Luminary, “The Netflix of Podcasting,” Two Years Later

Two years ago a fluff coming-out piece in the New York Times debuted Luminary, a venture capitalist-funded podcast app with a hundred million dollars and a dream to become “the Netflix of podcasting.” They then tweeted an ASCII bunny holding a sign reading, “Podcasts don’t need ads.” Things went downhill from there.

The first few months of Luminary’s life were plagued with bad PR, massive free podcasts pulling their feeds, and a glitchy app. Their $7.99 monthly subscription was a tall order for anyone who wasn’t a diehard Michael Rapaport fan in early 2019. 

It’s now 2021, the dust has thoroughly settled. Luminary has had over two years to build upon its stable of 40+ podcasts planned at launch, fix the app, and back the monthly subscription down to $4.99 a month. Also they’ve got a limited series with Dave Chappelle, and don’t you forget it. Luminary sure as hell won’t let you. 

Let’s see how Luminary held up. For a week I did my best to exclusively use the Android version of Luminary as my only podcatcher. It was more difficult than one might expect.

The App

With the gift of hindsight (and an 18-minute lecture by Ben Running, Luminary’s head of design) it’s easier to scrape away the layers of marketing guff and evaluate the product on the company’s own intended goals. Podcast pundits were right to roll their eyes at the “Netflix of podcasting” gimmick, but I can’t find evidence Running’s – and by extension Luminary as a company – interpretation of the concept being interrogated. 

A core design philosophy Running cites is wanting to “build a five star / three-and-a-half star app.” Luminary commissioned a painstaking study of every feature offered by every podcatcher available at the time, creating a snapshot of everything users currently had and, by extension, a view of which features were considered essential. The main takeaway from both their own study and others like The Infinite Dial was that most podcast apps valued power users over the average user. A five-star experience for the tech nerds of the podcast-consuming world but a middling experience for those easily overwhelmed by complex UI or tons of features. Luminary at launch intended to be a five star experience for someone who never listened to podcasts, but a three-ish star experience for power users. 

“These power features are, again, the demands of the few and they exist because of a really subpar sort of underlying experience. If you had these better management features, if you had better discovery by default, in a lot of cases you wouldn’t need some of these power user features,” Running said. 

While Running does not speak for the company as a whole, being lead designer on the app is a hell of a lot of influence, and his dismissive fake dialog for what confuses an average person on the street (.e.g “‘Pod’ sounds too techy”) speaks volumes about how disconnected the Luminary app is from the reality of podcasting. The enemy Luminary sought to fight to become popular was both the wrong one and didn’t exist.

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During my week of attempting to use Luminary as my daily driver, I was constantly reminded of how the app is actively hostile to users who listen to independent shows. Every episode of something like We Hate Movies or Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod served through Luminary is a wasted opportunity for them. Why? Two years ago Luminary considered manually adding an RSS feed (something anyone who supports podcasts on Patreon has done) to be something only “power users” care about. I emailed back in 2019 asking if it was on the development roadmap and got back a very polite message saying they might consider it, maybe. 

They didn’t. 

At launch the iOS version of Luminary was inundated with one-star ratings while the Android version stayed in beta for quite some time, available to the public but locked in a pre-release state where reviews only counted as developer feedback and didn’t affect the rankings. As far as the public can tell, Luminary for Android went public early 2021 with its first public review going up February 1st. As of this writing it sits at a 4.3 star ranking on Google and a 4.9 on Apple. While I fully expect there are a few people who genuinely like the app, it’s clear the majority of Google Play and Apple App Store ratings are fluffed with five-star reviews from Luminary subscribers who’re following calls to action from Luminary hosts. For every multi-paragraph negative review citing issues with the app and Luminary memory-holing content (we’ll get to that) there’s dozens of short five-stars shouting out a celebrity’s podcast.

If Luminary figured out one thing, it’s the inherent power of a charismatic podcast host. They can’t drive empty five-star reviews of the show to Apple Podcasts while exclusive toLuminary, but they can drive reviews of Luminary on the App store.

Around the anniversary of their launch in 2020 Luminary moved away from the much-criticized $7.99 pricetag to a more reasonable $4.99 monthly flat rate, though when one signs up they’re presented with a screen that displays the $34.99 yearly rate as the only option until one clicks a small line of text to reveal the no-commitment monthly fee. It’s shady, but most subscription services on the internet these days pull that same move so it’s not particularly unique to Luminary. An indication of their lack of faith in the idea users will stick around longer than seven months, perhaps, but not unique. 

To its credit: the app did not crash on me, worked with any Bluetooth connections thrown at it, and both the app and web versions did a good job of syncing my progress on episodes when switching between the two. The player itself has a 30 second skip-forward button and a 15 second rewind, identical to how my Podcast Addict custom buttons are set. One does have to manually press play whenever connecting a phone to a Bluetooth device. If one is in a use-case like mine where they regularly switch from a car stereo to Bluetooth earbuds, Luminary’s lack of auto-start when connecting to a new device will necessitate one taking their phone out dozens of extra times a week. Call me a power user, but the fact I can trust other apps or (change a setting to force said app) to auto-play when connecting to a device is pretty nice.

Using Luminary as a podcatcher without listening to its exclusives is like walking around a mall that only has one anchor store left. Sure, there’s a Macy’s but once you walk outside Macy’s it’s seemingly random businesses and empty places where old recognizable stores used to be. Since importing an .opml file to get my subscriptions from an actual podcatcher is a power user feature, I had to spend some time manually searching podcasts to add to My Shows. This is where Luminary’s hubris at its debut really bites them in the ass. Their original library was created by effectively copy/pasting iTunes’ podcast database, which immediately pissed off the podcasting world at large. iHeartMedia, NPR’s The Daily, and a pre-Spotify Joe Rogan all demanded their podcasts withdrawn from Luminary around the launch window. Smaller independent podcasts started sharing a form letter on Twitter to easily email a demand Luminary remove their RSS feed. 

Going forward any new shows on Luminary are there because the creator made an active effort to submit their RSS feed to the service. Any older podcasts on Luminary feel like they’re there because the creators didn’t care or don’t know. iHeartMedia seems to have done a decent job keeping itself off the service with only a staccato offering of shows made by indie producers who might not know about the ban (e.g. Jamie Loftus’ My Year in Mensa is available but Lolita Podcast and Aack-Cast aren’t). 

Speaking of missing content…

The Content

In researching this review I sat down, took a page out of Ben Running’s book, and made a huge spreadsheet of every Luminary original podcast in their walled garden. Or, at least I intended on making a complete spreadsheet. After going through their list titled “All Luminary Originals,” I followed a hunch and also went through the bespoke categories for original podcasts. There, nestled in “Great Conversations” was People’s Party with Talib Kweli, a podcast that has dutifully chugged along for 108 episodes since June of 2019, arguably one of the more productive Luminary properties. Yet, despite its size, it’s not listed in All Luminary Originals. Perhaps there are other ghost Luminary products like People’s Party that I haven’t found, but the following data is based off what the company itself claims is its entire catalog.

At launch the number thrown around in press releases was 40+ Luminary Originals. This was a bit of a marketing fib to fluff numbers in this writer’s opinion, as a not-insubstantial amount of shows in that 40+ had little “coming soon” banners on their feeds in spring of 2019. Content was thin on the ground at launch. As of late July of 2021, Luminary is in a content spiral, down to 35 total exclusive podcasts including new additions not in the original claim of 40. Only 13 podcasts in the company’s catalog have uploaded content in 2021. 

The average episode count of a Luminary original podcast is 78. If one removes the five pre-existing podcasts Luminary bought exclusivity rights to (including their substantive backlogs) the average number of episodes in a “true” Luminary podcast drops to 31. That difference in content is huge. All told Luminary has 2,754 episodes of content in that playlist (plus People’s Party). Without the backlogs of pre-existing celebrity podcasts that number drops to 997. Not an insignificant amount of podcasting, but definitely underwhelming for a startup with $100,000,000 and two years of runway. 

Most disappointing is Luminary’s tendency to, as one iTunes reviewer put it, “memory-hole its own premium content.” Without a doubt one of the most passionate defenses of Luminary’s premium content during early criticism was made by Lauren Shippen, creator of The Bright Sessions, who was debuting a spinoff series on Luminary. On a Tumblr post responding to an ask, Shippen spoke to the fact Luminary offered a rare opportunity to fully produce an audio drama with a budget that fairly paid every member of the cast and crew, an extreme rarity in independent audio fiction. “Thankfully, we’ve been able to pay everyone – guest writers, guest actors… pretty fairly, but we’ve made no additional profit off of the Patreon, ever. [With Luminary] everyone is actually being paid a fair, livable wage and we were able to get Atypical Artists off the ground, a company that we’re going to use to make more great – and free – content.”

Shippen’s defense of the decision to produce content for Luminary presented a hopeful vision for what Luminary could be. Most corporations getting into podcasting treat audio fiction as a novelty, something to stunt cast a celebrity in that will quickly sell movie rights to a studio for the actual payday. Here was a new platform launching with such offerings as a sequel to The Bright Sessions called The AM Archives (now available on the main feed of The Bright Sessions for free, along with the show’s second sequel, The College Tapes), an exclusive season of A Very Fatal Murder, and John Cameron Mitchell’s audio drama follow-up to Hedwig and the Angry Inch titled Anthem: Homunculus. 

In March of 2020 Shippen announced Atypical Artists’ relationship with Luminary had come to a close and both Luminary Bright Sessions sequel series would be released as traditional RSS feeds. Both The AM Archives and The College Tapes have been deleted from Luminary entirely. Also gone are Anthem and A Very Fatal Murder season two, along with any notion Luminary had intentions of being a bastion of well-paid audio fiction production. Unless one counts the potentially-fabricated ghost stories on Spooked, the last fiction property on Luminary died in September of 2019 when the Team Coco audio drama Frontier Tween aired its final episode. There are likely other Luminary-funded shows that’ve been successfully memory-holed in this manner, as no website I can find thought it necessary to manually list every Luminary property. I only noticed the above three axed shows because I remember them. 

The lack of fiction seems to lead to Luminary using niche categories when deploying its much-advertised content curation. Generic terms like “Performing Arts” are used instead of “Fiction” so shows like Love and Radio and Spooked can be listed alongside The Magnus Archives and, funnily enough, The Bright Sessions. 

At this point Luminary has ceased to be the content platform it intended on becoming. From the outside looking in, it appears the current strategy is to embrace the fact the app is effectively a container for a handful of celebrity chat shows. Any focus on creating original content has fallen by the wayside to the point popular creators who did the bulk of positive word-of-mouth marketing at launch either weren’t renewed or left of their own accord. 

The true irony of the “Netflix of podcasts” schtick is, in a way, they succeeded. Netflix, formerly known for world-class original content and massive backlog, has lost a significant portion of its content to competitors and turned to churning out celebrity-driven content in a bid for relevancy. Congratulations to Luminary for succeeding in the worst way possible, I guess. If there are users in the world who swear by Luminary as their all-around podcatching app, they’re doing so because they’re stubborn, ignorant to the options available, or really enjoy the yellow app icon. 

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