How to get your podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify

The thing most people get wrong first: you do not upload episodes to Apple or Spotify. You submit one RSS feed URL, once, and from then on both directories check that feed and pull in whatever is new. If you find yourself uploading an MP3 to Apple, you have taken a wrong turn.

What you need before you start

Both directories reject feeds for the same small set of reasons, and the review round trip costs days. Have all five ready:

• A public RSS feed URL. Your host generates this. It must be reachable without a login and must stay at the same address forever, because that URL is your show’s identity in every directory.
• Square artwork, 1400 to 3000 pixels per side. JPG or PNG, under 5 MB. This is the single most common rejection. A 1200 px image or a non-square crop fails.
• At least one published episode. An empty feed gets rejected. Publish episode one before you submit.
• A working email address in the feed’s owner field. Both Apple and Spotify send an ownership code there. If it bounces or you cannot read that inbox, you cannot claim your own show.
• A category and a description. Apple requires a valid category and subcategory pair from its own list; an invented one fails validation.

Apple Podcasts

1. Sign in to Apple Podcasts Connect with an Apple ID.
2. Click the add button and choose New Show.
3. Paste your RSS feed URL. Apple validates it immediately and tells you what is wrong.
4. Verify ownership using the code Apple emails to the address in your feed’s owner field.
5. Submit for review. Approval usually takes a few days. Until it clears, your show is not searchable, and that is normal rather than a mistake on your side.

Spotify

1. Sign in to Spotify for Creators.
2. Choose Find an existing show, then say it is hosted somewhere else. This is the step people miss: without it, Spotify tries to host the show itself and you end up with two separate shows.
3. Paste the same RSS feed URL you gave Apple.
4. Enter the verification code Spotify emails to your feed’s owner address.
5. Confirm the details. Spotify is usually live in hours rather than days.

The four things that actually get feeds rejected

• Artwork outside 1400 to 3000 px, or not square. Resize before you submit, not after a rejection.
• An owner email you cannot read. Ownership codes go there and nowhere else. A typo costs you a support ticket.
• Enclosure URLs that do not support range requests. Apple’s validator and most podcast apps ask for byte ranges so listeners can scrub. Files served from generic file storage often refuse, and playback breaks in ways that look random.
• Moving the feed later. Changing your feed URL without a redirect orphans every subscriber you have. If you must move, your old host has to publish a permanent redirect.

After you are listed

Nothing further is required per episode. Publish to your feed and both directories pick it up on their own schedule, typically within an hour for Spotify and a few hours for Apple. You never submit again unless you move hosts.

Worth doing once you are live: check that your episode artwork, chapters, and descriptions actually render in both apps. They read the same feed but display different fields, and a show that looks right in Apple can look bare in Spotify.

How PodPilot360 handles this

We host the feed and generate it from your episodes, so there is nothing to hand-write. The artwork uploader takes any image and produces the largest centred square inside Apple’s 1400 to 3000 px range, which removes the most common rejection before it happens. Audio is served with range support from a CDN, so scrubbing works and the validators pass.

You still do the submitting, because Apple and Spotify want the show claimed by a real person with an account, and no host can do that for you. What we do is check afterwards: the distribution page detects your Apple listing and verifies your Spotify show, so you can see that it worked rather than wondering.

Next: how to turn one episode into a week of content.