How to Upload a Podcast to Spotify – Quick & Easy Walkthrough!
How to Upload a Podcast to Spotify: At-a-Glance
- If you want to grow an audience around your podcast, you should make it as easy as possible to find, and listen to.
- That means being available everywhere people are consuming audio.
- Spotify is one of the biggest podcast listening platforms on the planet. It’s quick and easy to make your show available there.
- Here, we’ll show you how to do it via five great podcast hosting services – Transistor, Captivate, Alitu, Buzzsprout, & RSS.com
- We’ll also show you how to get access to your Spotify stats, and to find out if your audience are secret Miley Cyrus fans.
- Read on for the full guide…
Why List Your Podcast on Spotify?
At the time of writing, Spotify is one of the biggest podcast listening platforms on the planet. It accounts for 26.7% of all downloads on podcast hosting platform Buzzsprout, second only to Apple Podcasts. By getting listed on Spotify, your show’s going to become available to millions of potential listeners, in over 75 countries
The good news, too, is that it’s quick and easy to make your podcast available on Spotify. There are just a few things we need to check in with, first…
Before You Start
You need to have a few things in place before you can list your podcast on Spotify.
It might sound obvious, but your podcast already needs to exist. You don’t “upload” content to Spotify in the technical sense – instead, you create your show and publish your episodes via a podcast hosting provider. We’ll run through how to put a podcast on Spotify via four of our favourite options in just a sec.
When you sign up with a hosting provider, you’ll enter your podcast info. These are things like the podcast name and description. You’ll also be asked to select a primary category that best fits your show’s topic.
You will also need to upload cover art to be listed on Spotify and other directories. Your cover art should be a 1400 x 1400 JPEG and under 500kb in size. Here’s our full guide to what makes effective podcast cover art, as well as where to get it.
Finally, you’ll need to have at least one published episode in your feed. This doesn’t need to be a full episode, it could be an ‘episode zero‘ or a short trailer.
Once you have all of these things in place, you can tell Spotify about your show, and they can add it to their directory. Here are four different ways you can go about it.
A quick heads up, too, that we use affiliate links for some products and services we think you’ll find useful. Our hosting provider links here are affiliates because we recommend them all highly. If you decide to buy through one, we’d earn a small commission, though at absolutely no extra cost to yourself!
How to Upload a Podcast to Spotify With RSS.com
RSS.com allows you to create an account and upload up to one episode for free, but you’re better off opting for their $8.25/month annual plan. This gives you unlimited episodes, duration, monetization features and more.
RSS.com offers automatic distribution to Spotify and other major podcast directories. Once you’ve signed up for an account and uploaded an episode, click the “Distribution” tab from your Dashboard, enable “Automatic Submission,” and then enable Spotify and any other directory you’d like your podcast automatically submitted to.
Use the promo code THEPODCASTHOST to get two free months on the standard monthly subscription.
How to Upload a Podcast to Spotify With Alitu
Alitu is an all-in-one podcast-maker app. It’s one single place where you can record, edit, publish, and distribute your podcast. You get access to absolutely all of its tools and features for $38 per month (or get two free months when paying annually). This means you don’t need to pay for additional subscriptions to call recorder, audio editing, transcription, and hosting services.
Once you’ve created your podcast inside Alitu, you just need to go to Settings > Distribution. You’ll then see a ‘Connect with Spotify’ button which takes you to their podcaster dashboard. Click the menu in the very top-left corner, then ‘Add or claim your podcast’.
Copy your podcast RSS feed from Alitu’s distribution page, paste in, review, and submit!
How to Upload a Podcast to Spotify With Captivate
Captivate‘s lowest price tier is $19 a month. You can start and run as many podcasts as you like on Captivate. Their payment tiers work by capping the overall number of monthly downloads from all your podcast episodes, combined. For the $19 that number is 30,000 downloads a month. To put things in perspective, here’s a guide on ‘typical’ download numbers for podcasts.
After signing up and creating your podcast in Captivate, you just need to click ‘Distribution’ on the main menu. Again, you’ll see a list of places you can submit your podcast to, and Spotify is one of them.
How to Upload a Podcast to Spotify With Transistor
Transistor is another top-tier hosting platform. They offer a 14-day free trial, and their lowest-paid tier is $19 a month. They work the same way as Captivate, so you can run as many podcasts as you like. Your overall combined download limit this time would be 20,000 per month.
To get a podcast on Spotify via Transistor, sign up and create your podcast, then look for the ‘Distribution’ option in the menu on the left-hand side of the page. There, you’ll find all your submission options alongside Spotify itself.
How to Upload a Podcast to Spotify With Buzzsprout
You can start using podcast hosting provider Buzzsprout for free, but you’re better off opting for their $ 12-a-month plan. That way, your episodes won’t be deleted after 90 days, and you can upload more content, too.
Once you’ve signed up and created your podcast, you simply need to click the Directories tab, and you’ll see all the places you can get listed.
How to Submit or Claim Your Podcast on Spotify
Another option is to use the dedicated Spotify for Podcasters portal. You can log in with any Spotify user account.
Once you’re logged in, you’ll find an ‘add or claim your podcast’ option when you click on your name.
You then just need to paste in your RSS feed – this is a unique URL for your podcast. You’ll find it in your hosting provider dashboard.
If your podcast is already listed in Spotify, you can also use this method to ‘claim’ it. This lets you see your show’s Spotify stats, demographics, and some other useful info.
Spotify Verification Email
When claiming an existing show in Spotify, they’ll contact you via the email address associated with your podcast hosting account. That’ll give you instructions on how to verify and confirm everything.
Spotify Users Podcast (& Music) Stats
Once you’ve claimed your podcast in Spotify, you can despair in the fact you’ve discovered yet another place to obsessively check stats. Remember, these are only stats from Spotify, and not other listening platforms like Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, etc.
You’ll even get to see the guilty listening pleasures of your audience in the ‘Artists they’re listening to’ section. This is based on the most streamed artists of the past 28 days. I had someone called Billy Eyelash as my audience’s top pick. I’ve never heard of them.
There are demographic stats too, which might come in handy for things like sponsorship. You can also look at episode stats to see completion and listener drop-off rates, which can give you a useful sample in identifying segments of your show that hold attention, as well as the bits that have your listener reaching for the skip forwards button.
You can grab a direct link to your Spotify podcast listing once you’re listed there.
You can do this in both the Spotify desktop and mobile apps.
To get your show’s link in the desktop app, click the little ‘more’ button (the circle with three dots in it) to the left of the ‘Play’ and ‘Follow’ buttons. Then click ‘Copy Show Link’.
In the mobile app, the ‘more’ button is up in the very top-right corner of the screen. Again, it appears as three dots. Click it, then click ‘Share’, and then ‘Copy Link’.
Add these links to the subscribe page on your podcast website – make it easy for your listeners to find your show anywhere audio is consumed.
Bonus tip: You might even want to create a public Spotify playlist with your best episodes.
How to Upload a Podcast to Spotify: FAQ
You might have a few additional questions if you’re new to podcasting. Here are a couple of the most common ones we’ve heard recently.
What is an RSS Feed in Podcasting?
An RSS feed is a unique URL you get when you sign up and create your show in a podcast host. As I mentioned earlier, you don’t upload audio files to Spotify, you do that in a dedicated hosting account. Then, you tell Spotify (or any other listening platform) your RSS link.
The cool thing is, you only need to do this once. When a directory like Spotify is connected to your podcast feed, it’ll list all of your content automatically from then onwards.
What’s the Difference Between Spotify and Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, etc?
There are tonnes of apps and directories podcast listeners use to consume content. Spotify (26.4%) is the second biggest behind Apple (39.7%), with Google Podcasts at 2.9%.
A much lower percentage doesn’t mean a platform is unimportant, though. Anecdotally, I know loads of people who use Overcast, and that currently accounts for 1% of the podcast downloads market share.
As a podcaster, the best thing to do is to let your listeners decide where they’d like to listen, and simply make sure you give them the option. List your show in as many different places as you can.
Here’s the list of top directories to submit to, as well as how to get your podcast in iTunes/Apple Podcasts and on Google Podcasts.
Don’t Hang Around
Millions of people are listening to podcasts on Spotify right now. If you’ve launched your podcast, you should prioritise being listed there.
If you’ve not started your podcast yet, then our podcast launch course can get you there quickly, with no stone left unturned. In Launch Essentials, Colin walks you through the entire process, from defining your target audience and choosing a format, to equipment and software.
And if you’re looking for somewhere to host your new podcast so you can push it out to places like Spotify, be sure to check out Alitu. Not only is Alitu a podcast hosting provider, it has every other feature needed to run a podcast, too. These include call recording, editing, auto noise reduction, volume levelling, and AI-generated transcription. Check it out with a week’s free trial and see for yourself!
