RAIN Podcast Business Summit is next week

• The RAIN Podcast Business Summit is next Tuesday in New York NY, USA, focusing on Unlocking the podcast mainstream. There are great speakers, including Google’s Zack Reneau-Wedeen, NPR’s Joel Sucherman, and Edison Research’s Tom Webster. We’ll be there, and you can be too - this Podnews-exclusive link will give you 50% off the ticket price.

• Job: Spotify wants “a senior development executive to oversee our exclusive content strategy for the Sports category.”

• Dr Phil wants to produce a true crime podcast. He’s already producing Phil In The Blanks; and apparently Apple flew some of its staff in to help his team launch it.

  
  This link is no longer available, as at Aug 10 2023

• Wondery has launched Wondery Plus, promising “Early Access, Ad Free Listening and Exclusive Content” for US$5 a month.

• Seth Godin lists five reasons you might want to start a podcast. (Interestingly, none of the reasons are anything to do with the listener.)

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• iVoox, a Spanish podcast host, has managed to temporarily extend a licence it has with the Spanish music industry to let you use commercial music on their podcasts.

• As we go to press, Global - the largest commercial radio company in the UK - have announced plans to make over 100 radio presenters redundant, by networking breakfast shows across the country.

• Marco Arment has accused NPR of being “empty and naive” about the aims of their RAD podcast analytics program; and claims it’s all about ad tracking.

• Joan Warner, Commercial Radio Australia’s CEO, has responded to our Editor’s comments yesterday. “Our submission does not propose restricted access to podcasts; podcasting has grown and thrived because of access via a multitude of third party podcast apps. The Australian radio industry is Australia’s leading investor in podcast creation and promotion, and has benefited from having its content being available everywhere,” she says. This directly contradicts her quote which we published yesterday.

  
  Aug 10 2023: This broken link now points to the Internet Archive.

Podcasts

Podrunner is a workout music podcast, celebrating thirteen years as a podcast this week. The podcast has won many awards during the past thirteen years, and is currently in the charts in many different countries. The current episode is an hour of mixes at 154 BPM, which we listened to at our desk and still felt exhausted. (Libsyn)

The government won’t tell you to get a cab. That’s advice from Scamwow, a podcast about the worst scams. After receiving a mysterious phone call possibly concerning her parents’ safety, Abby Holland embarks on an epic journey that involves the IRS, a Mexican drug cartel, graphic designers, and one extremely helpful Apple store guy. (Libsyn)

Halo is a headset that makes you learn faster. If you could learn as fast as a child… would you? Should This Exist? is a WaitWhat original series, in partnership with Quartz. (ART19)

Developer corner

Through an undocumented API call, we’ve now worked out how to link to individual episodes in Apple Podcasts (joining Google Podcasts, which is a base64_url encode of the GUID). If you scroll down to the bottom of any podcast page on Podnews, you’ll find a link to “episode links”, and one of those looks like this. Our quest continues: how does a Spotify episode link work?
This link is no longer available, as at Aug 10 2023
• In other news, our podcast pages now correctly spot VBR encoded files, and tell you not to; and our press release pages now link to the podcasts they’re about.