Yeah, I’m a paying spotify customer and I hate this. And I also hate that the spotify client seamlessly mixes podcasts with music in its recommendations. It’s like a PM somewhere at spotify was offered a cash bonus based on how many podcast listens happen, and they decided that making the app trick people into playing podcasts was a profitable idea.

It breaks trust, and makes the spotify app feel adversarial. Like I have to be vigilant when I play music in case I get tricked. In a paid product I don’t want that at all and if it isn’t resolved, I’ll probably cancel my subscription over it and move to Apple Music or something.

I couldn’t agree more.

I’m a massive music fan and podcast listener.

Spotify had been my go to for music, but the combination of podcast and music has absolutely killed my experience.

I love both, but when I’m listening to music, I don’t want to listen to podcasts and vice versa. They serve different purposes for me, all audio is not the same.

I’ve recently switched to YouTube Music. I will occasionally use Spotify for podcasts.

Yep. I've been listening to podcasts since Twitter was the podcast directory Odeo. Also, have been djing for much longer so mixing these worlds in Spotify's ever-changing UI is just a mess. I pay for Spotify premium, but now get ads what seems like every ten minutes in the "premium ad free experience" during his podcast. Often, skipping back 15 seconds to hear something again will trigger ads.

I’ve been using Deezer for over a year now and have never looked back. Amazing audio quality, DRM free files, decent API, good app, amazing catalogue.

Used its API to build https://audile.app which has completely changed my relationship with music.

You have described it well. The force feeding of podcasts is unwanted. No one ever went to Spotify to listen to a podcast before, so forcing them at us from the UI is shit. I also don’t go there for recipes, movies or TV, they are a different thing and belong somewhere else.

Yea same, I fucking hate it that the podcasts are taking the space where playlists and albums should be.

Spotify is going to hell.

I’m unhappy that Spotify distributes my subscription cash to artists I don’t listen too, I’m even less happy that a large proportion goes towards podcasters I don’t even want as part of the app, and am unable to even hide from the screen.

Hey Spotify: since I haven’t found a good alternative to your service, if I can’t stop your monopoly giving my money to Joe Rogan, can I at least have a ‘hide podcasts’ option?

I went back to the good ol' TPB. I can count on one hand the artists that I really enjoy listening nowadays and there are better ways to support then.

ive come to the same conclusion lately; that i mostly listen to a handful of artists on repeat 80% of the time. i used to think that i couldnt afford to buy all the music i listen to, but looking at what i have paid spotify over the last 10 years i dont think that anymore. im slowly buying all my favourite stuff where i can and all probably cancel spotify soon and just put up with the annoying ads when i listen to discover weekly on a monday

> Spotify is trying to be the one that owns it.

If you're interested in pushing back on this, the Podcasting 2.0 community welcomes you. Check out https://podcastindex.org/ for details.

Podcast 2.0 apps have more metadata, chapters, cover art that can change like a slideshow during an episode, etc.

Podcast 2.0?

These just sound like standard features of the MP3 spec and are hardly new...

The open Podcast Index is great - that's the one place where the "open podcast industry" is most centralised, on Apple's podcast index

Got to make it sound groundbreaking to make people care. "It even has new and improved instant-pause audio control" /s

I am. will do.

Realizing that spotify was trying to "steal" podcasting in order to challenge youtube was a depressing thought to me. I always hoped that podcasting, as a free medium, would evolve to the point where it can usurp youtube... but not like this.

Luckily, perhaps, I don't think they're succeeding. I was a semi-loyal listener of most of Spotify's now exclusive content. Besides a select JRE episode that peaks my interest, I don't follow any of them currently.

It's not because Spotify's play is dirty. I'm just using different podcast apps, don't love spotify for podcasting and other such trivialities. As this article mentions, this is probably common. I guess a diverse selection of clients still counts for something.

I think you're giving Rogan too much credit if you think he even for a second would care about Freedom while staring at a 9 figure check.

He absolutely does. That paycheck won’t stay that big of his popularity craters.

I got the impression it was a lump sum payout, or at least came with golden handcuffs that were purely in terms of "exclusivity and X-podcasts-per-week for X weeks", rather than subscriber count.

tbh, Rogan's not alone. Not many people would.

Yep. They were suckers for putting their podcasts on "RSS Feeds". All media is becoming the Netflix model. Spotify saw that as the new goldrush and was first to act. Now they all are.

It's not great for the customer... Yet. Maybe podcasting will continue to explode and we'll see a jump in quality, like we did with podcasts like Serial.

Podcasts follow a predictable trend, almost always. Someone really interesting and very well-informed has a lot of stuff to say that they've been stewing over for a decade or more. 100-200 episodes in, they've gotten it off their chest and you have to find someone else.

Agree; it's the same with most bands and one or two albums.

iTunes (Apple Music) doesn’t own streaming music and never has. Spotify has the largest market share (32%) and Apple is second at half the size (16%).

Another free medium is email newsletters, which are seeing a resurgence. Yes, you need to manage CAN-SPAM compliance and the actual protocols are a mess, but you can cobble something together with on-prem campaign software and AWS SNS for not too much money.

True fact. I'd call the medium "email" though.

The infrastructure and compliance requirements of running a newsletter is very different from personal email (mostly to stay on the good side of antispam)

...and back to platforms :)

Often, yes, but with some care you can run everything yourself except actually sending the emails over the wire. And you can do so cost-efficiently.

> No one "owned" podcasting, like itunes own streaming music...Podcasts are/were one the the free digital medias.

Ironic considering the origin of the term "podcast".

Ironic-not-ironic maybe. Back then, Apple wanted content to exist. Podcasts were content.

Also, 15 20 years ago, smart people (me being the smartest of all) genuinely believed that "information wanted to be free." The explosive success of WWW demonstrated that open platforms and protocols are far more powerful than companies. Trying to control a medium was a recipe for failure.

That was before reality cracked her whip, and the borders separating one media from another became defined by the monopoly owning it.