Over a week ago I submitted my podcast to https://podcastsconnect.apple.com The RSS feed was validated and then taken into review by a human being working at Apple. This took a couple of days. I’ve done this many times for many podcasts.

Guess what? It was rejected!

I contacted Apple about this. Here’s their response:

“Your show was rejected due to a copyright issue. You must obtain legal authorization or usage rights for copyrighted material contained in your podcast.

This type of rejection does not allow you to resubmit the RSS feed URL. You must correct the issue, and then submit a new RSS feed as a new show.”

I asked Apple what copyright issue they were referring to since my show contains no copyrighted material, it only consists of spoken word. For the first episode I had used a short intro tune which I composed myself (not sampled or using any copyrighted material whatsoever). I am a professional composer and sound designer and I am fully aware of legal issues.

It seems I was not fully aware of ALL legal issues though because when I asked Apple it they confirmed something I had already speculated in my latest Podpraat newsletter (in Dutch):

The cover art should not contain Apple products or any copyrighted Apple logos.

How silly! And what’s the solution? Fix the logo and resubmit the RSS feed? No not really. I tried that, I changed then logo and resubmitted my podcast:

You need to be able to change the RSS feed before you can resubmit it. Bad news since I am hosting this feed at SoundCloud and at SoundCloud you cannot change it.

I also had submitted the feed to Spotify a week ago and it was approved within 15 minutes.

From all podcasters in the Netherlands I am hearing Spotify is the most used app for podcasts. And I can now see the reason way.