TrueFans founder Sam Sethi unveiled two new features on LinkedIn on 23 July. Creators can now mark an entire show or a single episode as premium directly in TrueFans. Fans pay, and the content unlocks in the same app where they listen to everything else.
The second feature targets content bought elsewhere. Listeners can import private feeds from Patreon, Memberful or Substack into TrueFans and keep them alongside public shows in one place. Visitors to their profile see only public content. “Your private podcasts remain private,” Sethi wrote.
How many steps paid listening takes today
Premium podcasts are usually sold outside the app where people listen. A fan signs up for a membership service, pays the subscription, finds a private RSS address in the settings, copies it and pastes it into their podcast app. They repeat the process for every additional service. Sethi calls this process needlessly complicated and sets against it a single-tap purchase right where the listening happens.
Closed solutions already exist. Apple has sold show subscriptions directly in the Podcasts app since 2021. The purchase works only there, though. Anyone listening in a different app is back to copying addresses.
Subscriptions are the second leg of podcast revenue
According to the Owl & Co. report, the global podcast economy reached $9.2 billion in 2025, up 23% year on year. Direct advertising accounted for $5.3 billion of that. Consumer revenue from memberships and subscriptions reached $2.2 billion, $400 million more than the year before.
The advertising side of the market received a single definition of a podcast and a single play metric this year. The sales side has nothing like that. Buying premium content works differently in every service and does not carry over between apps.
The membership infrastructure is also going through its own shake-up. Patreon, the largest membership service, laid off 93 people in July, a fifth of the company. A creator who builds on membership has good reason not to keep the whole premium audience on a single service.
Where this is heading
TrueFans is a small platform and cannot reshape the market on its own. But the direction it points to is clear. Pay where you listen. Unlock content without copying addresses. And carry purchased feeds with you, instead of having each service keep listeners on its own island.
The rest of the market still keeps buying and listening in two separate worlds. Whichever big player connects them first will be selling subscriptions to people who today end up copying an RSS address.
Comments