400,000 sound recordings come out of copyright

Happy Public Domain Day 2022 - on Jan 1, more than 400,000 sound recordings went into the public domain in the US, including tracks from Bert Williams (above), as well as books like AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh and movies from Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. What might you find for your podcast?

• Tascam has announced updated firmware for its Mixcast 4 Podcast Station. It adds better voice effects, input gain control, and additional tools: but it won’t be available until February.

• Could the UK’s Podcast Radio be heard in more countries? A senior executive at the station, Paul Chantler, says the company has plans to expand into the US and Australia.

• More new podcast episodes were published last month on Anchor and Buzzsprout than anyone else, with both podcast hosts increasing their market share by more than 1%.

• Libsyn’s AdvertiseCast reported a record high for podcast advertising of an average $23.78 CPM. That’s up 6.5% year-on-year.

• The Podnews Ranker shows an unchanged top three of companies we’ve reported on over the past 90 days; and a new #1 for the person we’ve reported on the most: the Podfather has beaten a former wrestling commentator. Our gender balance for people mentions remained unchanged at 36%.

• Helen Zaltzman discovers podcast-themed coffins.

The Tech Stuff - with the podcast:transcript tag

• Podcast app Fountain has published its list of most supported shows on the platform, using the value-for-value cryptocurrency “boost” method. Podcasting 2.0 is the #1 show; the Podnews podcast is #11!

• Tip: AWS Cloudfront will only compress content that has a Content-Length header. If you’re generating a larger (and dynamic) podcast RSS feed, it will likely be chunked, and therefore have no such header. Buffer the output, and set one manually, in that case. Related: Podnews’s RSS feed is now compressed; saving us 77% of our data bill (60GB down to 15GB), a saving of, er, $1.10 a month. 🎉

  • We get more than 486,000 requests for our RSS feed every month ($4.86 in fees). Were everyone to support Podping, that would drop to about 2,000 requests a month ($0.02).

• The Podnews RSS feed is also now paged. Good podcast apps that support paging, like PodcastAddict, will now see all 986 episodes. We’ve also added all these episodes to Spotify’s feed, since it shows them all.

• Boostagrams (a way of sending a message and a tip using new podcast apps) are a great way to get in touch; thank you to the many messages we had over the holiday period. Especially:

  • “I like the music bed”, says Dave Jones (we’re looking at refreshing our music in 2022)
  • “BOOST! From the guy who’s voice clip saying that word is regularly used by Adam Curry!”, says whoever that is
  • Adam himself boosted for our mention of Able and the Wolf, the music album that’s been released with streaming sats

Tips and tricks

• Audry post New Year’s Resolutions to Grow your Podcast in 2022: planning is important, as is planning breaks, they say.