YouTube Music in Progress

Hey there, K here. I'm posting to update about our switchover from Google Podcasts to Google Music. You can see our creator page on that platform here.

Mea culpa, I was warned about Google Podcasts ending its service and I dragged my feet because I thought the switch would involve little effort on my part and it would happen instantly. Boy was I wrong!

See, it's not just a matter up sending YouTube an RSS feed and having them point to your audio file like it's any other podcast directory. No, YouTube Music takes that RSS feed and starts the process of uploading each episode as its own video. This seems wildly inefficient to me. Walled gardens are a hell of a drug.

Something that complicates the rollout is that YouTube has a poorly-documented limit for how many videos (or how much video) you can upload in a particular day. By my count, we have ~4,641 episodes that need to be uploaded. In the six days since I started uploading videos, 669 have completed. At this rate of about 112 videos per day, we're looking at about 37 more days until the whole network is posted.

What might make this shorter is the fact that most of the episodes uploaded so far have been WOFF! episodes. If YouTube's upload limit is based on total time, uploads of other shows might go faster (shorter episodes fit more within that limit). But there's no way to tell.

Here's a look at where the progress stands now.

Certain shows (ones that had a short run or were premium with a few public episodes) are already uploaded. These include:

• Adaptation Decay

• Duckfeed Presents

• File Under Water

• Heartbeat City

• Radio Free Mid-World

• Real Lich Hours

• Unfilmable

I will continue making shows available as they finish uploading.

People who relied on Google Podcasts who are switching to YouTube Music will have a way to listen to their Premium feed(s) just like they did before, by adding the RSS feed to your library.

A note on regional availability: Our episodes that feature licensed music from games are getting copyright blocks specifically in Russia, and nowhere else. I apologize if this affects you. I'm disputing the copyright claims that I can. Relatedly, our episode on Rock Band is fucking radioactive to YouTube. It's not available anywhere right now, but I'm making fair use claims and hopefully things will be sorted out. If they aren't, anyone listening on YouTube will have to suffer muted audio in that episode.

To end this update on a cantankerous rant, this is a big reminder that podcasts are, and should always be, privately hosted audio revealed and cataloged by RSS feeds and podcast directories that aggregate them. Any deviation from that, like YouTube requiring re-uploads, is a weird bastardization that doesn't serve the listener or the creator. Ceding control of the content to walled garden ecosystems like YouTube and Spotify is to be at the whims of corporations and their shareholders, which is never a safe position. We try to include our shows on popular services like that because we want things to be easy for you, but please understand that the primary way to listen will always be audio files downloaded from an RSS feed through a podcast app.

I apologize for waiting and leaving so many of you in the lurch. In the meantime, Android users can try Podcast Addict or PocketCasts until everything is online with YouTube Music. If there are any more big updates, I will post them here. I will also post when everything is current on YouTube Music so people know when to subscribe there.

Thanks so much for your patience and support,

K