Does anyone have a great service for linking to podcasts? I love to share podcasts, but there’s never a “best way” to link to them it seems. I have friends on Android, friends who use the Apple podcasts app, and friends who use third party apps on iOS. For podcasts like MPU of course I can link to the Relay landing page but lots of podcasts I listen to post to Soundcloud or their own landing pages have no links to podcast services.
For music, I often like to use song.link to share links to a broad audience when I figure there’ll be a variety of streaming services they use. Is there something comparable for podcasts?
Something which is not quite solving this, but is tangentially related:
Sometimes I just want to find an old episode of a podcast without subscribing in a podcatcher. So, I wrote a webpage which digests a podcast feed via its url, and produces a page containing a list of all available episodes, with an embedded player for each ep.
It’s still very much a work-in-progress (e.g. there’s a few feeds I’ve found it doesn’t work with yet). And it’s made as a personal project, certainly not ready to be used by anyone else yet!
But I thought people here might find it interesting. The source code’s on Github.
This is an in issue in the industry. We just encountered it again this AM trying to send a link to a specific episode for a fortune 200 CMO and we did not know what device he had.
Someone needs to develop essentially a billy for podcasts that when the link is shared provides a pop up on the other end with choices. I am not the tech guy but if it can’t be done without os integration perhaps the link auto generates a landing page with the all the links similar to what Linkin.bio and linktree are doing on Instagram.
I have a podcast newsletter and this is a huge problem. I’ve talked to a developer about the ability to have a ‘universal’ link to a podcast episode but to no avail.
Without going nuts, I end up including episode links to the website, iTunes, and now Overcast. Getting Google Play links is still a bit messy. I include Overcast because that’s what I use and I know a lot of friends use it (probably because I have told them about it).
I also use song.link which is great. If they could adapt their technology to podcasts, they would make themselves the biggest name in the industry overnight.
I think – just like with music streaming – it’s worth a solution. I think the reason no one has gone out and done it (outside of the difficulties outlined in the Castro blog post @khit linked to) is because too many podcast creators aren’t invested enough. I listen to a lot of independent (not in a network like Relay or others) podcasts that are supported by a Patreon. Most of these don’t even have a good webpage of their own feed, and just end up linking to libsyn, Soundcloud, Patreon, or directly to their iTunes feed. If they’re already not concerned at that level with how easy it is for people to share their content, and 3rd party podcast players represent a fairly small section of the market (and one that doesn’t get them iTunes ratings or stats at that) then they’re probably not chomping at the bit for someone to make this kind of a solution.
Of course, I don’t know how representative the shows I listen to are of the podcast industry as a whole. I’m sure by volume of consumption, more people are listening to more episodes of shows in networks or done by bigger groups (like NPR or another news org) that similarly don’t mind people going directly to their site at the expense of being shareable.
So, I think I’ve got some good news for some of you. As I mentioned above, this is a huge problem for me. But I just learned of a podcast database that has a service where you can create a playlist of podcasts/episodes and it will give you an RSS feed that you can give out.
The RSS feed can then be subscribed by any person with any app just like any normal podcast show as you would imagine.
Here is the feed I created for my newsletter. The service is at Listennotes.com and the playlist functionality is called Listen Later.
I say this not to promote myself but to give you a real working feed that I set up yesterday. It was so easy to do and it’s free. You can include your own art and obviously write whatever description you want. Feel free to subscribe to mine if you want to test it out. It’s called Podcast Gumbo Newsletter.
This service certainly could fill the gap. Episode linking seems to be good, making custom RSS feeds is nice, though before it could be the perfect solution here, I’d love to see it incorporate links directly to different podcast apps.
After about 2 weeks of using this service, I think it’s great. It works as advertised, allowing you to easily create a list of podcast episodes and providing an RSS feed to your playlist.
The surprising actual downside comes not from the service but from apps that don’t allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed. It seems as if this is a little more prevalent on the Android side.
