Can I change my Podcast name without loosing my subscribers in iTunes?

Question

I have a Podcast. I herd that if I change the Title of it I might loose my subscribers.

Is there a way to change my Podcast Title without loosing my subscribers in iTunes?

Answer 1

Making a change to the title tag within your podcast's RSS feed will update the podcast title within iTunes, without losing subscribers. It may take a day or two for such a change take effect within iTunes.

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Note: The main concern is that making a title change to a podcast where the feed is created for you automatically could potentially change the url for the feed which will stop the podcast from updating [...and an 'easy fix' for that could be resubmitting your podcast, which would lose your subscribers!].

So http://example.com/oldTitle.rss might become http://example.com/newTitle.rss.

If needed, it's possible to update the feed URL within iTunes, without resubmitting your podcast or losing subscribers, as described by Apple in the 'Changing Your RSS Podcast Feed URL' section of their podcast specs:

You can move your podcast feed from one location to another. To avoid losing subscribers, you must announce the change directly to all users who are subscribed to your feed. To do so, you should:

– Use the <itunes:new-feed-url> tag described in the iTunes RSS Tags section below.

– Set your web server to return an HTTP 301 redirect response when receiving a request for the old feed.

This will update the iTunes Store with the new feed URL and your subscribers will continue to receive new episodes automatically. Be sure to maintain the <itunes:new-feed-url> tag and the HTTP 301 redirect response for at least 4 weeks to ensure that most subscribers have attempted to download your most recent episode and have thereby received the new URL.