Exactly Right Media, the American audio production company co-founded nine years ago by My Favorite Murder creators Georgia Hardstark and Karen Kilgariff has partnered with iHeartMedia, who become their exclusive sales, marketing and distribution partner. They announced the end of an exclusive arrangement with Wondery and Amazon Music in January, a deal thought to have been worth around $100 million.

For Australian ‘murderinos’, what fans of the My Favorite Murder podcast call themselves, there is a more interesting story behind the scenes which is another demonstration of why entities like Wondery and Spotify are much more cautious about spending big on exclusive podcast deals.

On the Triton Australian Podcast Ranker, Wondery podcasts have their sales representation with SCA / LiSTNR. In the most recent ranker, the top Wondery title was Morbid, at #26. Wondery also saw SmartLess, probably its most successful asset, move to SiriusXM a year ago. 

What the exclusive agreement saw, for Exactly Right and Wondery, was that they would release new episodes of My Favorite Murder a week before any of the other platforms could have it. But strangely, and I’m not sure why, in Australia at the end of 2023, My Favorite Murder was #32 on the ranker, up 5 (see below). In first ranker for 2024 it had vanished and has not appeared in the top 200 since.

On the LiSTNR Wondery podcast page, they still appear to have rights to other Exactly Right Media podcasts like This Podcast Will Kill You and That’s Messed Up, but perhaps there was an additional cost to get the sales, distribution and marketing for My Favorite Murder, which LiSTNR, in 2024, was not prepared to pay.

Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark said in an episode of their show:

“We are no longer working with Wondery [and] Amazon, which means no more early-release episodes, which means everybody is listening together just like the good old days.”

Which includes Australians, but this time on iHeart.

Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and podcaster for Radioinfo.