See, I pay for Spotify because of their playlists. Playlists have nothing to do with podcasts. I listen to my podcasts using a different app. Yet Spotify keeps throwing its podcasts in my face. Spotify is not good at podcasts. That's why I use a different app for that. I'm getting tired of scrolling past all the podcast spam in my Spotify UI, and yet Spotify provides NO option in Settings to turn OFF their podcast advertisements/recommendations. That is annoying to me, a paying customer. So they're pushing this, and annoying me, at their own peril.
I think back when I ripped my 350+ CDs to FLAC. In retrospect, it wasn't worth it.
I don't see any advantages of spending time and effort curating a library, which harks back to the days of physical media.
Some artists really put effort into developing their albums or EPs as a coherent expression. If we all were to change to experiencing music like you describe it would inevitably result in a sea change in how the art is created in the first place. Artists will look to optimize for that particular method of consumption, in much the same way we have a large focus on individual track releases now in the streaming dominated world. I feel this limits the expression of the artists in general
I think that this would lead to further stagnancy or homogeneity in the most popular genres, as the playlist generation will look to optimize for the most listeners. This would come at the expense of artists who are not already in the public's sphere of consciousness, and would deeply hurt genres which have infinitely deep pools of sub-genres and micro-scenes; the world of Heavy Metal comes to mind specifically here. I think this damages the overall health of popular music in totality.
More interestingly because music in general is an incredibly subjective experience, opinionated tastemakers can be crucial for exposing underground or breaking through artists to a larger audience. Historically people like John Peel, and more recently Anthony Fantano (TheNeedleDrop) bring new music from underground artists in a wide range of genres to people's attention. It can feel like a minor triumph when you discover a new album that just speaks to you in a style of music you have no grounding in, especially when it's recommended to you by someone you know or trust.
While you may listen to more music in the way you describe, I don't think it would invoke nearly the same level of connection that I feel now, personally I find that to be a bit bleak, and self-defeating in the long term.
I make use of it a lot for albums and songs not available on Apple Music. AFAIK, Spotify doesn't really have an answer to this.
Also, the Spotify Chromecast integration is utter shit. It has been utter shit for a while, but it seems it's just getting worse? It's laggy, it randomly pauses during my playlist for no reason. I ended up buying a bluetooth receiver to hook to my AV system so I could get reliable playback. What the fuck? Why isn't this getting fixed?
That's what I use to get more in-depth than the tiny amount of new releases Spotify features in its official playlists.
The really aggravating thing is that we know they have the tech to do better. There was that demo of a 2D embedding of genre-space that actually did a pretty decent job of grouping similar-sounding songs together, but their recommendations all seem to be based off of what was popular at the same time, or what came from the same label.
E.g. when I ask for recommendations for a song like "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness," I should get "Avril 14th," not "Bullet with Butterfly Wings."
Not nit-picking, just piqued my curiosity about how you would connect those artists.
I would listen to those two songs in a row and be completely satisfied by the transition.
I've worked and interviewed for companies that do music analysis to find moods, atmospheres, similar timbres, chords and structure to mix and match automated playlists for business needs (restaurants, cafés, retail stores and so on), would like to see what kind of similarity scores they could get between the songs you mentioned.
I found a lot of the release radar and other recommendations are spot on and I end up liking a lot of the songs it suggests.
I think I read something about that which turned me off instantly.
I understand everyone’s doing it and you as a company feel entitled to a slice of whatever podcast pie.
What I don’t understand is how that can take focus when your audio player has been getting steadily worse - corrupted offline download, buggy buffering, choppy audio after jumping back 30s.
If your bread and butter - what I’m actually paying for - doesn’t work I’ll gladly save a few bucks and go to the public library.
There should be an option to turn off simple things like that: turn off podcasts, pause learning from my music for then next 30 minutes, etc.
I always thought the advantage of standalone apps like Spotify(updated anytime) vs something like Apple Music(updated on big iOS releases) is that they can iterate faster. But seems like they are throwing more eggs in content creation basket than UX.
They state that private listening 'may' not influence your music recommendations.
Apple has gone a similar route recently with reducing the Activity/Fitness app to just two/three tabs, mushing all sorts of content together. I hope this doesn't become another user-hostile UI trend.
Personally they keep advertising podcasts by people who I find morally or politically objectionable, which makes me quite unhappy that I cannot hide or remove their content (and podcasts as a whole) from the Home Screen.
I started falling asleep to comedy a couple months ago to manage poor sleep based on a generally negative attitude. It was fine on YT Music for a while, but now a lot of the community playlists are garbage, or most of the clips have been pulled (I assume some copyright issues).
I'd move to Spotify for that, and pay, if they had a catalog of decent standup comedy.
The podcasts I listen to from comedians is more along the lines of interviews, like WTF, or a few people spitballing on various topics. Not well formed jokes.
Their D&D podcast is probably my favorite of the genre as well.
Apple and Google are playing this game too in their own ways. Google is going to try to make podcasting more like youtube in the next few years.
"The Office" was paid for in full, distributed in a first-party network, then syndicated, then digitally licensed, and now back to its first-party network. The total revenue value of that decade long investment is not the same as a variable cost businesses like ecommerce, delivery services, or Moviepass.
If so then it would make sense to establish themselves as a podcast player - with their users listening to podcasts through their app - even if they don't sell any extra subs and that alone might justify the up-front investment.
Every time I hear that (and I want to check it out), I do so in Pocket Casts, my fav app (first on Android, then on iOS). I know there are probably podcasts that are _only_ on Spotify, but I haven't tripped over one yet.
I use Spotify at the moment (thinking of switching back to Antennapod due to Spotify being buggy as fuck) and actually hit download on every episode I want to listen to: putting them in my downloads is the easiest way to both mark them as 'to be listened to' as well as having them available whenever (though that's one of the bugs: I'll still need internet to get permission from Spotify HQ to start playing, but I won't have to load the audio stream and can turn off internet once it's playing).
Or you could just grab the files and dump them into a folder for something like smart audiobook player -- that's what I'd do for anything longer than ~6 hours in total, don't want to keep track of that stuff in my podcast player which is for, well, podcasts, not (cut-up) audio books.
I have Spotify Premium for listening to music while I work but I started listening to podcasts while doing mindless chores like laundry or dishes.
It's convenient to just have the one app.
Other communities certainly have their relevant content.
- Total MAUs grew 27% Y/Y to 345 million in the quarter (...) Based on the behavior we see when users first join Spotify, we are confident that podcast usage has been a factor in the accelerated net additions.
- The strength in Ad-Supported revenue was led by our Podcast, Direct, and Ad Studio channels, with Podcast and Ad Studio both growing over 100% on a Y/Y basis. Podcast performance benefited from strong underlying demand from advertisers with a 50% increase in the number of companies spending in this channel vs. Q3
- As of Q4, we had 2.2 million podcasts on the platform (up from more than 1.9 million podcasts in Q3). Of note, 25% of our Total MAUs engaged with podcast content in Q4 (up from 22% of MAUs in Q3 2020
So the short answer is that podcasts help increase usage of the platform (and with better margins than music, probably due to copyright and leverage of artists vs. content creators)
"Podcast usage has been a factor" - okay, how much? Answer: no idea.
"The strength in Ad-Supported revenue was led by our Podcast, Direct, and Ad Studio channels, with Podcast and Ad Studio both growing over 100% on a Y/Y basis" - okay, but from what starting point and how much did it contribute? Answer: not saying.
"25% of our Total MAUs engaged with podcast content" - okay, how much? Answer: not saying.
Obviously podcasts help increase metrics, but even Spotify either doesn't know or won't say, meanwhile all this discussion ignores the flip side of the coin which is how much this is all costing the company.
Why would you not put it on Spotify? It costs you nothing and can only increase your audience. I’m not talking about exclusive-rights scenarios, but the majority of podcasts which are published to multiple platforms.
Personally when ever I hear about an interesting podcast, and it's followed by "available on Spotify/Podimo, whatever", my reaction is always: Okay, never mind then.
There are so many great podcasts on the open web. Those available on platforms like Spotify always seems to be people with existing celebrity status trying to "cash in". Those shows are rarely that interesting, and even if they are there are so many competitors.
Assuming you have an existing successful podcast, I don't get why you'd move to something like Spotify. Are you really going to make that much more money? Your share of $10 per month cannot be high. Of cause it Spotify throws a large sum at you, to effectively buy your listeners, then I see the profit motive.