AP 0950: What’s the Difference between Libsyn and Soundcloud?

AskPat 950 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Thank you so much for joining me today, this is Episode 950 of AskPat, you're awesome for being here.

All right, now here is today's question from Wan.

Wan: Hi Pat. I would like to ask, what is the difference between Libsyn and SoundCloud as a storage for your podcasts? Thanks.

Pat Flynn: Hey Wan, thank you so much for the question, I appreciate it. So Libsyn and SoundCloud, and there are many others . . . These are podcast hosts, or audio hosts. Now SoundCloud was started specifically to help musicians and artists who are posting and sharing their music online and they, since then, have added on podcast hosting to their solutions portion of their offerings. Libsyn was started many, many, many years ago. It's one of the oldest, and most reliable, podcast hosts out there, and I use Libsyn myself too, and I definitely recommend them. There's been some other ones that have come onboard as well, like Buzzsprout. Buzzsprout is one of my new favorites that is a very easy to use, very user friendly, and personally I feel like it's a lot better interface than Libsyn, but anyway there's a lot of options out there.

But between the two that you mentioned, Libsyn and SoundCloud, what are the differences? Well the differences—first of all, I would just not even touch SoundCloud right now. There's been a lot of news recently and I don't if, by the time this episode comes out, if it's even still gonna be around. I mean it's just been going through a lot of financial struggles for the last couple of years; I've always recommended people to stay away from it. AskPat was actually hosted on SoundCloud way back when podcasting was initially offered, podcast hosting was initially offered on SoundCloud, and I've since removed myself from SoundCloud, and experimented. That was my first time getting experience with Buzzsprout, so AskPat is hosted on Buzzsprout.

Smart Passive Income is hosted on Libsyn, and I love both of them, they're both amazing companies, and they both are very reliable, and like I said, Buzzsprout has a better interface, Libsyn's just more—is used more. More people have a lot more support to share behind it. So there's pros and cons to both, but SoundCloud I wouldn't even touch. It was, like I said, built for musicians and sharing music, and it's just struggling right now. There were a lot of cool features, like the little audio player that you can put on your website, and showing the waveforms, and no other players really did that. Sharing, and you know just building a following in SoundCloud, it's been amazing, but it's on its way out for sure. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time this episode comes out it's not even around anymore. It was almost shutdown, but there was an emergency funding that just happened to keep it alive, but that was in August of 2017, just last month, as of the time this recording goes out, so I don't even know if it's still around.

So anyway, there you go, Wan. If I were to choose one I would choose Libsyn or Buzzsprout right now. I'd research both to see which one works for you, and they're both fantastic. So check it out, Libsyn.com and Buzzsprout.com.

Wan, thank you so much for the question, I appreciate it. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com, and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much, and I appreciate you. And here's a quote today from Robert Keith Leavitt, “People don't ask for facts in making up their minds. They would rather have one good, soul-satisfying emotion than a dozen facts.”

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