Note to All iTunes Listeners: Episode List Not Visible

Living in the 24/7 digital world (and working in it) ensures that our days are never short of stupidity and annoyance. So unfortunately, I present to you yet another thing to add to the list! :)

On Substack there is an automated paywall setting for content, so that creators can set rules about how to monetize their content. Personally, I chose a 1 week paywall cutoff, so that all my content is free when it is initially released, and then if you want to index it later or search it for whatever reason, it’s part of the archive and requires a membership.

This allows me to offer a benefit to everyone without requiring them to be paid members (like if they want to watch ad free coming from YouTube), while still respecting my time and effort so that there is some incentive for people to be members and some monetization for me as well, which I think is very reasonable.

But as it is the case with practically every platform I’ve used, there is always a lack of consistency, a lack of follow-thru and always something that breaks. In the case in question, I only recently (few weeks ago) realized that for the last 3 years of my publication, the automatic paywall setting I’d been employing was NOT affecting my audio and video content whatsoever. It was only active for pages created and for written posts.

Fast forward hours of dissecting the problem, using DevTools to get Substack’s API and payload destination for post edits and all kinds of nerdy stuff, and I had Claude design me a script to go and make up for this stupidity on the part of Substack’s development myself. The result is that the automatic paywall now does what it’s supposed to do (at least for me!), and all my video and audio episodes older than 7 days are paywalled.

For Spotify this is not a problem, because they have a natural integration with Substack and people can pay/upgrade to unlock locked episodes. However, for iTunes this is not the case. They do not have any kind of integration beyond simply receiving an RSS feed, and when a piece of content is paywalled — Substack just doesn’t have a way to make it free for iTunes only while preserving the paid feature for the website.

At this point, which I found out by accident also, I had to make a decision. So, I chose the lesser of two evils and kept my paywall consistent at the cost of erasing my entire iTunes history, with the exception of the two or three episodes that are currently free and not paywalled (which will rotate going forward).

That means that if you were relying on iTunes for exploring my library, this will not be available anymore. I have reached out to Substack to have them solve these issues in an intelligent way, but I’m not holding my breath. In the end it’s not that big of a deal, because new content will still be on iTunes and totally free to listen to. But if you want to browse my library then you need to use the website. I have organized it such that most of all my content is actually STILL freely available through pages and the menu, but if you want to use the search feature and look something up, or reference things like VDS episodes, then you will need to be a paid member.

Balancing these things is always tricky, however we also have to make a living and be fair to our own time and effort. I always try to lean toward giving much more than what I receive and doing things with service and excellence whenever possible, but I also do this full time and if something like a major business function isn’t working then that needs to be fixed.

If you relied on iTunes to browse my library, I’m sorry that this will no longer be available to you going forward. At least not in the near future. But it’s not that big of a deal actually, and this is better because I want people to engage my content using the website — as that is why I created one to begin with :)