[butokai]

Not so sure about podcasts. At least where I am from (Italy) a great deal of podcasts are either Spotify exclusives, or consumed mostly through Spotify, or bundled in some producer-specific app (e.g. the state-owned radio does this, and doesn't provide feeds).

[tourmalinetaco]

The vast majority of podcast content is distributed via RSS. In fact if its not distributed via RSS, no one is listening. It’s so important its even advertised as part of Spotify’s podcasting platform.[0]

Of course Spotify has incentive to prioritize you listening in their app, but they can still put ads into the audio feed so it doesn’t matter as much to them. And your state-owned radio is absolutely limiting their audience by not using the accepted standards for podcast content.

[0] - https://podcasters.spotify.com/switch

[throw0101c]

> or consumed mostly through Spotify

I would not be surprised if Spotify themselves get the audio from the source via RSS/Atom.

No doubt the podcast creator may have to create an account and tell Spotify manually (and also on Apple, Google, etc), but once the feed is in their system the creators/producers just need to update things in one place and all the 'distribution points' get the new episode.