Record labels take podcaster to court for music in podcast

• Universal Music Group and a further six major record labels have filed a lawsuit against the UK company iBus Media Ltd. They allege 46 copyrighted songs have been used 253 times by the company in their PokerNews podcasts; and they’re requesting $150,000 damages for each use. Digital Music News, a campaigning website for musician’s rights, covers the story in more depth.

• We note that the RSS feeds for most PokerNews podcasts have been removed (they use a mix of hosts including AudioBoom and Podbean). PokerNews Romania still exists at the time of writing, hosted on Podbean, and the latest episode starts with Bennie Goodman’s Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing).

• We’ve published a guide on how to use commercial music in your podcasts, including fair use, non-commercial usage, and other elements.

• Chartable, a podcast analytics product, has added integration for Apple Podcasts Analytics. To use this, however, you need to share your Apple username/password with Chartable; the company told Podnews that “we triple encrypt all usernames and passwords with the same technology used by sites that ask for the same information for bank accounts”. They’ve also launched Trackable, a redirect stats service much like Podtrac or Blubrry. (We’re trying it out for our podcast).

• Panoply writes about Apple Podcast ratings, and what we can learn from them. Their conclusion? “Pay extra close attention to the first few hundred ratings and reviews you get”.

  
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• The New York Times interviews Guy Raz, host of How I Built This.

• The Washington Post’s new podcast? Digiday posts an important correction to the story we linked to yesterday: “An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the Post is estimating 1 million downloads per episode, rather than per month.”

Opinion

• A podcast is the audio equivalent of desktop publishing, says Dutch commentator René de Monchy.

  A modern communication department must come up with a good reason why they employ a “desk-top publisher” employee who publishes text (on paper and digital), but not a “desk-top audio” publisher who publishes audio.

Podcasts

Someone in the UK suffers from a stroke every five minutes (and in the US, every 40 seconds). When UK radio broadcaster Mark Goodier suffered a series of strokes in 2016 and 2017, he realised there weren’t many resources you could use to help your recovery. Stroke Stories is the answer: in every episode, a different stroke survivor, and a different story of recovery. (Wise Buddah / Acast)

REAL Talk features the real-life experiences of high profile people and their unexpected journeys with mental health, despite a seemingly ‘perfect’ external life, and aims to transform the mental health conversation in each personal and moving episode. The latest episode features Australian TV personality Osher Günsberg’s journey out of alcoholism and relationship with medication. (Heart On My Sleeve Movement / NOVA Entertainment / Acast)

Chartable Radio is a new podcast that discusses charts and podcast statistics. (Libsyn)

The Guardian covers their own daily podcast, called Today in Focus.

Thank you to the Weird Tales Radio Show who are our newest silver supporter. They’ve helped us be able to spend time today on our image resizing script, significantly making all our supporter logos look better and clearer on the web, whatever device you have.