Incoming Transmission #3

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

I found an interesting article yesterday: “Is Your Podcast Being Held Hostage By iTunes?”

 iTunes is notoriously finicky, and its team tends to take a Honey Badger approach to the concerns of indie podcast creators.

You can file this under “OH HAI, This actually happened to me.”

See, for about a month and a half, my podcast was essentially in iTunes limbo, which dropped my monthly listenership by about 60%. Sixty Percent!

In that time, I had numerous conversations with the support team who confirmed that they had fixed it, or forced the refresh, but each interaction took, at the very least 3 days between a message or action, and the actual refresh or result being in effect.

In a way I’m incredibly grateful not to be financially reliant on iTunes, because I would have lost half of my income from this revenue source otherwise.

Also thankful to have a good listenership over other sources (such as Mixcloud, Soundcloud, and most of all the dedicated microsite.)

artwork

I think this is important for a number of reasons —

  1. First of all, you can't be reliant on a single platform. Just like anything in business, you can't put all your eggs in one basket and need to diversify. In my case, that means uploading to the services I've mentioned earlier, as well as here on my own blog.
  2. In a similar vein, I truly believe that owning your content & distribution channel is very important. It's great to have access to a bigger audience on a specific website, but you are limited by the platform as well as the terms & conditions. On your own website, you can do whatever you want.
  3. At this point in time, I'm trying to reach as many people as possible, so being easily findable on different sites, including my own, is a great way to see how different people and communities react.