They didn’t even email us!) We’re genuinely grateful for the company’s previous support of our independent journalism; and if you value it too, your company could take its place.

• Thank you to Joe Stone who became our latest personal supporter a few days ago. We really appreciate it, Joe - thank you.

Podcast News - with Pushkin Industries

From Pushkin: Coming this fall: Come As You Are features sex educator and bestselling author Emily Nagoski, who answers questions about sex with the latest science, dispelling popular cultural myths and lies. Her advice will not only improve your sex life, it will help you learn to live with more confidence and joy in your body.

Congratulations to Wild Business Growth Podcast for hitting their 200th show. The milestone episode includes special returning guests, best of moments, and unreleased bloopers.

Songbook, a podcast about music books that shape our lives, has been launched. Hosted by Jude Rogers, it features a special guest dissecting one exciting music book in detail; the first season includes Brett Anderson, Ian Rankin and Shirley Collins.

Inner West Icons is a new indie podcast from Sydney, looking at the other side of Sydney, away from the harbour and the bridge, and towards the delights of the Inner West of Australia’s biggest city. They call it “local history done different”, and it’s hosted by ex-ABC TV presenter Bernie Hobbs, who’s a long-time inner westie, and produced by Jane Curtis.

It’s eleven years since Amy Winehouse died; We Miss Amy Winehouse is a companion podcast to an Edinburgh Fringe show from Suchandrika Chakrabarti. The show, on Anchor’s Music + Talk platform, asks Amy fans from the worlds of comedy, music and journalism about their favourite Winehouse tracks, when they first heard the songs and why they, too, miss Amy Winehouse.

The Chris Cuomo Project appears to have been launched today by the ex-CNN news anchor. He was fired from CNN for assisting his brother’s defence of sexual harrassment allegations, now dismissed, and more allegations about his own behaviour. In a first episode that starts with him apologising to his former CNN team, he interviews Sean Penn.

Canción Exploder is the Spanish-language version of Song Exploder, and it’s now available. It’s co-executive produced by Martina Castro, and Executive Produced by Song Exploder creator Hrishikesh Hirway.