Libsyn temporarily stops some 301 redirects
A “301 redirect” is much like telling the Post Office that you’ve moved house, and asking them to redirect your mail to your new address. It allows podcasters to move a show from one podcast hosting company to another, and is a fundamental part of open RSS and portability. It keeps podcast hosting companies honest and competitive, knowing that it is relatively easy to switch companies.
Almost all podcast hosting companies offer 301 redirects for free. (Libsyn charged a $25 fee prior to 2020, but now operates like any other hosting company).
Unlike most podcast hosts, Libsyn doesn’t use just one RSS feed for a podcast: it has a set of different feeds that it gives to podcast directories. Podnews does similar - we feed Spotify and YouTube slightly different feeds to the rest of the open RSS ecosystem, to enable us to serve slightly different content and help our analysis.
In Q4 2025, Libsyn made a number of changes to its RSS infrastructure, which stopped the company being able to offer 301 redirects for some of these feeds - technically, ones starting rss.libsyn. An email from the company’s support team stated that these feeds are “meant for internal use only” and are “not redirectable”.
We asked a Libsyn spokesperson why they’d stopped offering 301 redirects on these feeds. They replied that this was a temporary technical issue:
What has occurred is a technical edge case introduced late last year when we rolled out improvements to our RSS infrastructure to improve performance and reliability at scale. If you recall, we had a brief period of downtime and issues in October that you covered. As part of the work to address those issues, some feeds served via our CDN are using a temporary (302) redirect internally. In a limited number of cases, certain directories -- or manual submissions -- appear to have treated that temporary redirect as a source URL, which can complicate downstream redirects when a show later moves hosts.
The issue affects every Libsyn podcaster who wishes to move off the service. It’s not a “limited number of cases” that directories have listed these URLs as the source URL - it’s the majority, according to our research. In the Podnews podcast sample, which is populated by (mainly) Apple Podcasts and also the Podcast Index, we list more than 6,570 Libsyn podcasts using these “internal” feeds. (Only 5,900 Libsyn podcasts in our sample use the “correct” feeds, which start feeds.libsyn).
However, there’s good news - contrary to the Libsyn support team telling customers that these feeds are “not redirectable” and offering no indication that this is a technical issue, Libsyn’s spokesperson tells us:
The team is actively working on changes that will both prevent directories from adopting interim feed URLs and allow redirects to be applied consistently across all Libsyn feed variants. This work is a priority, and we anticipate getting something to market in the coming weeks.
Meantime, Libsyn creators who wish to leave the podcast host will find it difficult to ensure all platforms correctly see a redirected feed. Shows may disappear altogether from some platforms; others will show stale information and no new episodes.
In conversations with their customers, Podnews has evidence that the Libsyn support team are blaming other podcast hosting companies for Libsyn’s technical issue. One communication to a customer said that “We have seen that (your new podcast host)’s redirect status tool they have custom built does not really work with Libsyn feeds and will state that the redirects are not functional because of how our RSS feeds are structured.” This is false. When alerted to this behaviour, Libsyn agreed that blaming other companies “doesn’t meet our bar for customer support / engagement.” We would agree.
A Libsyn spokesperson told us:
Libsyn has not stopped supporting 301 redirects, nor do we have any intention of preventing creators from moving their shows if they choose to do so. Creator ownership and portability have been core to how we’ve operated for more than two decades and there is no intent to change that.
We remain deeply committed to building a creator-first hosting platform that prioritizes reliability, openness, and long-term growth for creators. Alongside core infrastructure investments like this one, we have exciting plans to innovate across distribution and monetization in a much more ambitious way in the future -- recent examples include the investments we’re making as part of our inclusion in the shortlist of Spotify Distribution API partners and Podroll, but those are truly just the start.
In the last four years, Libsyn’s share of new episodes has dropped from 5.1% to 2.9%. Its popular The Feed podcast was abruptly cancelled without even offering a final episode, and Elsie Escobar, Mathew Passy and Rob Walch have left the company in recent months.
As the world’s first podcast hosting company, Libsyn still has significant goodwill from the podcast community. We would hope that the company fixes this issue quickly.
