Migrating Your Podcasts Shows From Google Podcasts
Dec 07, 2023 – minute read
Back in September, we announced our plans to create a centralized podcast destination on YouTube Music. For listeners, we’re combining the world of music they already love with podcasts delivered by their favorite creators and artists. And for podcast creators, this means boosting audience growth across audio and video formats. As part of this investment, we will be discontinuing Google Podcasts in the US as early as April 2024. To make this transition as seamless as possible, today we’ll begin rolling out a tool that allows Google Podcast listeners in the US to migrate their subscriptions from Google Podcasts to YouTube Music or export them for use in other podcast apps. We’ll share more about Google Podcasts’ availability and the release of this migration tool for other countries soon.
Over the past year, we’ve been building a great podcast experience for listeners across both YouTube and YouTube Music.
Migrating Your Podcast Show Subscriptions
In the coming weeks, listeners will be able to access the migration tool through a banner at the top of their screen in Google Podcasts. You can find step-by-step instructions on how to use the migration tool here. The tool also has the option to export Google Podcasts subscriptions as an OPML file that can be uploaded to any other podcast app that supports uploads.
We built this migration tool with both listeners and podcasters in mind. Many of the most popular podcasts, from New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce to Murder, Mystery & Makeup with Bailey Sarian are already available on YouTube. For podcasts that aren’t currently available on YouTube, listeners will be able to add shows directly to their YouTube Music library via the podcast’s RSS feed. And if you’re a podcaster, this move will open the door to new audiences and functionality–robust creation and analytics tools, RSS uploads to YouTube, along with availability to the millions of listeners that already call YouTube home.
In the U.S., Google Podcasts will be available for podcast listening through March 2024, and listeners will be able to migrate or export their subscriptions through July 2024.
Investing in Podcasts Across YouTube
Over the past year, we’ve been building a great podcast experience for listeners across both YouTube and YouTube Music. Here’s what we’ve been up to:
- Improved listening experience: Listeners can now continue listening to a podcast exactly where they left off, allowing them to seamlessly jump back into their podcast. In the coming months, we’ll enable the ability to mark a podcast as listened to so listeners can easily identify podcasts with which they’ve previously interacted.
- Discovery features: We’ve introduced podcast shelves on the YouTube Music homepage to make podcasts easily accessible to listeners and to increase engagement for creators.
- Auto Downloads: New episodes of the podcasts that listeners are subscribed to will automatically be downloaded and added to their library to consume offline.
- Add a podcast via RSS feed: Listeners can now add any podcast to their YouTube Music library with its RSS feed URL.
- Better integration support: We’ve made it easier to play podcasts in YouTube Music through Google Assistant in the car and on wearable devices.
This is just the beginning! We can’t wait for listeners to start exploring new features and discovering podcast favorites along the way.