This week, it was announced that WTF with Marc Maron would be ending its run after 16 years. The show will end sometime in the autumn (aka ‘fall’) having produced more than 1,600 episodes over that time. Maron’s podcast was one of the big early titles, and it’s fair to say that although Maron was a successful stand-up comedian prior to starting his podcast, his fame has developed as a consequence of the podcast and its popularity.

But I’m not really here to write about a podcast I’ve only occasionally listened to. I’m interested in what happens after the title stops.

And more to the point, what happens after any podcast stops producing new episodes.

Will episodes continue to be made available in perpetuity? And who’s paying?

Hosting podcasts costs money, and even though audio files pale into insignificance compared with video files in terms of size, if you’re a hosting company, then it’s costing you real money to keep old episodes on a server somewhere. Cloud storage is not free.

Now to be clear, Maron’s podcast is likely to continue earning some very good revenue once he’s stopped making new episodes. With hundreds of guests and thousands of hours of discussions, people are likely to continue to seek out old episodes which can continue to be monetised. I would expect money to continue to flow for the foreseeable future.

But what about smaller titles that never had that level of fame? Or those with subjects that don’t really have a long shelf life after they’re produced? What happens when the creators stop producing new episodes? Do the old ones continue to be made available? Or do they just fade away?

YouTube and Facebook

It’s very easy to look at somewhere like YouTube, where basically videos continue to be made available, effectively in perpetuity, and think that this is the norm. YouTube will keep videos up subject to copyright claims, violations of YouTube’s terms, or owners just deciding to remove their videos.

But you never know when a copyright claim might be made: I had that experience with an old episode of something that the rights holder eventually spotted I’d uploaded some fifteen years after it had first been uploaded by me (in fact, I originally uploaded the video to the long shuttered Google Video service, and it was transferred over to YouTube following Google’s acquisition of YouTube and their eventual closing of Google Video).

More recently, Facebook announced that Live videos that were uploaded to its service would be removed after 30 days. Previously, they had been left up permanently. I imagine that the decision to reduce the availability of these videos was a combination of people abusing the service (were people live streaming their doorbell cameras as some kind of pseudo free-alarm system?), legal liability, and the cost of storage. I think I streamed one video one time ten or more years ago, and that video had remained on their platform until last month, when it was deleted. Facebook did give users the opportunity to download their old videos.

But video files are only getting bigger, as more people upload more videos in ever higher resolutions – 4K, 8K, HDR and so on. So hosting videos permanently is no small undertaking, even for companies the size of Alphabet and Meta.

Audio files are much smaller, and default perhaps to something like 128K stereo mp3s.

But if you host enough of them, those much smaller files still add up.

Free vs Paid Hosting

There are broadly speaking, two main hosting models for podcasts: free or paid.

Spotify for Podcasters (formerly Anchor.fm) is the archetype of the free model. Anyone can upload their podcast to the platform where it integrates seamlessly with Spotify. Spotify gains the right to monetise the podcast, and titles are made available in the broader audio ecosystem. (Note that I’m considering primarily audio-only podcasts here). Of course, Spotify also hosts gargantuan quantities of music, so podcasts are likely to be a small part of the company’s hosting costs.

Many other platforms offer various tiers of service. They might include a free tier, such as Buzzsprout or Acast, but the basic free plans tend to come with restrictions limiting the number of shows you can host, the number of episodes, the duration of episodes and so on. Free tiers will work for some creators, but most hosts in the paid space are looking towards pushing you to a paid monthly plan of some sort or another.

Not all the major podcast hosting platforms offer free hosting. Companies like Blubrry and Libsyn have relatively low-cost basic plans, but there is still a cost attached. Often, as well as allowing more episodes to be published, more premium plans will come with better analytics and increasingly, AI services.

Paid hosting plans may offer greater flexibility to work with sales partners beyond anything the hosting company is able to offer.

But once you decide that you no longer want to make new episodes, and stop paying the monthly (or annual) fee for hosting, what happens to old episodes of your podcast? Are they lost forever? (Or perhaps the only copies are those left on an old hard drive in the back of your wardrobe somewhere?)

Terms of Service

This is where we have to start looking at hosting platforms’ Terms of Service (ToS) to at least try to work out what happens when you stop paying, or stop uploading new episodes.

And from what I can tell, there is no consistency across the market.

An example of host that is quite explicit about what happens is Spreaker (owned by iHeart). Their ToS state:

The Owner reserves the right to delete a User’s account and its activity and data if such account is inactive across the Service for at least two years. Such deletion may be made without warning and in Owner’s sole discretion.

Spreaker does have a free tier, but they’re obviously keen to push users to a paid tier, because even statistics cease after 6 months on the free tier.

But they are pretty clear that they may delete your old episodes after two years of an account being “inactive.”

However, even then, it’s not entirely clear what inactive means. If I log into my account once every two years, even if I don’t upload a new episode, does that count as an active account? Or do I need to add a new episode to keep the account alive?

If we consider Buzzsprout’s ToS, they state:

Your account and all of its Content will be deleted immediately upon your cancellation of the Service. This information can NOT be recovered once it has been deleted.

It would seem that in essence, if you stop paying them, they’ll delete everything.

Similarly, if you stop paying Libsyn, then their ToS state:

If you fail to make a payment or if Libsyn is not able to collect payment on the due date, your account will be considered “delinquent”.  Libsyn may suspend or lock access to your account until payment for all outstanding balance is received and additional late fees may be incurred.  Libsyn reserves the right to terminate your account and delete Your Content from the Site at its sole discretion if your account is “delinquent”.

While Spotify for Podcasts’ is clear that the service is provided free-of-charge, they also give themselves enormous leverage to do what they like in the future. From their ToS:

We aim to evolve and improve our Service constantly, and we may modify, suspend, or stop (permanently or temporarily) providing all of part of the Service.

The Spotify for Creators Service offering is constantly evolving and adapting to the needs of the Spotify community. Spotify has no obligation to provide any specific content through the Service, and Spotify or the applicable owners may remove Content without notice.

And many ToS from providers include terminology giving them the right to terminate “for any or no reason.”

Things tend to be a lot clearer if a user actively wants to delete an account or remove titles from a platform. The hosting company would normally oblige, and delete titles that the owner wants removed.

In general terms though, it becomes apparent that if a podcast producer stops paying their hosting fees, in many cases, those episodes are likely to be deleted from that platform.

In practice, many larger titles will continue to derive some kind of revenues from a long tail of listening many years after episodes were first produced. And that may make it much more likely that those episodes continue to be hosted. It’s essentially free money at this point. But smaller titles are much likelier to disappear, just as smaller websites in the past have done.

The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive has backed up millions of websites, videos, free texts, audio and much more. In particular, I love to use the Wayback Machine to see what websites used to look like in the past. The archive does include podcasts, although with just over 1m items at time of writing, it’s clear that this is just a fraction of the podcasts in existence.

It’s also not clear whether these are all user-submitted or whether the team is proactively archiving what might be considered as culturally important titles.

In general terms, it’s a handy backstop to find old titles, but as with websites, they don’t archive absolutely everything. And in any case, the bigger titles are likely to live on for a long time in RSS as long as they generate cash.

Conclusion

I think many people probably imagine that all their favourite podcasts are going to be available forever. But that’s simply not the case.

There’s no easy remedy to this. While I’m confident that Marc Maron’s podcasts will continue to live on online for years to come (assuming he chooses to continue to make them available), many others will disappear just as soon as that credit card stops paying the hosting subscription fees.

That’s already the case with websites, and even the Internet Archive isn’t going to capture everything. There will be fans of some podcasts who will share them and make them available. And of course, there is nothing to stop you downloading and saving podcasts from just about any provider. They’re nearly all mp3s after all with no digital rights management attached.

But as with other digital media, there should be no expectation that podcasts will continue to made available in perpetuity.

I wonder how many podcasts have already left this mortal coil?

Note: I am not a lawyer, and this information is provided as is. Terms of Service are updated frequently, and you should always check out the current Terms of Service with any podcast host that you’re planning to use. The information presented above may have changed between me writing this piece and you reading it.

Top Image: AI Generated with Adobe Photoshop using the prompt “A server center disappearing into a fine cloud of dust against a white background.”