Cast Update: New Publisher Categories, New Podcast Types and Self-Serve Invoices
Once your podcast is recorded, edited, and mixed it’s time to get it out to the world so that listeners can find it. A big piece of that puzzle is setting up all of your podcast metadata in Cast’s Publisher — this includes things like your podcast’s art, episode descriptions, and the all important podcast categories.
New Podcast Categories
Apple has recently changed the list of supported podcast categories; they’ve updated this list to better reflect the types of podcasts people are currently making and listening to, adding some new categories and deleting some of the old ones. (For example: there is a brand new True Crime category! 🕵️♀️)
We’ve got a complete article about the new categories over at Cast’s Help & Guides, but here’s a quick high-level summary:
- If you haven’t yet published a podcast feed with Cast, you’re all set! (Whew, that was easy.) New feeds will automatically prompt you to select from the updated category list.
- Existing podcast feeds will have their categories unchanged unless you explicitly choose to change them. Apple has said that the old category list will continue to be supported for the time being.
- That said, you may want to update your podcast feed’s categories to make use of the new categories; head on over to the Publisher page for your podcast feed and edit your category selections. The category picker will only let you pick new categories, so there’s no way to mess this up.
New Podcast Types
Apple has also rolled out support for explicitly marking your podcast as a serial or episodic podcast, and this is also now supported in Cast’s Publisher. The big change here is that if you’re making a serial podcast, you can now tag it (and your episodes) so that podcast clients know and show your episodes oldest-to-newest to new listeners.
As with the categories update, you definitely don’t have to change anything; the majority of podcasts are episodic, and Apple presumes a podcast is episodic by default, so most people are already done without having to do anything.
If you’d like to learn more, we’ve got — you guessed it — a writeup about Podcast Types on our Publisher Guide.
Also: Episode Date Changes
When we built Cast’s publisher, we spent a bunch of time talking to the people who made popular podcast apps and asked about the most common problems they saw in podcast RSS feeds. As it turns out, they had a long list of problems, but there was a common theme: a huge percentage of podcasts have invalid RSS feeds — from unclosed tags, to nonsensical dates, missing times, and incorrect filesizes. Invalid RSS data increases the chances that a podcast app will display your podcast incorrectly (or not at all).
As a result, we did everything we could to make Cast’s Publisher foolproof — as much as possible, we wanted to make sure that the Publisher only produces valid RSS feeds, and that often means automating parts of the publishing process. For example: Cast doesn’t ask you the filesize of your published files, we simply determine it ourselves. Similarly, Cast doesn’t ask you to enter a date when you publish an episode (with the exception of scheduling episodes to publish in future) — we use the current date and time.
That said, we know that sometimes you want to alter the date on a published episode, and we’ve just rolled out a small change to the Publisher that now makes that possible (while also making sure your dates remain valid, of course).
Also, Also: The Invoices Page 📑
We built Cast’s billing system to automatically send you a copy of each invoice every month when you’re billed, but we occasionally hear from users who want a way to review and download all of their historical invoices in one place.
We’re excited to roll out Cast’s Invoices page, which gives you all that and more. In addition to letting you view and download your historical invoices, the Invoices page will give you more information about failed charges when we’re unable to charge your credit card for your monthly subscription. Your Invoices page can be accessed from the Account Settings menu on your Account page.
My name is Julian, and when I’m not writing this article, I’m working on Cast — a product that makes it easy and fun to record, edit and publish a podcast.
