TMI cover stars for The Podcast Sessions

• The October issue of The Podcast Sessions magazine was released, free - focusing on podcasting in Africa. Cover stars Lydia K.M and Murugi Munyi are hosts of The Messy Inbetween, hosted on Spotify for Podcasters - a podcast about “life as it is”.

• On Air LA Annex has announced Jason Derulo and Alexandra Shipp as the Thursday night headliners. It’s the annual West Coast edition of New York City’s influential On Air Fest, and takes place in early November.

• YouTube continues to roll-out podcasts globally, and has added a podcasts homepage in Australia. It looks like this. We’re expecting more countries to get podcasts in YouTube later this week.

• In Canada, the CRTC has published “myths and facts about Bill C-11, the online streaming act”.

• TWiT podcasts were added to an advertising block list used by Eero and PiHole, rendering them temporarily unplayable. We’ve seen this behaviour affect other shows, too; technical details are below in the tech stuff.

• Student organisation The Black Snapper International Film Festival has launched the Black Snapper International Audio Competition. If you’re a student and you’ve some great audio (in English), it’s free to enter; you’ve until Sunday.

• Sonnant and Podder announced a partnership, combining Sonnant’s content analysis with Podder’s demographic data.

• Spreaker is building an uptime monitor for the podcast industry. Poduptime isn’t yet officially launched, but seems to be testing major podcast hosts and tracking prefixes.

• Further reading… The host of Generally Spooky History talks about getting into the in-flight entertainment on British Airways … and RedCircle suggests embedding your podcast for more downloads (and we’ve a list of some embedded players you might want to use).

Moves and hires

• Crooked Media has announced a number of new executives. Madeleine Haeringer has been named Executive Vice President and General Manager of News and Programming; Reid Cherlin has been appointed Executive Producer of Politics; Dariush Brizuela-Nothaft has been named Senior Vice President of Community and Partnerships; and Crystal Ponzio-Busto has been elevated to Executive Vice President of Marketing.

The Tech Stuff - with RSS․com

• Want to make your show notes look lovely in the Spotify app? Here are Spotify’s formatting notes - bold and italic are only supported if you host with Spotify for Podcasters, interestingly. Spotify only supports https links, by the way, not http links.
• Looking for automated ways to link to podcasts (and episodes) on a variety of players? Nathan Gathright’s podcast-platform-links is quite helpful.
• In your app, how can you spot if a download has been blocked by an ad-blocking service? Normally it’ll be blocked by ad-blockers like Pi-hole, NextDNS or Control D - but because of the way these services interface with podcasts, they kill the whole download. You could see if the DNS has resolved to 0.0.0.0, which is the standard for Pi-Hole and ControlD (and then give the user a message); and/or force a DNS lookup with a known DNS server, like Google’s 8.8.8.8.

Podcast News

If it’s difficult to find balance in today’s fast-paced world, Spiritual Mixtape is new from This is Distorted, dedicated to health, wellness and spirituality. It’s hosted by Daisy Mack, who burnt-out in an entertainment company in LA, and discovered a change in life for the better, which she now wants to share with us all.

Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps has hit 3mn downloads; and to celebrate will be undertaking a live podcast tour next year, and expanding into video on Dec 1. The show “forces loyal, engaged, educated listeners to consider unpopular opinions”. If you recognise Josh Szeps from somewhere - it’s probably when he told Joe Rogan that, putting it politely, he was talking nonsense about vaccines.

BOSSY with Tara & Katie is new from Morning Brew - a podcast tailored to women looking to grow their businesses and financial wealth. It’s hosted by Katie Gatti and Tara Reed.

Now more than ever, people are questioning what they do for work and are looking for ways to create their dream career. So, I Quit My Day Job has joined Australia’s 9Podcasts this month for its fifth season. Each week Catherine Mahoney speaks to a different person who has quit their jobs and followed their heart.