Chartable switches off: what you have to do today

Chartable is switched off today. Among the many things the company offered was analytics - which it achieved with a “prefix”, looking like chtbl.com or chrt.fm in your RSS feed’s “enclosure” section, which counted your total downloads. You must remove this Chartable prefix today if you have one, otherwise your podcast may not play at all in the future. SmartLinks and SmartFeeds will also no longer work.

As of Saturday evening, the Chartable prefix was still in 21,585 shows (not including those in Megaphone). We know many have now been removed automatically by podcast companies. If you’re unsure, contact your host’s support team and ask.
Users of Spotify’s Megaphone need do nothing. Make sure the Megaphone integration in Chartable is set up in order to access the Chartable platform starting tomorrow. Here’s more information.
Don’t panic. Prefixes won’t stop working immediately, we understand. But they will stop working at some point in the future. It’s important to remove them today.

The closure of Chartable will have a big impact on download numbers. Changing an audio URL in your RSS feed, as you’ll do when removing Chartable prefixes, causes every Spotify listener’s app to automatically redownload every episode that may have been recently played, or that has been downloaded for future playback. Spotify is built to immediately replace audio if it changes (even in a listener’s cache), since record companies required that functionality for legal reasons. So, if you see bazillions of downloads for some reason, this will be why.

Ausha has launched Ausha Charts, a chart tracking service that also covers sub-categories and all countries for Apple and Spotify. The tool is currently a chart (and category) browser, and doesn’t let you search your show. (That’s coming).