It’s great if things in the German podcast scene are different than rest of the world, enabling German podcasts to make more from donations than Spotify.
But if that’s not the case elsewhere, can you really blame the podcasters? Let’s say you decide to bake specialty cookies and give them away while relying on donations. Months in, you realize the donations aren’t really covering your expenses and effort. Then someone comes along and offers you a multiple of your donations for an exclusive, enabling you to make a decent wage.
I guess you could say “you’re doing it against your cookie-loving fans”. But I could just as easily argue “your original fans didn’t help you get fair comp, so you found another set of fans/arrangement to get fair comp”
The US values free speech very much, yet for some reason you will have a hard time to find any podcast who isn't dependend on or tied to some coporate interest (and be it the Nord VPN thing they are selling).
I am btw. willing to throw money their way, as I do with other podcasts. But the option wasn't there to begin with.
Having one sponsor like Spotify means you get paid but also retain a lot of freedom and distance from the audience. If I was a podcaster I'd much rather take that route, even if I lost some listeners.
I'm not sure I understand the "yet" here. Freedom of speech protects the ability to say things but has few implications on the incentives for saying things. It seems to frequently be cited as a variety of different things that are tangentially related to public discourse. Anyway, I'd hardly expect people in the 18th century to come up with a comprehensive framework for protecting against media outlets depending on corporate interests to monetize, if that's your concern.
Perhaps that's because I'm selecting content with little political or controversial content. But even there, I suspect that people who do want that content will find that the advertisers who want them are the ones who naturally appeal to them anyway.
Consumerism in general is always insidious, but that's hardly limited to podcasting. There are a lot of paradoxes associated with being wealthy enough to be in an advertiser's demographic, and yet still be vulnerable to wanting something to make you happy.
The TV world is so fragmented these days, almost nobody will have access to every show on every network and streaming platform. Similarly in music even, not many people have Spotify and Apple Music and Tidal to have access to all the exclusive music. The openness of the podcast world is pretty great, but I won't be surprised if it goes the same way with more and more exclusives.
The flip side, though, is there's more really good TV content these days than ever before, it's just expensive (& annoying) to access it all.
From the perspective of the podcaster the question is: what kind of fans will they loose with such a move, and what kind will they gain in return?
Fewer, or different fans, but a funded show may be worth a lot more than more / great fans and an unfunded show.
The most expensive thing in podcasting is the gear and your time.
For the gear, I went fairly cheap, I got a Zoom H5 [2], which is super small, light and portable and two lavalier mics, one for me and one for the person I interview.
I then upload the two WAV files to Auphonic [3] and they add the jingles to it, clean up the sound, normalize it and let me download the mono mp3 which is really small but good quality, which I then upload to my server.
The whole workflow is surprisingly easy and fast. The most time I spend on finding people to talk to and trying to arrange a meeting at a specific time and place.
[1] https://jeena.net/pods.rss [2] https://zoom-na.com/products/field-video-recording/field-rec... [3] https://auphonic.com/
It's still good to get a decent quality recording. But seeing all the people who do video and broadcasts from trade show floors and the like got me to a point where I don't sweat it if I don't have pristine near-studio conditions. As long as I get interesting guests, 20-25 minutes of conversation IMO comes out pretty well without a huge amount of work.
Fest & Flauschig?
I support a few English-language podcasts on Patreon and that model seems to work quite well for them. Meanwhile, I rely on fan-supplied RSS feeds to keep up with F&F and GH :)
I was a regular listener of Sanft & Sorgfältig back in the days and stopped after their switch to spotify because it was just inconvenient to use compared to overcast. I'd probably do the same with other podcasts I regularly consume.
I get it through a Telegram group where someone rips the casts ;)
The fact that half of its hosts are Justin and Griffin McElroy makes me worried the whole McElroy family of podcasts might flip eventually.
I'd be happy to funnel that money through Spotify, but I suspect there won't be enough to fund the truly jaw-dropping array of content that I've been getting for free for years. And I'd miss my existing podcast app (Pocket Casts), which I'm a very comfortable with.
I'll be very sad if my favorite podcasts decide to jump to Spotify, discover there's no money there either, and drop out.
i don't even need a word to answer that: $.
Why do people actually do that?
I know it is a little silly and they probably do what is (in the short term) the best financial decision for them, but I already accepted that this is it and I won't listen to them anymore.
If you go exclusive to any plattform you never do it for your fans, but essentially against them. They might have a podcatcher they listen to you on they used for years, which they now should change because you want to limit the plattforms you are on.
The german podcast scene gladly seems to be quite resistant against these kind of things and they say they earn more through direct donations than spotify and/or audible is able to give them anyways.
Why would you voluntarily give up that freedom? And why is it so often US podcasters who do it first (they are also much more plastered with ads)?