Podcast guest booking platforms tested

• Over six months, Jon McLernon reviewed four different podcast guest booking platforms that help you be a guest on other shows. After all of this testing, he has a clear recommendation.

• Not a podcast, but some great audio, The Prick and The Sting is a binaural audio experience created with, and for, blind and partially sighted audiences. A “darkly woven, gothic fable set in a shabby, crabby little theatre in the century before the century before last”, the show received funding from Arts Council England. It’s available until May 18, and was produced by Raucous, a Bristol-based immersive theatre company.

• Podbean has extended the deadline to their Start Advertising on Podcasts contest. The competition is offering $2,000 of cash and promotion for your podcast, for making a creative-sounding ad.

• Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack has had a significant upgrade. Audio Hijack 4 is $29 for existing users of Audio Hijack 3, or $64 from new.

• Spotify’s acquisition of podcast analytics firms has some in the industry concerned, says Morning Brew.

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

• Spotify has posted office tours of their facilities in Los Angeles, Milan, Mumbai, New York City, Stockholm, Berlin, Toronto and Paris. They’ve also published their corporate values.

• NPR has published six podcasts that offer a glimpse into kids’ minds, from entries from their Student Podcast Challenge.

• Writing for his newsletter, Tom Webster discusses NFTs, iHeart’s new NFT podcast network, and argues that podcast companies should be investing in growing the space: “building excitement, understanding, and interest with the general population”.

Sounds, songs and their stories: Nathan Wizard is the curator for The EarBuds Podcast Collective this week, featuring five episodes of podcasts where the hosts and guests dissect songs, soundtracks, artists, or stories that are good, bad, or wild and off the wall. Subscribe to EarBuds today!

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

Moves and hires

• Kelly McEvers, who has hosted NPR’s Embedded podcast for six years, will leave the show as full-time host (but still be heard on it on occasion). She is launching a podcast production company.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS.com

• Downloads from an “AppleCoreMedia” useragent aren’t just from Apple Podcasts: but what are they from? Our podcast download stats page now identifies exactly where those downloads are coming from every day.
• The OPAWG user agent list has been updated with a number of new services including Gaana’s iOS app, Bullhorn, Newsly, ProCast, and Anchor’s importing tool.
• Are you WebSub/PodPing’ing updated shows? Tip: also ping when the RSS feed is deleted, which will also inform downstream systems that it can remove the feed from directories.
• Thank you for your boosts on new podcast apps for Podnews - many people have been sending us value in the shape of boosts, for the value they get from Podnews. Hit the boost button on a new podcast app (Fountain is a good one) to send us a message. You can also claim your podcast in Fountain to get boostagrams too.

Tips and tricks

• How many people should you have on your podcast? Rachel Corbett says that any more than three, and “things get complicated”

Podcast News - with Acast

From Acast: Naked Beauty has recently been featured on the Today show and Daytime; it talks about beauty trends, selfcare journeys, skincare, wellness tips and the products we love, hosted by Brooke DeVard Ozaydinli.

OTHER PEOPLE’S STORIES is the focus of a piece in The Salt Lake Tribune. Hosted by Lauren “Lo” Peterson and Elizabeth Leach, the show interviews interesting people from the community.

Pod Chat this week features AJ Churchill from Apollo, a fiction podcast app - how it’s driving podcast findability, and the future of podcast apps.