Other Platforms & Creator Culture
RSS feed
Also called: podcast feed
Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the rest do not host your episodes. They read a feed you publish and pull each new episode from it, and the file carries the show details, the artwork and every episode with a link to its audio.
Because directories point at the feed's address, that address effectively is the show. Move host without redirecting properly and the entire subscriber base stops receiving episodes with no way for you to contact them, which is why owning the domain the feed sits on is worth the small amount of hassle. Video podcasts distributed through YouTube work along different lines, so most shows now maintain both routes.