Why YouTube Music ingesting podcast RSS feeds could be a big mess

Hey, so here's the potential problem I see with youtube music and youtube doing podcasts or ruling out podcasts, ingesting podcast feeds currently.

Uh So here's uh a submission screen on transistor.

You can submit your RSS feed to any one of these podcast players.

So for example, I could choose to submit it to Deezer and Deser gets basically a copy of and Dieser gets basically pointed to a single source of truth, which is this RSS feed and the RSS feed has some built in features to make sure that everyone's pulling the same information from the art from the feed.

Each episode gets a GU ID.

Um And if, and if anything is updated, for example, if I replace an audio file, the, the uh different directories and podcast platforms, they're always pinging the RSS feed looking for updates.

And if they see there's an update, they'll pull the newest version of the audio and there's a single source of truth for the podcast.

But what youtube has now done is they've created multiple, there's gonna be multiple sources of truth.

So for example, here, uh youtube has been telling lots of folks to create these podcast uh playlists and these have no gu I DS.

I'm people are maybe not even keeping these up to date.

Sometimes people aren't even uploading the full episode to these playlists.

And so, um even though in this case, this podcast, you know, every time I upload an audio episode to transistor, um I'm also duplicating that over here on youtube, but now there's two sources of truth.

There's the RSS feed which every single podcast directory pulls from Spotify, Apple, Google, Amazon Music podcast podcast, addict, Deezer, et cetera.

And now there's another source of truth for that podcast, which is this youtube playlist.

Now, when you go to youtube Music, let's uh yeah, here we go.

So if I go to youtube and I search for um podcasts on here, I can see for example.

Uh Yeah, let's do, I don't know, let's do podcast, industry, cast, industry news.

Um So what's showing up here is the videos that I uploaded? Now, what happens when Google? Sorry, what happens when youtube music suddenly starts ingesting our cess feeds? There's gonna be two versions of the same show.

One will be the video playlist and the other will be in RSS feed.

And uh I think that's gonna create all sorts of confusion.

Um And, and theoretically, uh right now youtube is just gonna be pulling in RSS feeds and then not um not doing pass through.

So we wouldn't even get the statistics or play information from you know, times that people play the audio version inside of youtube music.

Uh As a, here's a good example, I bet you build your Sasses in here.

That's another podcast I do.

So we've been adding episodes every once in a while, but this isn't every one of our episodes.

Um It looks like we stopped adding to this particular playlist in 2021.

But the, the full feed of this, the, the actual source of truth, the RSS feed if you go, um, you know, there's tons of new episodes since we uploaded to youtube.

And so now there's two versions of the show and when people search for this particular podcast in Google Podcast, oh, look, here's another version right here.

So, and this version, this version has more up to date stuff, but even here we're not uploading full episodes all the time.

Sometimes we're just uploading partial episodes.

This is gonna be a real mess.

Um, and, uh, they haven't really communicated how they're gonna deal with this, especially if they're gonna start, ah, ingesting our assess fees