Tracy Hazzard explains why your new episode hits Apple Podcasts right away but takes a day or more on Spotify. Apple reads your RSS feed live when someone plays it. Spotify downloads and stores episodes on its servers, so it checks less often. Wait a day, then contact your host's support if it still hasn't shown up.
Hello and welcome to this resource video to discuss differences between some of the listening apps and to really answer a question we get pretty commonly, which is how come my episode is not displaying on Spotify, but it is displaying on Apple? So this is something that there's a lot of factors involved in that are not obvious, and you probably don't realize until, you know, you learn that Apple Podcasts and Spotify are two apps that work very differently. Okay. And this is in a technical nature, functionally. On the back end, I'm displaying here on my screen the Apple Podcast desktop app and the Spotify desktop app. And I'm displaying the feed you'd brand podcast, which is just one of ours, just as an example. So let's start with Apple and talk about how they work. And we register your show for you on Apple, if you didn't already have it registered there when you come to host your podcast on Politize. And once we register it, what we're doing is we also call that syndicating your show or registering your RSS feed, which is sort of the mechanism by which podcasts get distributed to all listening apps. And the way Apple works is they don't store your MP3 files on their servers. They are a directory. They read your RSS feed, they read it and they get all of your here, your show name and the authors and the description here. You know, you can look at the, you know, description itself. You can look, you have the list of episodes, most recent ones usually at the top, go to the oldest ones at the bottom. Although that's not always the. You can certainly change that. You click into an episode. It gives you the description of the episode and some more information about it. But when you Click play.
That MP3 file is not in their system, only the written data, this images. They do download all this information and display it in their app. They are a directory, what I would call a directory. They certainly are a listening app. But when you play an episode, or if I click play for the latest episode and it starts playing it at that time, has sent a request from this app on my computer through Apple Podcast app to Poditize to then stream that episode. Right now, if I'm not subscribed to it, it will stream and effectively download it to your local device so that you can play the whole thing. Now, when you do that in real time, that's considered a stream, but it is downloading the MP3 file to your device, to your library. In fact, in the language of Apple podcasts, so that's how that one works. And when Apple sends a request to Poditize for everyone that plays this episode, we get that request, we log that data and information, and that's how we have the number of downloads and what app it came from and all that other information on our analytics page. Spotify works differently. Certainly. They also are using your RSS feed to get all the data for your show, and they're downloading, you know, all the show data, and then here all the episode data for each episode. And in some ways, Spotify is doing a better job. See this episode data? We have a unique image for every episode, and we publish that to the RSS feed. Apple doesn't use it. And we've actually talked with people at Apple, and they agree they probably should use it, but they aren't using it yet. So that's one unfortunate part of Apple and something that Spotify is doing better. However, Spotify is more than just a directory. Whenever you publish a new episode, they're actually downloading it to their servers. They're pulling it from Potatoes and saving it in their own servers to serve it out to listeners from their own system. Now, the reason they're doing that is mostly because they want to be able to run ads in front of it. Especially if you're a free Spotify app user. You have to listen to some ads before you can hear the podcast. They do the same thing with music. That's why they're doing it. And also gives them more control over, you know, the whole process. They're the only app, to our knowledge, to my knowledge, that is doing that. And because they do that differently, because they're not just a directory that is requesting every single play to come from Potatoes or any other host. The process is just different. And there have been a lot of instances where we see that your podcast appears on Apple Podcasts within 20 to 30 minutes of publishing it. But it doesn't appear on Spotify because Spotify decides on their own how often to check your RSS feed for new content. And then when it finds new content, it puts it in a queue because it's got to download it, put it in their servers, log it, associate it with your show, and then get ready to serve it whenever anyone using the Spotify app presses the button to stream it. I know this is getting a bit, you know, technically complex, but I hope it makes sense and is clear. There's just a very different process Spotify is going through. It takes more time, takes more computing processing power. It takes them adding your MP3 files to their volume of storage of music and podcasts and all the content that they stream. And it just doesn't happen as quickly. So we can find sometimes your new episode may not appear on Spotify for even a day or more after it's already available on other platforms. Unfortunately, there's absolutely nothing we can do about that to change that. It's the way Spotify works and you just have to accept it. Now, I will tell you, sometimes there can be another kind of a glitch. And if you are finding it's been more than a day at least, you know, at least more than a day or two days or more, and your latest episode is on Apple and all the other apps and not on Spotify, then you should reach out to helppoditize.com or hostingauditize.com and let us know, ask that question so we can look into it and make sure there's not another technical problem. We do have direct contacts with people at Apple and at Spotify, and we're happy to reach out on your behalf and solve any technical problems that may exist or do our best to solve them. So.
It'S this, really this, this video resources just to help you understand not all apps are created equal. They don't work the same way. And, you know, if you don't see your show on Spotify as quickly as you do on Apple, that may happen. That's just the way things work. So our request would be, you know, have a little patience, give it at least a day, check it again, and then if it still doesn't show up, then reach out to us and we'll be happy to look into it further. Okay, thanks very much. I hope you find this resource video helpful.
