Oddly it’s probably best for podcasters who want to add a few songs to an existing speech-heavy episode.

Listeners who are Spotify subscribers get the full tracks, Spotify Free folks get 30sec clips. You can also only listen to the shows in the Spotify app and not on the web. I imagine these rules were necessary to get music industry sign-off. There must be at least 10 minutes of ad-free talk content between ads (irrespective of how much music separates the ads), and no talk ads are permitted in episodes that have less than 10 minutes of ad-free talk.īaked-in ads should be marked as ad segments in your episodes. There must be at least 60 seconds of ad-free talk content on either side of the ad It’s rules get even tougher if you want to include ads: Which depending on your view, could be a good or a bad thing! But this isn’t a service that will allow people to do music-intensive commercial-radio style shows. My attempt to demo it for this piece was rejectedĪnnoyingly clicking through to the guidelines didn’t then tell me how long these talk segments would need to be. In fact it’s pretty hard to use it like a radio show as short links are not allowed either. You can’t upload music either, so you can’t use it for dance mixes. It’s very much stop speaking and then the song plays from the beginning and runs to the end.

You also can’t edit the songs, speak over them or create radio-like segues. So this is definitely not ‘podcasts can now have music’ territory. This is because those apps rely on downloading MP3s, and the music labels won’t allow that. They will not be distributed to Apple Podcasts or any other podcast apps. First of all, your episodes-with-tunes will only appear on Spotify and Anchor. Now you can add songs from Spotify’s catalogue to your episodes too. What you can do though, is upload an MP3 you’ve made in Audition, or whatever, and use Anchor for free hosting and distribution. The interface to do this is quite whizzy for amateurs, but let’s just say pro-audio folk are unlikely to use it to make the next Serial. They also have some monetisation options and distribute your show to some key places - notably Apple Podcasts and (sister-company) Spotify. Ish.Īt the moment their Anchor tool, allows people to create podcast channels and episodes within them, for free.

When Spotify entered the space, many asked whether they would be able to fix this? And, well, er, they’ve, um, not really got there but they have created something new. Podcasts have tended to be music-free zones because of licensing restrictions. News from Spotify’s podcast creation service Anchor, as they announce that you can now add full tracks from Spotify into your shows.

Anchor to spotify