[neurotixz]

Im running a very small podcast hosting company, and spotify is NOT a good player in this space. They are not respecting the standard in any way. As an example, instead of linking to the source url, they make their own copy and serve that instead in the app, so the hoster does not see any downloads, cannot do statistics, etc. It also add copy protection... They also do not refresh the original URL regularly or the content, so if a change was made to the file , description or image it will not show up on spotify unless you do some custom stuff (breaking other players).

So the break is already happening in this world...

[WesleyLivesay]

Interesting...in a bad way.

I guess I am not shocked that they would do something like that. I'm sure they claim that they do it for user experience or some such nonsense.

[mostlysimilar]

All their posturing about Apple and open ecosystems is transparently hypocritical.

[lxgr]

They really do need to do that in order for Podcasts to be supported on very old devices (that only support Spotify's APIs and DRM-ed Vorbis files), which I appreciate as a user of such an old device myself.

That said, they allow distributors to opt into "Passthrough" MP3 delivery to all modern devices (including browsers – just check the network tab in developer tools!), although it's not the default.

[thehappypm]

Security and performance come to mind.

If they just served podcasts directly from third parties, third parties would be able at least in theory to push potentially malicious data to the Spotify app (and Spotify users' devices).

As for performance, if the third party has an outage, then it would make Spotify look broken. And who knows if the third party site can serve the traffic well enough for a good experience.

[lxgr]

You can apparently opt into something called "Passthrough" that makes (most) Spotify clients download MP3s directly from your CDN, but it's not the default and has certain requirements on your format and uptime.