Two stories in one week
Sanderson Jones stopped making his podcast. The podcast did not stop. Someone took over the show's account, moved it to another host, cloned his voice and carried on publishing episodes in it, earning 1,293 US dollars before the hosting company returned the money and the show to him. Listeners heard his voice saying things he would never say, as Podnews reported on 26 October 2026.
A day later Podnews published something larger than one hijacked account. Its investigation found that Spreaker, a hosting platform owned by iHeart, lets anyone paste an RSS address into an importer, copies the show audio and its metadata, can refresh that copy every hour, and accepts the result for advertising monetisation. Podnews counted 1,778 pirated podcasts in its analysis of the Podcast Index, and most of the publishers affected never heard from anyone.
How a copy gets made
| Step | What the platform does | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Import | An RSS address is pasted in, and audio, artwork, titles, dates and descriptions are copied along with it. No message reaches the owner of the show. | Podnews, 27 October 2026 |
| Stay current | The importer can check the original feed every hour, so the copy keeps receiving new episodes without anyone doing anything. | Podnews, 27 October 2026 |
| Distribute | The copy is submitted to Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other directories under a new publisher name. | Podnews, 27 October 2026 |
| Monetise | Ad breaks are inserted automatically. Podnews's test show, built from copied audio, was approved for monetisation the same morning. | Podnews, 27 October 2026 |
| Collect | Spreaker keeps up to 41% of the ad revenue that the inserted ads earn. | Podnews, 27 October 2026 |
The damage is not the file but the accounting. Plays of a copy are counted by the copy's host and not in your numbers, the duplicate sits next to you in search, and the ads inside it are chosen by someone who has never spoken to you. A listener who subscribes to the wrong listing takes their reviews and their attention with them.
Five days from copy to chart
Lisa Lacy hosts Notes From the Edge, a show that passed 500,000 downloads in four months and sat at number one on Apple's US Personal Journals chart. She found an unauthorised copy of more than 150 episodes on Spreaker, with her artwork and descriptions, set to import future episodes as she published them. Five days later the copy had reached number 121 on the same chart while her own downloads fell.
Lacy is careful about what she can prove. She documented the listing, the copied catalogue, the chart position and the monetisation setup, but she cannot attribute every lost download or one star review to that account. The mechanism is documented all the same: an imported copy plays from the new host's servers, so the listening is counted there and the publisher sees none of it. Her network needed about 24 hours to remove the main listing, and the copies elsewhere stayed.
“"A publicly accessible RSS feed should not be mistaken for permission to reproduce and distribute someone else's intellectual property." Lisa Lacy, host of Notes From the Edge”
What a copy cannot reproduce
A duplicated feed duplicates the finished episode. It holds what you already published, at the quality you published it in. It does not hold the per person source tracks, the takes you did not use, the raw file with its original timestamps, or the note recording who agreed to what before the take started. Those are what an editor asks for next month, and what you show when a recording has to be proved yours. The published file is the last stop of the process, not the asset.
Three things you can do this week
- Lock the feed. Set the podcast:locked tag to yes, which tells other hosting platforms that an import of this feed should be rejected, and add the owner attribute with an address you control so a platform can verify a genuine move.
- Search your own show the way a stranger would: by title, by an episode title, by the publisher name inside the listing. A duplicate does not have to sit on your host to cost you plays.
- Download your masters after every take and keep them where you control access. A host is a distribution service, not an archive.
None of this is a wall. The locked tag is a signal a platform has to respect, and Spreaker says it honours it, yet the same report shows how little stands between a feed address and a copy. Your own masters are the one link in the chain a stranger cannot rebuild from outside.
Consent that covers a cloned voice
Name the uses, one by one
Recording, editing, publishing, clips and promotion, each named. A guest who agreed to a podcast has not automatically agreed to a trailer, a vertical clip or a paid course.
Name synthetic voice, either way
Write the sentence you actually mean: the audio may not be used to train or produce a synthetic version of the guest's voice, or it may, under these conditions. Silence on the point is what makes a clone arguable later.
Keep the record with the recording
The signed note belongs next to the files it covers, with a date, the name of the person and the session it was recorded in. A form in an inbox is not a record anyone finds in two years.
A published episode is already enough audio for a convincing clone, which is why the sentence about synthetic voice belongs in the agreement before the take, not in a follow up email.
What Airtape does here
Airtape records in the browser on each participant's own device, so audio and video are captured where they are produced instead of being re-encoded out of a call. Every participant leaves one audio track and one video track named after them, the guest link needs no account and no install, and a take keeps recording on the device when the connection drops. The files are yours to download. Airtape does not host your feed and does not distribute your show, because the product is the source, and a source is what a copy cannot be.
The Free plan includes two recording hours a month, two participants in total and seven days of storage.