How many of the top 50 podcast do you suppose would be willing to give up their broader market to be Spotify only?
If you were creating a website, how much would Microsoft have to pay you to be exclusively discovered with Bing and not be found with Google?
How would they even measure this? What share of those is Spotify users?
Spotify is at 10%
https://a16z.com/2019/05/23/podcast-ecosystem-investing-2019...
https://www.reddit.com/r/podcasting/comments/9ytna1/does_spo...
However, Overcast also caches RSS feeds but it does send the number of subscribers for a feed in the header of the GET request. It also doesn’t cache the actual audio.
We've refused to put any of our 8 podcasts on Spotify for various reasons. One of the reasons is that they will accept money from paying customers and from ad co's for non-paying listeners, but simply want our content for free. Ummm... no thanks.
Could this be Spotify’s version of AdWords for audio?
Most podcasters that are made an offer that they can’t refuse, probably won’t refuse.
Would you take your website off the web and host your content exclusively as a Facebook page?
If the most affluent audience is iOS users, then Spotify probably sees this as critical to success on iOS because it gives them something that people can't get from Apple Music.
How many of the top 50 podcast do you suppose would be willing to give up their broader market to be Spotify only?
It's interesting: exclusive deals haven't worked well in the music industry because artists make most money outside the platform in concerts etc, and exclusive deals eats into that. OTOH, media plays (eg streamers, TV shows) make most of their money directly from the show and so exclusive deals make sense.
I think many of the top 50 podcasts are exclusively advertising supported, and so they will be tempted by an exclusive deal.
We know that the top Apple related podcasters charge between $5500-$6500 a spot for three to four ads per episode. How much do you think the top more general podcast like Stuff You Should Know charge?
Do you think they would stop publishing podcast that can be found not only when people click on the Podcast app that comes preinstalled with all iOS devices, but can also be found on other podcast apps that use Apple’s public API to its podcast directory?
It may even be cheap - Howard Stern's deal is reported to be $90m/year (and that is exclusive to one publisher).
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2...
Emphasis on "I". You are not everyone, and so you don't control all the demand, and so you don't control the direction that the market moves in. Though it's not self-evident that we're headed towards podcast centralization, I think it's a legitimate concern here.
Social networks like Facebook ate a decent part of the open internet's cake in the 2000s because the centralized services were easier to set up and user for the end users (compared to the RSS and SMTP hacks).
I think that's what is going to matter here: If Spotify does a significantly better job than plain RSS, then they're going to be "the" place to listen to podcasts, and can start building a closed ecosystem and then use their monopoly to rent seek. And like in the social networks case, I don't think it's going to be that hard to improve on plain RSS. Some podcasting apps already have comments, user ratings, etc. and I definitely find this sort of thing useful.
Maybe the path of least resistance in these sorts of situations is always some degree of centralization, but I obviously hope the tide starts going back out at some point - preferably complete decentralization, rather than just federated protocols. I think it's a bit like how native apps can move faster (in terms of new APIs and stuff), and the web slowly follows along, waiting for certain things to be "proven" before standardizing them. I think the web wins in the long run, but native apps end up being the "exploratory" instrument in our search algorithm.