Wondery does a deal with Universal Music

• Universal Music Group have partnered with Wondery “on audio stories that could later be developed into films or TV shows”; the deal reportedly means that Wondery can use UMG’s music catalog in its podcasts.

  • This doesn’t, quite, mean that Wondery can start using all the songs it likes, though: UMG owns the recordings, but typically not the publishing rights for the songs, which would also need to be agreed. As one example: the UK rock band Queen are on a UMG label, but their song publisher Queen Music Ltd is owned by Sony/ATV. Here’s how to use commercial music in your podcasts.

• Earshot Strategies writes, critically, on the decision by the BBC to pull its podcasts from Google.

• A pop music critic for the Washington Post posts a clickbaity article entitled Are podcasts killing music or just wasting our time?. The article (which does contain some useful points) has been widely reviled on social media, probably doing exactly what the author wanted; Helen Zaltzman has an especially cogent take (and the comments seem to agree).

• If your podcast was submitted to Spotify by your podcast host, you may have looked enviously at those who have direct access to Spotify’s analytics, which contain demographic details and more information. You can now see that, too: just add your podcast and you’ll be able to see your stats; you need access to the email address in your RSS feed.

• Omny Studio - featured in WIRED magazine this month - have written about their transcription service, and the benefit of it. They also show off their “transcript player”.

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• Vox Media has purchased Epic Magazine.

• Spreaker, a podcast host, have announced a one-click publishing service for their clients, and a few more tweaks.

• Neilsen have published a blog post about podcast advertising, noting that audiences think podcast advertising is a good fit with the content.

• A British record plugging service (“pluggers” go out to radio stations and convince them to play songs) has launched a new podcast plugging service, matching artists with podcasts “that best meet their strategic needs”.

• We Edit Podcasts has written a good - no, excellent - list of top 14 podcast blogs.

Podcasts

The Primary Ride Home is a new daily podcast from Ride Home Media, “the daily news podcast company”. The podcast, hosted by Chris Higgins, is updated for 5pm every day. It’s the second podcast from the company; the first was Techmeme Ride Home, a tech news podcast. (Ride Home Media / Anchor)

Happy Birthday This Week In Tech, which is 14 years old. Leo Laporte and the team have posted their very first episode, then called Revenge of the Screensavers, on YouTube - oddly, acted out by puppets.

Correspondence

Laura says:

I manage podcasts for an NPR member station. I’m thinking of changing all our language to “follow.” It solves the listen-one-time vs listen-from-now-on problem, but still sounds free.

Joshua adds:

I think “Follow” actually makes a lot of sense. More so than Subscribe or Listen. Particularly when you realize that people “subscribe/follow” a lot of shows and only selectively listen to episodes that either look interesting or come from their absolute favorite shows.

…we’d note that “follow” is language also used by Spotify (in some user interfaces), as well as iHeartRadio.

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We’ve added magic QR code links to our podcast links pages (here’s an example) which, when scanned, open either Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts automatically. Good for business cards, if you think people know what to do with QR codes.