Don’t publish your podcast only on Spotify

I’ve been coming across small or personal podcasts that can only be heard on Spotify. Intrigued by this phenomenon, I created a new podcast on Spotify Creator platform to find out what’s happening.

Spotify, among other services, offers podcast hosting. It’s a similar arrangement to what Substack has for newsletters: generous resources at no cost to create and maintain the newsletter (or, in Spotify’s case, the podcast).

There’s a fundamental difference, though. A newsletter created on Substack can be followed by any email client — Gmail, Outlook, Fastmail, your own domain. Spotify podcasts, however, are limited to Spotify and, worse, have their RSS feed disabled by default.

This behavior is somewhat standard across all podcast hosting services. After publishing the first episode of a new show, you need to submit it to some major platforms — Spotify itself and Apple’s, which serves as a reference for various apps, are the most important.

But when the podcast is hosted on Spotify, it’s automatically published on Spotify, which can give the impression that all the work is done.

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After publishing the first episode, Spotify displays a message about the RSS feed and the show’s unavailability on other apps.

They could do better, highlighting the Enable RSS button instead of Done and using a more understandable label. (How many people know what “RSS” is?)

If the RSS feed isn’t activated on this first opportunity, you can do it in the settings, under the Distribution tab.

With the RSS feed enabled, you need to go through the ordeal of submitting the podcast to other platforms. The same settings screen lists eight: Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Castbox, Goodpods, iHeartRadio, Overcast, Pocket Casts, and RadioPublic.

Spotify’s documentation has an article about distribution, with detailed instructions for each platform.

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The fact that it offers free, unlimited podcast hosting is a major differentiator for Spotify. All other popular services of this type, like Buzzsprout, Libsyn, and Podbean, are paid or, at most, have heavily limited free tiers.

Spotify uses dark patterns to make it difficult to distribute podcasts hosted on its platform to rival apps.

If you come across a podcast available only on Spotify, contact the person responsible and suggest including the show on other apps or, at least, activating its RSS feed. Everyone wins: you, who can listen to it in more places, the podcast owner, who will have a broader reach, and the podcast ecosystem, which becomes a little less hostage to Spotify’s monopolistic push.