Honestly I have no clue, but as a devoted conspiracy theorist I have my suspicions.
The process for getting your podcast to appear on the various major podcast apps is pretty straightforward – you sign up, cut & paste the RSS feed for your episodes into their website, and hit save. The end! Pretty easy, zero fuss in most places.
I submitted the RSS feed to Spotify (for the first time) at around 1:20 pm on 2/27/2023. I received an email “takedown notice” at 1:33 pm on 2/27/2023. (Not that it matters but is “takedown” even the right nomenclature here? Like did I even make it onto the platform in a meaningful enough way to be Taken Down? (No.))
So it seems likely no human looked at this or listened and found the content lacking or offensive in some way. And like most of these things, there’s no info about Why or What I Did in the email they just link to their content policies. It seems safe to assume the fact that this podcast involves music (and mostly music, not, like 10 minutes of talking with a music clip at the end) is the problem.
I tried to submit it again a few episodes later, but the system just threw up some error like “We already told you No.” Kinda weird! Hurtful, even. I wrote back to the email asking for more info hoping a real human would respond, and I got a response! But it was not human or helpful. It just said “Refer back to the previous email.”
My POINT is I just think it’s weird that Spotify has defined podcasts as “for talking” and if you are making music you have to upload it as a single or album directly to their platform. Someone infinitely smarter than me can write an essay about What That Means.
But, whatever, who cares, not even me.