Hits 21 - An Update: The Short & Long Term Future of Hits 21.

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

It's good news, we promise!

HITS 21 Hi there, everyone, and welcome to this little update episode of Hitch 21. It's just Rob here for this one. I hope you're all doing okay out there. This episode will be a little like the one I recorded towards the end of our coverage of the 2000s when I revealed that Lizzie was going to be leaving her permanent position on the show and that we were going to be heading into the 1990s with Ed as part of the team. Only the big difference on this occasion is that this little update will be all positive news, 100% of it.

So the main headline is that Hits 21 is moving back to our original podcast feed as of next week. That will be the week commencing the 22nd of September. This current feed we're on, which is hosted by RSS.com, is perfectly fine, but we have sadly lost listeners since being booted out of Spotify, simply because not everyone is on social media these days. There will be people out there who think we've just stopped uploading posts and don't know that we've moved all the reasons why. So now that the opportunity has arisen to reclaim our old feed,

we're going to take that opportunity and try to get things back to where they were about two months ago. Hopefully, in a few episodes' time, it would be like nothing ever happened. Now, I want to go back to the beginning of all this to explain what went on behind the scenes, why we were kicked off Spotify and why we had to move to RSS.com. So around mid-July, I received an email, basically out of nowhere, saying that my Spotify account was going to be shut down due to repeated copyright infringements. At first, I just thought it was a spam email, like those phone calls you get sometimes that claim to be from HMRC and

tell you that you're going to be sent to prison if you don't transfer money to a random account in the next 24 hours. So I just ignored it. But then I received a second email from Spotify saying that they were sad to see me go and that my monthly direct debit and my Spotify premium subscription would both be cancelled next week. That's when I found out that his 21 had been hit with more than one copyright complaint. I appealed the decision, but Spotify rejected it based on the fact that had apparently been given adequate time to respond to the individual complaints yet had failed to do so. That's when I started doing some digging and investigating and I found that Spotify had sent me three emails about three separate copyright strikes, but they had all gone to my junk slash spam

folder and had no idea that they existed. I explained this to Spotify, hoping that they'd give me a bit more time to lodge further appeals now that I knew what the situation was, but my premium account was shut down and my Spotify for creators account was also suspended. The old hits 21 feed went down and if you were to look at Spotify, it would have appeared as though the podcast had never existed. Thinking that it was a lost cause, I decided to upload every episode of Hits21 again to a new feed hosted by RSS.com.

Now, RSS.com has been absolutely fine, as I said, and it seems like a great place to host a podcast, but in the move between feeds, as I said, hits 21 lost listeners. Not many, but enough. And I started wondering about all the people who listened to who aren't subscribed to social media and would have no idea why we moved, whether we had moved, what had gone wrong, there was people who were left completely in the dark.

To those people, Hits 21 just stopped uploading episodes in July for no apparent reason. One of our most dedicated and lovely listeners out there, whose name is Rebecca, she left Twitter a while ago and she was not on any other form of social media that I could find. So I had to find a podcast that she'd been featured on, tell them that it. Hits 21 had moved house and only then did Rebecca find out what had gone down with Spotify. So that got me thinking about everybody else like Rebecca, for whom Hits 21 just stopped without warning. I started exploring options that would allow me to manually edit the RSS feed on the old Hits 21 podcast feed, but nothing good came of that. I'd initially just wanted to

leave our Spotify era in the past, but there were too many complications in the end caused by us no longer being able to upload our episodes via their service. So I reached out to Spotify, again, to get to the bottom of where the complaints had come from, which episodes were the problematic ones in question, and then hopefully get hits 21 back on our original RSS feed. I found out that all three complaints had come from an American company, who I won't name, but they protect the work of songwriters in the music industry. Another podcast called Pop Pantheon had been hit with a similar complaint,

as had friends of Hits21, the 2000s chart show podcast, we all got hit basically at the same time. And it seems that these companies are now using bots to identify usage of their music that they think does not comply with fair use rules in the US. I reached out to the company in question and explained that Hits21 was not a monetized podcast that we produced the show as a hobby and that we have a small but dedicated audience that we didn't want to lose. and thankfully the people working at this company in the copyright department were very, very nice. They immediately got back to me and told me that two of the three copyright strikes that had been put forward were actually submitted in error.

That was the bots acting beyond their brief, I suppose, and that those complaints would be withdrawn. But they upheld the third complaint, however, which was lodged against the last episode that we recorded for the 2000s, our decade review show. on that episode I chose to play the tattoo song all the things she said in full after it was named as our favourite song of the 2000s and me playing the song in full was what this American company objected to so I told them that if they withdrew the other two complaints

I could get back into Spotify for podcasters hopefully edit the episode in question so that all the things she said was no longer played in full and then I could get everything back to the way that it was again the company acted pretty quickly and within a few days I received word from Spotify that two of the three strikes were now closed cases and that all content would be restored within 48 hours.

Spotify had closed my account for multiple violations, that's in their words, multiple violations of their terms, but now there was only one violation as opposed to multiple, which had agreed a deal over with the company who made the complaints. So I asked Spotify if I could have access back to my account once again so that I could make the necessary changes to the episode that still had the strike against it. A few days went by, much longer than 48 hours like I was originally promised, and nothing had changed. Then a week. Then two weeks. I repeatedly emailed Spotify, making the new developments clear to them

and asked if I could be allowed back into my old account. Eventually, after two weeks of silence, they emailed me to let me know that all content had been restored and that my account was now open again. And this isn't just to do with Hitz 21. I also run a separate Game of Thrones podcast that was taken down. No copyright claims were made against that podcast, but I lost everything. Thankfully, everything is back now. And they were right. You know, I can log back into my old Spotify premium account.

And most importantly, I can now upload episodes of Hitz 21 to our original feed from our original distributor. It's great to be able to get everything back to normal. And hopefully in a few months, it will be as if none of this ever went down. So what's going to happen is that the RSS feed we are currently on, this new one, hosted by RSS.com, that's going to cease uploading new episodes after this episode, the one I'm talking on right now. This will be the last episode on the RSS.com feed. I'm not going to shut it down or delete it. I'm just going to leave it as a backup.

After that, I will upload every Hits 21 episode from recent weeks to the original feed in one batch. So those last remaining episodes of 1995 and those early episodes from 1996, they're all going to be uploaded in a batch to the Spotify for podcasters feed, the original Hits21 feed. They will all come at once, followed by this little update episode just to explain to everybody what's happened over the last two months. Then from next week, I will continue to exclusively upload the Hits21 episodes to the original feed hosted by Spotify.

This feed, hosted by RSS.com, will just lie dormant. If anyone finds the RSS.com feed, this will be the first episode they find and that will hopefully point them back home to our original starting point. Now with that stuff out of the way, I should let you all know about the exciting plans that hits 21 has for the next few weeks. We're going to be doing something a little different from our usual programming. Andy and his husband are heading off to New Zealand for three weeks for a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. Although I say that Andy's husband has already been to New Zealand. They're both incredibly excited and obviously we hope they have the absolute best time. We considered carrying on hits 21 as normal with Andy

recording his bits beforehand and then me stapling them in to our usual episodes as you know trying to pretend that nothing was going on. We considered patching him in from New Zealand to record live but that consideration didn't last long and we considered just bringing Lizzie back in for a few weeks to sit in Andy's chair. However, there are lots of huge number one's coming up from 1996 that Andy didn't want to miss out on the chance to chat about. So, here's what we're going to do. Hits21's usual show is going to take a three-week break, but we're going to continue uploading new content for each of those three weeks that Andy and his husband are away. We're going to try something new. So it's going to be me, Ed, and Lizzie.

Lizzie will be returning, but we will be hosting three special episodes of Hits 21 that will each take a look at the episode of Top of the Pops from the week in which each of us, were born. So Eds is up first from 1986, then Lizzie's, 1991, then mine in 1994. Then when Andy's back from New Zealand, we will continue our coverage of 1996. So I hope everything has made sense. My explanation for what happened to the podcast and what we're going to be doing over the next three to four weeks. The short version is that we're going to go back to our original podcast feed. The feed we had to move to after Hits 21 was shut down, will stay untouched but won't have any new episodes uploaded to it from now on and when we come back

we'll be covering Top of the Pops for three weeks. We will see you very soon and thank you very much for listening to this short update.