Email from iTunes? Huh?

Question

I got the same "not available in US Store" and from what I read it should be.
I also read "in the email you got from iTunes"... I never got an email from iTunes and I submitted our podcast 4 weeks ago. It does come up in the "powersearch/title" when I type in "Brian and Mark Show".
My questions are:
1) When I search under Music it doesn't show up on the 5 pages of music shows although it is "findable" under powersearch.
2) My link on my podpress is listed as this below (from right-clicking/paste on my artwork in itunes) but when I ping iTunes in Wordpress/Podpress it comes back as "your request produced an error [newNullResponse]" Should I worry about or fix this, and if so, how?
3) Certainly it should show up under the category "music" which it is under by now?
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=253055793
Can ANYBODY help? We're just getting going and I hate to botch it right out of the gate.
Thanks in advance,
Mark
http://brianandmarkshow.com

Answer 1

I had no trouble accessing your podcast through the "phobos" link you had in your post; no "not available" messages showed up, nor any other errors. Sometimes it takes a little while for a newly listed podcast to show up reliably, so if it gives you this message for a few days, don't panic.
In regards to the missing email "approval message" . . . I checked your in code, you have about 3 different email addresses in there, and you should also have a (different?) email address associated with the Apple ID you submitted the podcast under. Since I use(d) one email address under all fields when I submitted my podcast, I have no idea from which field the email address is grabbed to send the notification. You might want to try looking under each of those email address before you assume that email was never sent. Don't worry about it too much, though, because it's not really a big deal anyway - your podcast showed up in the Store. You have the ID# from your listing, and that is really the only important info that would have been in the email.
1) If you are searching under the term "music" in power search, only the top 150 most popular results are going to be displayed. Since you are new, you probably don't have enough subscribers to break into that list, and that's why you are searchable under some terms but not others.
2) Pinging through Podpress - my guess is that the "newNullResponse" message is standard when you ping through that service - error messages are commonly displayed when you ping through a service, but they still usually ping successfully. If you are truly worried about it, ping iTunes using this address: https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast?id=253055793. It will give you a friendly "podcast ping received" message.
3) Do you mean the "music" category in the browse feature? (Your podcast isn't there . . .?) Oh boy, have you opened up a can of worms. We get reports in here all the time of podcasts not showing up in browse, even though they should. It's a pretty buggy system. Personally, I have 7 active podcasts in the Store, and 2 of them have never showed up in browse. That may not be able to be fixed.
Lastly, I don't think you have "botched" anything beyond repair - your podcast looks pretty good, especially if you have never done this before. Publishing podcasts can be such a jungle, with all the various tools and methods, and it's unfortunate that a lot of the time you just have to do it and make mistakes to learn how to do it correctly. Don't worry, have heart - you are on the right track.
Peach