RSS Feeds
To distribute music tracks and shows, we use RSS, or Really Simple Syndication.
RSS has been used for blogging and podcasting for more than two decades. It is media-agnostic, meaning we can use it to distribute audio, video, and text. RSS is reliable, widely supported, and transparent.
An RSS feed is a text document that contains details about the content you're distributing. For example, if your feed is an album, it may contain the following elements:
<title>Albuquerque Blues</title> <description>Our favorite tracks</description> <language>en</language> <itunes:author>Jimmy & Kim</itunes:author>
<title> Albuquerque Blues </title> <description> Our favorite tracks </description> <language> en </language> <itunes:author> Jimmy & Kim </itunes:author>
This represents the album's metadata: title (Albuquerque Blues), description (“Our favorite tracks”), language (English), and authors (Jimmy & Kim).
RSS-based players regularly check these feeds for updates. Whenever a new track or episode is uploaded, RSS feed is updated; after this, the player downloads the media files and extracts relevant metadata in order to display it to the user.
RSS is an open standard, so no proprietary software is required to create or consume feeds—no more walled gardens!
How do I view the “code” of an RSS feed?
Many hosting companies add stylesheets to RSS feeds to make them pretty. For example, if you're viewing feeds.rssblue.com/millennium
in your browser, you'll see a nicely formatted page instead of the raw code like in the example above.
However, each browser has a way to view the source code of an RSS feed even if it's styled:
- Chrome, Edge, Brave, Firefox: Ctrl + U
- Safari: ⌘ + ⌥ + U