The first podcast to be released as an NFT?

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• The Techmeme Ride Home podcast has achieved a potential first this week - the first podcast episode released as an NFT - a non fungible token. A form of collectable digital art, host Brian McCullough, above, seems quite keen on it. (What’s an NFT?)

• Did you see Jordan Harbinger on TV? He was on ABC’s The Con (which they’re promoting all over the place including Good Morning America), featuring his interview with Fyre Festival creator and con artist Billy McFarland. “This is a big mainstream podcasting thing, from an indie show no less,” Harbinger tells us - “He’s still in prison. He actually got thrown into solitary for doing the interview with me, and he’s still there.”

• The nominees for The Ambies, the awards for excellence in audio, are to be announced today at 12pm, New York Time. We’ll have a full list with analysis tomorrow: if you’re a Podcast Academy member, you’ll get a vote to choose the winners.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 1 2023

• Paula Rogo, “the Podcast Shuri”, writes delightedly that Spotify is coming to much of Africa. Until now, they’d only been available in one sub-saharan country: South Africa.

• Blubrry has renamed its podcasting statistics plans. “Free, Standard, Advanced” replace “Basic, Professional, Advanced”.

• Crossover Media Group is now representing CBS Audio’s News/Talk podcast portfolio.

• James T Green was a contractor at Gimlet Media between 2015-2018. He writes about his not-so-great time there.

  
  Sep 1 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

• Going:

  • Tyler Moody, the VP of the WarnerMedia Podcast Network, has marked his end date as February on LinkedIn; others in the (former?) division appear to have been redeployed.
  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 1 2023
  • Peter Morris, the CEO of PodcastOne, has marked his end date as January in LinkedIn. He was announced as CEO in February 2019; the company was acquired by LiveXLive in July last year.
  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 1 2023
  • Erik Diehn, the CEO of Stitcher is “winding down” to a new role as adviser to SiriusXM, who acquired Stitcher in October.

• YouTube videos are not podcasts. But, Nick Hilton writes, “they are, aren’t they?”

• Things change fast in this world, but until now, our podcast events website didn’t. The good news: you can now delete events you’ve posted, if you need to. Some people would call this an essential, and obvious, feature to code before launch. We’re not those people.

Tips and tricks

• How To Dedicate More Time to Your Podcast (Wesleyne Greer)

Podcast News

Lemonada Media is debuting a new podcast this week. Covering body-positivity and intimacy and the importance of asking for what you need in the bedroom, it’s the education that you never got - but always needed.

The Aria Code returns for a third season next week, from WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera. The first show will be all about Puccini’s Nessun Dorma, which the press release describes as a global symbol of hope and resilience over the past year, but all soccer fans remember as “that song Pavarotti sang at the World Cup in 1990”.