• by Ray Schultz , August 23, 2022

Apple has lightened the rules for podcast-hosting providers.  

Starting in 2023, the owner tag and email address will no longer be required and will not be supported. This should eliminate any aggravating emails being sent to podcast creators, one report says. 

Creators need only have an Apple ID to submit a show, Apple said in a post on Monday. 

Apple also announced several other technical changes for podcasts:

• Each episode must contain a GUID, the standard for providing a unique identifier for episodes. But Apple Podcasts will not process new episodes with duplicate GUIDs.  
• Conditional GET—These updates are recommended. Apple states that “the Apple Podcasts RSS feed crawler will start reading and accepting ETag (HTTP 1.1) or Last Modified Date (HTTP 1.0) headers. Using these headers will limit the amount of data that our crawler will need to request if no changes have been detected.”
• Atom Feeds will no longer be supported.  

In addition, Apple clarifies that podcasts will be available in the Apple Podcasts catalog after the creator clicks "Add." Creators can then use the show URL to generate promotions. But it will take up to 24 hours for episodes to appear in search results and personalized recommendations. 

Last week, Apple announced the debut of Apple Podcasts Charts, which measure the most popular shows and episodes in a given market by listening, follows and completion rates.