You could be making the best show in your niche and it wouldn't matter — if it's not sitting where your listeners already are, it doesn't exist to them.

For a huge chunk of the world, “where they already are” is Spotify. So let's talk about why you need to submit your podcast on Spotify, why it isn't optional anymore, and what people tend to get wrong about it.

It's just… where the people are

Spotify isn't a nice-to-have distribution channel — it's one of the biggest rooms in the building. We're talking over 760 million monthly active users as of early 2026, and it's the single most popular podcast app for Android listeners (and the runner-up on iOS). In terms of raw downloads, it accounts for roughly a third of all podcast listening globally.

Translation: if you skip Spotify, you're not skipping a niche app. You're skipping the main room.

It reaches people who'll never open a “podcast app”

Here's the thing a lot of new podcasters miss — plenty of your future listeners don't think of themselves as “podcast people.” They're just Spotify people. They already have the app for music, and podcasts just… show up there too.

Listing your show on Spotify means you're catching those listeners in an app they already opened today, not asking them to download something new just for you. That's a much lower bar to clear.

Submitting your podcast to Spotify is free, and it's basically automatic now

If the idea of “submitting to a directory” sounds like a chore — good news, it mostly isn't anymore. Submitting your show to Spotify costs nothing, and most modern podcast hosts (Buzzsprout, Transistor, Captivate, Podbean, Riverside, and others) will push your episodes to Spotify automatically once you connect your account. Set it up once, and every new episode just… shows up.

You get real data on how your audience behaves

Once you're listed, Spotify for Creators hands you analytics that are specific to your Spotify audience — how people are actually listening, not just vague download totals. If you care about growing intentionally instead of guessing, that data is worth having.

Video podcasts are having a real moment

Spotify has been investing hard in video podcasts and interactive features, and it's one of the few places where video and audio versions of your show can genuinely coexist. If you ever plan to film your episodes (or already do), Spotify is built for that in a way plenty of directories aren't.

The stuff nobody tells you

A few things worth knowing before you hit submit:

Being on Spotify doesn't mean you're everywhere else. This trips people up constantly. Getting listed on Spotify does not automatically get you onto Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or anywhere else. Each directory needs its own submission — same RSS feed, different destination, one-time setup each.

“Hosting on Spotify” and “distributing to Spotify” are not the same choice. This one actually matters long-term. If you let Spotify host your feed directly, you're more locked in — leaving later gets messy, and you can lose your listener history and playlist placements in the process. If you distribute to Spotify through your own host (keeping your own RSS feed), you keep ownership and flexibility. Same visibility on Spotify either way — very different exit plan five years from now.

Spotify's stats only know about Spotify. Great data, but it's one slice of your total audience, not the whole picture. Don't mistake it for your full analytics story.

The bottom line

Being on Spotify isn't a bonus move for later — it's part of the baseline setup for launching a podcast in 2026. It's free, it's mostly automatic, and it puts your show in front of the biggest audience of “not-really-podcast-people” you'll ever have access to.

Just go in knowing it's one piece of a bigger distribution plan, not the whole plan.