199 | Why You Must Own Your Podcast Content Before It's Too Late

[00:00:00] What if, in one click, one glitch could erase your entire podcast forever? Stick around because today I'm showing you how you can own your own show before someone else deletes it.

[00:00:20] Sound matters. Be heard. Welcome to the podcast where you get exclusive behind the scenes tips to make your own show sound truly spectacular. This is Podtastic Audio. Hey, what's happening? How are you doing today? Thank you so much for being here. I am Chris and I designed this podcast for you so you can design your amazing podcast.

[00:00:47] That's right. This is Podtastic Audio. The one, the only. Congratulations. You picked on the right show at the right time. And I'm here talking all about making sure to help you make your amazing podcast happen. And one amazing tool to help you make that happen is Riverside.fm. Today's episode is brought to you by Riverside. It's probably the easiest way to record podcasts and videos that are even in 4k that sound and look amazing.

[00:01:16] Since today we're talking all about owning your content and then backing it up, it's the perfect time to talk about Riverside. When you record with Riverside, your audio and video are saved locally, meaning that you own high quality copies even if your Wi-Fi crashes mid-interview because that would just suck. Plus, they just drop some awesome new features like this text-based editing. You can edit your podcast just by editing the text. Easy peasy. It's all magic now.

[00:01:46] Hey, and speaking of magic, they got this cool new magic clips that instantly turn your best moments into short form videos that are perfect. I mean, totally perfect for social media. You also get separate audio tracks and video tracks for super easy editing. Do you want to like to try to edit a podcast in a single track? It's impossible. But with Riverside, you get separate audio and video tracks. How cool is that?

[00:02:10] So if you want to sound and look like a pro while actually owning your own recordings, head over to Riverside.fm and use my code PODTASTIC and you're going to get yourself 15% off any paid plan. Check that out. That's Riverside.fm, promo code PODTASTIC.

[00:02:30] So a while ago, probably somewhere around 2013-ish, I was dating a girl and this is before Instagram kind of like took off, became like a big thing like it is now. I don't even know if Instagram was bought by Facebook back then, but anyhow, way back then I was dating a girl and she would come over to my house and she had like one of those other than iPhone phones.

[00:02:55] It wasn't a Samsung, it wasn't an iPhone. It was like a LG or some weird off brand smartphone, but it was still a smartphone. So you could do things like Facebook and, you know, your usual smartphone stuff. And this girl loved to talk. She loved to share like everything. She would be perfect if she had her own podcast. Maybe she does. I don't know. Hey, Tiffany, you have a podcast?

[00:03:18] Anyway, so she'd be at my house, show me her smartphone and she would be showing me all of her family pictures, all of her old photos or baby photos when she was a kid, when her kid was a kid, her old house, her old friends. And she loved to share stuff. I mean, my goodness, you could talk your ear off for hours and share everything she had. And so she was at my house one night and she was going through her smartphone and showing me all these pictures.

[00:03:45] Like, here's a picture of me when I was little. Here's a picture of my kid when he was born. And here's a picture of me at the hospital. And here's a picture of me doing this and all this other stuff. And I'm like, that's super cool. So she showed me these photos, but they're like on the Facebook gallery. I guess Facebook back then had like this, like this gallery section, like Facebook photos. Like, I don't know if they have that still, but it was this whole Facebook gallery.

[00:04:10] And as she's showing me all these photos on her phone from the Facebook gallery, I said, hey, this is kind of cool, but you have like real copies of these, right? You do have the originals of these photos somewhere, right? Like, where do you keep those? Like, obviously they have to be on a computer somewhere or a hard drive or something. You have to have these stored somewhere, right? Actually, no, she didn't. She told me they're on Facebook. So they're good. They're all on Facebook. I just keep them on Facebook.

[00:04:40] They're just there. I don't have the originals anymore. I don't have copies anymore. They're just on Facebook. And I got to thinking, wait a second. You're trying to tell me that your precious family photos, your kid's birth, things like that are only, only available to you via Facebook. You do not have a digital copy of those anywhere. Like, not even on a hard drive, not even on a computer. And she said, no, they're just on Facebook.

[00:05:09] I mean, I can access these at any time I want right on my phone. And then I said to her, did it ever occur to you that Facebook could close you down for any reason or no reason at all? And you will lose all of your family photos. You won't have access to any of those. Did it ever occur to you that you don't own that? Facebook owns that.

[00:05:33] And Facebook, just like YouTube, are places that, although they are free, we give them that. They're super free, easy places to store your content. I get that. But they are known to close people down for no reason or any reason they want. Close down your account and poof, gone. All your content is gone. And especially with like family photos, you don't want to leave those a chance that possibly Facebook could maybe glitch or delete their profile or something could happen.

[00:06:03] Like, I don't know if I would put that much faith into anything, let alone Facebook, a company that is known to close people down. So I think when I told her that, it pretty much went in one ear and out the other. I don't think she cared. But this got me thinking about podcasting and even people that exclusively do things on YouTube. Let's call them YouTubers, I guess, or whatever you are.

[00:06:28] If you're an Instagram person or a TikTok person or whatever, when you put all of your content onto a single platform that you don't own, that is run by a company that basically controls everything you have, you put all your faith, all your eggs into their like basket and say, hey, please take care of my stuff. Please don't delete it. Please don't close down my account. I know I'm not paying for anything over here. I know you're keeping storage of all my wonderful data.

[00:06:57] Please do not get rid of it. Please, pretty please. Well, I know, like you said, platforms like Spotify that are free. Platforms like YouTube that are also free. Platforms like the Facebook thing I was just telling you about, also free. You know, these free platforms basically could remove you from their platform and service for any reason or no reason at all.

[00:07:20] And I think that as content creators, we should not be putting all of our faith into something that could literally disappear in the blink of an eye. And then we're screwed. SOL, as you like to call it, it's short for something to figure it out. So when you upload your podcast to these, quote, free platforms that you don't own these spaces, you're just renting. It's like renting space like anywhere else in the world. And at any day, they could change the locks.

[00:07:48] Now, it's not about being paranoid, although it might make you paranoid. It's about being smart. You worked very hard on your show. You deserve to have a copy of it. So today we're talking about backing up your podcast so that no matter what, no matter where, no matter where you put your stuff, you have a backup ready to go just in case something happens. And that something is definitely out of your control. So you say, well, I didn't do anything wrong.

[00:08:18] I didn't do nothing wrong. Maybe they can close you down for anything and nothing. It happens all the time. So here's what you need to know on how to actually back up your podcast step by step. So starting with step number one, and this is kind of an obvious one, but I'm going to tell you anyways. If you do not already have saved backup copies of your MP3 files of your podcast, you need to start downloading them from your host today.

[00:08:48] Actually, like yesterday. Download every single MP3 file you have of your podcast. But Chris, I got 500 of them. So what? Do you want them? Do you want them forever? Do you want them to keep them? Well, then maybe you got to download them or save them. Now, most of the podcast hosting providers that I've played with, usually they all have some kind of like a download feature built right into the service where you can download those files right back to your computer. Start with that. That is step number one.

[00:09:18] Download your MP3 files. Moving on to step number two. This is a tricky one. This one I had to figure out myself. This is where you go in and actually save your RSS feed. Ooh, sounds kind of complicated. Your podcast runs on an RSS feed. Well, unless you're doing things exclusively on YouTube, then I would call yourself a YouTuber. Not really a podcast. I'm talking like traditional, original RSS fed podcasts.

[00:09:47] So your RSS feed is basically like your show's blueprint. You need to save it as a .xml file. If you ever want to rebuild it later, this will save you a ton of time. So how do you save that XML file? Here's what you do. You go into your podcast host provider. You find your RSS feed. You click copy. Then you open a brand new browser page on your computer.

[00:10:15] You dump that RSS feed right into the browser. Now you're going to get entire like page and multiple pages of all kinds of like text code. You're like, what is this nonsense? I can't even make this out. Great. That's what you're looking at. That is your RSS feed. On the page itself, you click save text. And you should have a save option to save the entire project or entire website as a .xml file. That's what you do.

[00:10:40] So that was step number two, saving the physical RSS feed. Great. Now moving us on to step number three. This one is kind of an interesting one because not everybody does episode artwork. And I'm talking about physically saving your artwork for your show. Some shows like the one I created for my clients, we only have just the one artwork. Just the main artwork for the show is the only artwork they ever use.

[00:11:08] But even with that, you still would like to have a physical copy of that. Save that artwork. Now you can grab your podcast cover art and any episode specific images. I'm talking like episode artwork itself. Grab all that stuff. Right click. Save it. You're done. Keep it all in a folder. Put everything combined in a single folder. I'm talking the MP3s, the XML file, and all the artwork into a single folder.

[00:11:34] And that moves us on to step number four, which is create that backup folder. Now, keeping everything in a single folder that's titled something like podcast backup, you know, 2025 or whatever the year is. By putting it in one organized folder, you have it ready to go. Think of it as like a backup. And that one folder, what you can do and make it smaller is you can compress that folder

[00:11:59] into a zip drive and then maybe put it on a paid cloud service somewhere like maybe iCloud or perhaps maybe Google Drive or something like that. I mean, these folders get big. I'll tell you how big they get in a minute. But even when it's compressed, we're talking maybe 15, 20 gigabytes of storage, which for most computers can probably handle that easy peasy. And then of course, you know, have a backup hard drive. I got two of them on this computer. I've got a big giant one and I got a small portable one, which reminds me, the small portable one's getting kind of full.

[00:12:28] I'm going to have to upgrade to a bigger size. Anyways, you know, back it up, put it in storage, put it in a little vault somewhere, somewhere you know where it is. And somehow you know what it is by titling it like podcast backup, the year, the date, whatever. Put it right on there. That way you have it. You're ready to roll. Now, I'm not just telling you this just to tell you this. I actually went through this process myself recently. You know, I was on the show, the Chris and Christine show, the first podcast I ever started

[00:12:57] the thing back in 2019. Christine and I got together during the show. It ran for maybe four years, five years, whatever it was. We stopped making episodes like over a year ago. So yeah, the show pod faded. We don't do the show anymore. The show is officially over. And as I'm paying the monthly or yearly subscription to probably one of the worst podcast host providers on the planet, SoundCloud. Do not recommend using SoundCloud, but it's all I knew. That's what I put it there.

[00:13:27] Anyways, I wanted to move the show somewhere I could archive it, but not be paying money for it at the same time. So that's why I decided to move it off of SoundCloud and put it into Spotify, old anchor. Now it's what? Spotify for creators, which is a free platform. Now the show already had its RSS integration directly into YouTube, which is also free. So the show lived on YouTube essentially.

[00:13:55] And then I'm going to move the RSS feed from SoundCloud over to Spotify for creators. And I did that. And then after that went through, I decided to create a final, final episode saying we're done with the show. And I put it on Spotify. And that way I can make sure that the RSS redirect came through and that it actually did move everything over correctly. And it's all going like it should. Great.

[00:14:24] Everything's now on Spotify. Great. I shut down SoundCloud, shut all that down. Great. It's officially on YouTube for free. And the show is officially on Spotify for free. And I'm thinking, great. It's cool. It's still there. People can listen to it at any time. People that were subscribed to the show are still subscribed to the show, although we don't make new episodes anymore. But if they wanted to go back and archive an old episode, great. It's still there. Enjoy right there. But then it got me thinking that, yeah, I know.

[00:14:54] Just like that old story about the pictures on Facebook. What if Spotify shuts us down? We're not paying anything for Spotify. So they could, if they wanted to, just poof, gone. You're not on our platform anymore. Same thing goes with YouTube. They can do the exact same thing too. And they are also known to get rid of shows for whatever reason they want to come up with. They can poof, gone. You're gone. You're not here anymore.

[00:15:19] Basically, renting places for free, by the way, at Spotify and at YouTube. And those places seem great. They seem very easy to do. They make things very easy to upload, very easy to convert your show, very easy to create content on both platforms. That's great. Fantastic. But you're still renting at a place that you don't own or we didn't own. So I'm thinking, man, what if something happens? I don't want to lose everything.

[00:15:46] Now, although I did have every single MP3 file saved and I was such OCD with this stuff, I would save it like in multiple drives, multiple folders, multiple versions, the wave version, the MP3 version, all the different versions. Plus, I had all the original artwork and I had all the stuff, but I did not have any of the show notes and I did not have any of the metadata and the dates things got released and any of that stuff.

[00:16:15] So I'm like, well, how am I going to kickstart the show again? And if Spotify shuts us down, we have to move the show to, say, a Libsyn or a Captivate or a Buzzsprout, move the show somewhere else, which is fine. But how do you do that from zero? Like, how do you do that if you don't have the RSS feed, at least a copy of the RSS feed?

[00:16:36] And that's when I went down this rabbit hole trying to figure out, well, how can I copy the show and have a physical backup of everything just in case that Spotify shuts us down, YouTube shuts us down? I can kickstart the show on some other platform, you know, and get it up and rolling, easy peasy, ready to go.

[00:16:59] And that's why I decided to go down this path of finding a way, the best way to back up an entire show just in case you want to, you know, switch providers or start it all over again or something else. It's always good to have a copy of your own stuff. So if you have not already, I highly, highly, highly encourage you to make a backup of your podcast today.

[00:17:26] Like, if it takes an hour, plan on an hour in your week to physically back up your entire podcast. And if you're having issues with storage space, you can pick up a backup hard drive on Amazon, like a two terabyte hard drive for maybe, what, 50 bucks? Maybe not even that much. It's not very much, but it's well worth having your stuff saved just in case. It's all about just in case.

[00:17:51] It's not like I think that, you know, YouTube or Spotify are going to delete our show tomorrow. It's not that at all. I mean, it could happen, but chances are very slim to none that it would happen. But I put a lot of years, a lot of hard work, a lot of memories, a lot of good stuff on that podcast. And I would like it to be available for generations to come.

[00:18:14] My kids and their kids and anybody else that wants to listen to what we did with that podcast, you know, at any moment in time, they can listen to it. Yeah, I got the files. And yes, I have the physical copies of it and all that great stuff. That's great. But I still want a backup. I want a backup of everything. I think that you should be backing up everything you produce and everything you do. Do not leave it to chance. Do not leave it to the landlord that could, oops, deleted it. I don't know what happened. It's gone now. Sorry.

[00:18:43] And going back to that girl I dated with her photos on Facebook, would you leave all of your precious memories to chance on a platform that you have no control over that can do anything that they want with your files? I think it says in the user agreement on most of these platforms that they can delete you and all your stuff for any reason they want or no reason at all.

[00:19:08] Hey, if your podcast is worth it to you, if you find that your show is of value and that you'd like to keep that value archived somewhere safe for generations to come to listen to it and enjoy it, then back up your stuff. Hey, your content is your content and the things that you make, you should own and have a copy of it.

[00:19:29] Always have a physical copy that's not on a Facebook thing or it's not on a Spotify thing or a YouTube thing or a TikTok thing. Have copies of your own content and keep it because these places could fold over and do who knows what with your stuff. And that's a big risk. So that is what I have done for the old Chris and Christine show. The show is no longer being produced. It is no longer creating new episodes.

[00:19:59] But every single episode is still available on YouTube and all of the regular podcast platforms as if it never stopped making episodes. Although it did stop making episodes. Last episode I made, I think it was like beginning of this month. I just made that final episode. But other than that, the show and all its episodes, all like 200 something of them, I don't know what it is, are still there live on all the podcast platforms.

[00:20:23] And just in case something happens, I've got a copy of all of that ready to go. Just in case I got to move the show over somewhere else or something else, I have it all ready to go. And I got all that saved on multiple hard drives too. So this has been a fun experience figuring how to back up everything, keep everything ready to go. Got me thinking like what if? And what if something does happen? What if things out of my control happen? So it's just good to be in control of your own stuff.

[00:20:53] Hey, thank you once again for listening all the way to the very end of this episode. I create these episodes for you. I enjoy podcasting. I am not here trying to sell you something, trying to pitch slappy with some kind of nonsense, some chorus or some crap. No, I'm just here to tell you about podcasting, my journey of podcasting, why I do podcasting, how I enjoy doing podcasting. I enjoy listening to podcasts. And I just want to make you have an amazing podcast for your audience.

[00:21:22] If you want to reach me, you can reach me right through my website. That is oddtasticaudio.com. Link below in the show notes as usual. Right on there, I also have cool things like all my social media links. All my episodes are right there. And if you want to, I do have a book out. Yes, a brand new book. It's called Podcastic Playbook. In the About section on podcasticaudio.com, you'll find links to purchase the book right there. No pressure, but it'd be kind of cool if you did.

[00:21:51] So until next time, happy podcasting.