You can easily host and distribute a podcast to your paid and free subscribers through Substack. Podcast episodes will be available not only through email and on your Substack site, but also in all the major podcast apps.
Get set up
Create a new podcast
To set up a podcast through Substack, go to the Podcast tab on your publication dashboard.
There, you can select between two options.
If you start a new podcast, you will be prompted to fill in your podcast details such as the title, description, byline, categories, language, and logo. This is the information that will be provided to podcast distribution apps. We pre-fill these based on your existing publication settings, but you can change them to whatever you like.
Move your podcast to Substack
If you import an existing podcast, you can add it to an existing mailing list i.e. your main Substack or create a new section.
We recommend you always set up a new section to organize your podcast. The primary reason for doing this is unlocking more site design customization (for example, beautiful episode pages for your podcast episodes) and the ability for you to more seamlessly control your listeners' experience (for example, making the podcast emails default opt-in or default opt-out).
Now that you have a section, it's time to upload all of your old podcast episodes into your Substack website. Enter the RSS feed URL. When you click on import all episodes, it will upload all of your archived episodes as old posts on your Substack website. Note that these posts will not be sent out as emails.
Learn more on how to switch your podcast to Substack
Distribute your podcast
To distribute your podcast to the major listening apps (e.g. Spotify, Apple Podcasts), you’ll need to submit it with your podcast RSS link. Your RSS URL won’t be accepted until you publish an episode. Create your first episode announcing your podcast or publish your first episode before submitting your feed to players. You can then either upload your episode audio file or record directly from the browser.
We highly recommend distributing podcasts through Apple Podcasts Connect because every other podcast player except for Spotify (for example, Tune In, Stitcher, Pocket Cast) scrapes the Apple podcast feed.
Learn more on how to distribute your podcast
View your podcast stats
You can view your podcast stats (title, publish date, downloads) via the table in your Podcast dashboard. Stats for each episode post (e.g. link clickthrough) can still be viewed in the Posts dashboard.
Learn more about your Podcast dashboard
Visit our support center to learn more:
On Substack, podcasters can earn a living doing what they love. Getting started is easy. Set up paid subscriptions in just a few minutes.
Ready to get started?