[FrankHudson]

I distribute a regular audio piece, usually less than 5 minutes, consisting of original music and (almost always) someone else's words. I use the same listings and methods as podcasts, which are predominately now hour long interviews, audio documentaries or folks yakking about their interests.

I consider it counter-programming, but I know I'm also going against the tide there in the podcast world. Over the three years my stuff was once primarily listened to via podcast services (Apple podcasts, et al) and now is increasing listened to via a player on my blog.

A few years back I tried to sign up to use Soundcloud to stream my podcast. My memory was that I couldn't get their sign up for that level of their service to work, so while I have a Soundcloud account, I rarely use it. As a musician's tool it has a reputation a being strong on rap/hip hop discovery.

Spotify was easy to sign up for podcast distribution and reliable. Alas, they are not a great podcast listening platform in that you can't really queue up podcasts in a playlist manner (yes, podcast makers and listener remind them regularly that would be good to add). I assume I get some discovery via Spotify because of the large number of subscribers, but it's still only about 15% of my listeners.

As has been mentioned above, both Spotify and Soundcloud are used primarily as music streaming services, and to list your music on it as music, many go through separate services to get listed just like the folks from the big record labels etc.