What Spotify Open Access means for podcasters There’s a ton that remains unchanged, including their choice to not support RSS feeds, but it’s a step in the right direction, and one that holds immediate benefits for podcasters with subscription programs. So you can see how the news of Spotify launching Open Access is something of a big deal. This enables some unique features on Spotify, such as more detailed analytics, but it also means that to date you haven't been able to add a show to Spotify by URL in the same way that you can on most other podcast players. That's because Spotify's podcast streaming isn't based on RSS feeds. Since anyone can create an RSS feed from their audio content and nearly every podcast player can ingest and play RSS feeds, making and listening to podcasts has up until pretty recently been an accessible and democratic experience. Since their beginning, podcasts have existed in an open ecosystem thanks to a technology called the RSS feed.

Spotify’s move to make their platform more broadly accessible with Open Access is big news for a number of reasons. ‍ Open Access launched with an initial set of partners, including Supercast.

Through Open Access, podcasters who offer paid subscriptions to their shows can now offer those subscriptions through Spotify without having to share revenue or control of their content with the streaming service. Spotify announced the launch of their Open Access feature in July. Prefer to listen to this blog post? Get the audio version delivered to your podcast player by subscribing to Supercasters Premium -it's free!

Spotify open player