Yep, it's not irony, but is instead a common corporate play: if you see a space with a lot of value to extract, you move in and start extracting.
Its drastic cuts have triggered a podcast winter, as the small studios it helped support consolidate and lavish narrative productions wane
Also, I've tried 4 different podcast players and found Spotify's player to best of the bunch. Controls work like you would expect, it's very snappy, search and sorting are also polished. I've pretty much stopped listening to Podcasts on Apple's native app because Spotify's superior experience.
I do get what you're saying about RSS feeds though, but it's not quite as black and white as you make it.
Edit - updated wording:
+ "found Spotify's player to best of the bunch"
- "they're all terrible except for Spotify's"
You’re the first person I’ve heard with anything positive to say about their podcast UI, so I’m really curious what those four are.
Apple’s podcasts app goes out of its way to avoid showing the tracklist of the current channel or the list of recently played podcasts, or to make you misclick on the little channel name which changes the current track (given that you can’t list the recently played, any misclick is a major annoyance). I think they might have hired a AUX, an “anti-user experience” engineer.
I was listening to a history podcast (British History podcast), which has been going on for years. I listen while running, so it’s managed on my phone. For a while, I would occasionally get the app trying to skip ahead, but only if it had issues downloading the next episode (again, I was out running).
I eventually just downloaded batches of 10-20 episodes and everything worked perfectly in chronological order. And more recently, it all “just worked” even while new episodes were released. My guess is that some behavior recently changed, but I can’t confirm it.
So, I think the UX goal is to try to get you some content of it has issues with the next chronological episode.
It is accessible from Listen Now at the very bottom.
Because on these platforms if I list best 4 podcast apps, Spotify won’t come within miles of that short list.
I am slowly decreasing my use of Spotify because of the way it’s pushing podcasts while all I want is music from it. Nothing else.
Best thing to do is actually to pay for Spotify and use it regularly, but never touch the podcasts. They have metrics and usage logging all over the app and they will know over time how few paying subscribers are listening to Joe Rogan et al.
They'll soon give him the can if they know there's lower engagement than expected for the price being paid.
And I told them why I unsubscribed.
Pretty sure that’s better still.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Po...
After a year or two of this they finally moved it further down the page where I don't have to see it every day, though.
Nah, given their scale no one is probably listening to any arbitrary comment you sent it upon quitting, and from a behavior perspective they probably have no idea why you churned.
Like I said, keep using and paying for the product and don't use the feature you don't like - if others agree, they'll soon get the message.
You are their dream music-only listener. You don’t care how aggressive they get. The changes they are making clearly don’t bother you and you’ll keep shoveling money their direction no matter what they do.
I’d rather vote with my feet and wallet. If a company is too stupid to learn from hard cash then they’ll never learn from in-app statistics.
They fund early people to get momentum and lock others in at high rates once they build out an audience.
I'd love if my employer "locked me in" at a higher rate lol.
I think the book could have used a lot tighter editing, it gets kind of tiresome in many parts... but the basic fundamental observation seems right to me and helps give me the mental models to recognize and describe it.
"it" being the way in the internet economy those who occupy that "middleman" position can become "chokepoints" who can hold both consumers and producers hostage.
Or, as Doctorow wrote in a blog post covering some similar ground:
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
— https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
I'm not sure if they all die, there are a LOT of platforms around which haven't died yet, but those first steps are very recognizable in chokepoint middlemen like Spotify is for music and is trying to become for podcasts. First you give both consumers and the "business customers" (whether podcast producers or product sellers on Amazon) a great deal; then, once you've locked the consumers in you make the deal for consumers a lot worse in order to keep your business customers on your side; then, once you've locked _them_ in too (perhaps because they need you to reach the consumers, who are all on your platform), you tighten things up for business customers too, trying to extract as much money as possible from consumers and share as little of it as possible with the producers, while both have a hard time leaving you due to network effects.
So, yeah, it always starts great for your users. This is how you trap them, so you can then start tightening the screws.
So, I had to switch to spotify because it doesn't do that. I don't need to listen offline as much recently, since I wfh.
They think: we will flood this space with money, drive out competition, and then jack up the price.
They don't think: if we spend all this money, we will have to get a return...the product is free today, is there enough juice here? What will consumers pay?
Charging money impacts the level of demand, spending money like this is literally putting a noose around your neck with investors.
I remember when I first saw this happen...I literally couldn't believe it, these execs knew the business, they were so smart, well-incentivized...it had to work. It never does, it is horrible to read about because people get canned (less so in this case, this spending was clearly an extension of a prominent exec's social life) but you just see it every time with these "land grab" strategies.
To be clear, the mistake wasn't the strategy, it wasn't being wrong, the mistake was choosing to flamboyantly set fire to billions of dollars for no reason.
They must have simply thought that the reduction in demand would be small compared to the increased revenue. They are in an existential battle against heavyweights like Apple, Amazon, and Google for music streaming. Adding exclusive podcasts to try to lock in users seems like a good idea to me from a business perspective.
I absolutely hate the idea as a listener to podcasts though, and I am glad to see it fail.
No, they didn't. Paying $200m for Joe Rogan, $30m for Markle...these deals made no sense regardless of any economic model (as I allude to above, they also did strange deals where they tried to bring in someone from outside podcasting).
And the reason I wrote the meta thing at the end: I have seen companies do this repeatedly and I have seen young equity analysts get caught up in it because they think the same way you are thinking.
Yes, we live in a world where a business exec can waste billions of dollars on a totally unfounded hunch, they don't think it over, they don't look at the numbers, they are just like everyone else and will repeatedly do things that make no sense at all (it is actually far easier for someone who isn't in the industry and without business training to spot this...when people are in this situation and getting paid $10m/year for nothing, they tend to think they are geniuses and everyone else an idiot and end up making decisions like this).
The only reason we see this headline is because dumb money ran out last year'
They’re not dumb. They took a bet. Not all bets work out
Podcasts probably just aren’t that profitable. They just don’t have the same pull like a TV show, plus they’re so cheap to produce so there’s always so much competition
But I wasn't even thinking of media. I think it happens most with M&A where a company makes a land-grab investment that is fundamentally defensive in character (I think Spotify felt they needed original content), and it almost never works because it largely comes from execs feeling the need to juice numbers for comp packages rather than actually put down a long-term plan for investing capital (so some much smarter person comes along and tells them they have a solution and basically robs shareholders blind, in this case it was Joe Rogan).
And yes, they are dumb. The dumbness wasn't "the bet" but how they structured it. The investments were so large and aggressive, they were part of the "original content" bubble, the underlying thesis was unknowable, and they have ended up getting targeted by activists because the corporate governance here was so evidently bad (as I said, in this particular case there seems to have been a significant overlap between the social life of a prominent exec involved in this and some of the people being picked up).
> Podcasts probably just aren't that profitable.
You think? I thought their "bet" wasn't dumb.
In return, if a alternative falls behind (IRC to discord) companies may capture a free market yet, until the alternatives catch up (blender to autodesk). After that the walled garden dies and withers.
One of the main advantages for the signed artists is that they can use licensed music (paying the canon to the official regulatory agency SGAE). The spanish-speaking podcast scene is, surprisingly, very different than the english-speaking one.
edit: nevermind, iVoox offer rss links.
> Tomàs Fuentes e Ignasi Taltavull comentan y juzgan la peor anécdota de la gente que viene de público al programa. La historia más miserable se lleva un premio.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@laruinashow
I wonder why? Is it just because Spotify's attempt was so pathetic? Or some trait of the community? Maybe a little of both?
Personally I'm very glad that podcasting has resisted Spotify's takeover attempt so far. But I'm curious if we can take lessons from this community and apply it to other communities dominated by monopolies and walled gardens, like the App Store on iOS or ISPs.
FD, I dont watch him anymore as he is becoming increasingly less interesting.
Use https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp to grab what you need before the account is nuked.
Then they changed their monetization model to a subscription and left their previous customers with... nothing.
Screw them.
If they wouldn’t have I would have dropped it when they changed monetisation models.
You might want to log in to your account again since you have the premium for free.
Something happening like a podcast going exclusively on Spotify is likely to make me just stop listening to it even if I'm actively a Spotify premium subscriber because Spotify's UI is actually that bad and having to use one specific service instead of any to listen to a podcast is terrible user experience. Spotifies PAID experience is a negative.
Another huge thing is that podcasts being freemium is the norm, for a lot of other content types the inconvenience of logging into some portal isn't as noticeable since you had to do that to pay the content producer anyways, but for podcasts you can't help but notice how you're being made to jump through hoops and for what?
I'm not sure there's a terrible amount of value here to extract because I think we really underestimate how much value things like the App Store really provide in terms of security or payments and customer service and all that. I don't know, call me nuts, but I think Spotify would have better invested their money into making their podcasts experience good instead of signing exclusivity deals, I would happily use Spotify if it was simply the best podcast player.
I can't help but be happy that Spotify's bet is doomed to fail.
Dynamic ads ruin podcasts for me. Its the same 3 ads (often for other podcasts), and the technical execution leaves a lot to be desired. I'll often be listening to a podcast, only for it to repeat the last two minutes. That would be annoying by itself, but then the podcast cuts off 2 minutes before the actual end.
I can't imagine what features would need to exist for me to be willing to pay a recurring fee.
Nowadays I spend my time listening to different podcasts and tune into Rogan if he has a particularly good guest on.
With TV shows, if my friends talk about it, I want to watch it too
With podcasts, I don’t seem to really care. If I can’t listen to a podcast because it’s not available, I won’t miss it
If one disappears off your preferred platform, 100 more are waiting to fill the void.
Do you think solving the problem includes making it difficult to skip the ads?
There’s a comment about Spain podcasts going down that route because licensing music was a pain. Outside of Spain, that wouldn’t apply. For any of the podcats I listen to, the more complex part could be membership and advertisement sourcing, but there’s already strong players filling those gaps.
If there’s no pain point to solve by centralization, people won’t care for walled gardens.
Some guesses.
People didn't historically pay for talk radio. (OK, Serius in part. But that was always a pretty narrow slice.)
A lot of podcast content is pretty niche and not especially mainstream. Not sure how easy to monetize outside of advertising/sponsorships.
It started out very grass roots.
Same reason plain web browsers beat AOL and Compuserv
Smartwatches (namely Apple Watch) then became a thing because it provided more than time, such as vibrating alerts, fitness tracking, etc.
The conventional wisdom that smartwatches are killing traditional watches is just like the conventional wisdom that Starbucks and other corporate brands push out local coffeehouses: dead wrong. Instead, the new players validate the market and provide an anchor point for luxury goods.
the value proposition for Twitter at this point was different than it is now I believe, but perhaps I am just on the wrong parts of Twitter.
the value proposition for twitter at that time (at least whenever I saw something I thought was valuable) was that it was a TLDR provided by experts regarding some thing. RSS didn't have a length limitation, twitter's length limitation forced experts to write a quick thing as to why you would want to go read anything they pointed to.
When less technical people came on it became a bunch of oh you'll love this, low information tweets, but in the past in my experience they were high information tweets considering the length. So the value of forcing tweeters to provide quality summaries of content for their audience.
I started listening to podcasts 3 years ago because how easy Spotify had suddenly made getting into them. But, over those 3 years I've gotten so fed-up with Spotify's issues (which they refuse to fix) that I've recently moved to Pocket Casts (it took so long because of their walled-garden).
I think the main differentiator for Spotify - making podcasts easy to start listening to with a music-and-podcast-app-in-one - is in fact its largest problem. The UI feels like it was designed for music with podcasts clunkily added as an afterthought. When you add the fact that Spotify's UI is already bloated, even for music, it basically becomes unusable. And then the features are different between web/desktop and mobile - there's literally no way to get a list of new episodes on desktop.
Podcasts are just mp3 files in an rss feed. Super established technology that anyone can publish. MP3 patents have expired and were basically unenforceable before that. RSS is completely open. Other ecosystems that have grown up in the social media era have higher barriers to entry and network effects to overcome.
Apple Podcasts is the behemoth of podcasting. All the other podcast clients combined don't come close to Apple's player marketshare. Spotify certainly has a lot of users, but not all of them listen to podcasts. Most shows have been unwilling to dump their biggest audience by going to spotify exclusive, so the shows remain just rss+mp3.
Apple also manages the only index of podcasts of any great significance and so far has been content to be extremely hand-off with it. They are happy to let anyone register a podcast in the itunes index and have only removed a few items for objectionable content.
With Apple as a largely absentee landlord of the podcast space and the extremly basic nature of the underlying technology shows have developed many different monetization techniques. Selling user behaviour/tracking is far, far harder in the podcast space since Apple doesn't share and controls the biggest client. Shows have turned to largely untargeted* ads, patreon, touring, merchandise, and various combination thereof. For many creators Spotify forcing them to use a specific form of monetization as part of being exclusive isn't as attractive as owning their own destiny.
*podcast hosting networks can get a source IP so you'll sometimes get a broad location targeted ad inserted dynamically into the mp3 as you download it, but the level of tracking is orders of magnatude lower than what's possible in a browser. For example, shows have almost no ability to know if you actually listened to a episode, just that you downloaded it.
So far Apple has been happy to largely leave the podcast world alone. They recently added some monetization options for show creators, but that's above and beyond their hand-off management of the biggest player and index.
Apple is a far, far bigger threat to the podcast world than Spotify ever was. The ecosystem as it currently exists depends on Apple continuing to the mainly nothing they have been. If Apple gets tempted to start selling even aggregate user behaviour from apple podcasts there will be very little to stop them.
The fact it didn't for Spotify doesn't say anything about the potential of recorded radio making big $$$, it just means they didn't sign the right deals
At least anecdotally speaking, my experience is the podcasting audience largely seems to seek out fresh and lesser known voices rather than big, established celebrities.
If SiriusXM is the audio equivalent of premium TV networks like HBO, which has an audience base interested in following big celebrities (or, at least, did so 5-10 years ago) then podcasts are the audio equivalent of YouTube.
That said, it sounds like Spotify kind of threw a variety of deals at the wall to see what stuck. By now, they should have a better idea of what works and what doesn’t, so hopefully they aren’t reigning in all the spending equally, but instead are being smart about it.
SiriusXM was either very smart or very lucky in the deals they went after at the time, but Spotify was not so much. So now’s their moment to show what they’ve learned.
I still maintain that audio is unique amongst all entertainment avenues in that it does not ask for undivided attention, can be listened to everywhere (work, car, at night in bed while sleeping) and therefore is not subject to as much competition of human needs as video or gaming is.
At the same time, the cost of entering the space is so low, I don’t think you can ever really “out own” your competition.
I think these executives seriously overestimate people's desire to listen to rich and successful people drone on about how to live your best life once You Have it All.
The rise of paywalled podcasts was inevitable, and you can blame podcast creators just as much for wanting a piece of the $$$. But of course that makes as much sense as blaming actors for wanting to be paid for doing a movie, or blaming software developers for wanting to be paid to write software.
It's just capitalism doing what capitalism does. And I don't see a problem with rewarding popular podcast creators monetarily for their success, which Spotify (and Apple) created a new avenue for.
But remember, nobody's forcing individual podcasts to go from free to paid exclusive. The podcast creators are making that choice.
We're talking different levels of middlemen. Spotify is a middleman in music too, but upstream there are rights agencies and record labels with a lot of experience generating lots of revenue from lots of established distribution channels (and taking cuts of the cash for doing it). Not only do they want their cut of the revenue, but in general they simply won't do exclusivity deals.
With podcasts, Spotify potentially deal direct with the team making the podcast, who might see a big chunk of cash for exclusivity straight into their pockets as very attractive compared with doing extra work to distribute on lots of platforms of unknown future value.
wasn’t Spotify co-founded by the creator of Napster too?
Spotify has made it more difficult for me to access his content. All that move did for me was create ill will. I went from having Rogan (and others) in my normal podcast app to those feeds just going dead.
They also signed exclusive deals with some absolute no-names in podcasting. Michelle Obama and Megan Markel come to mind. Both of these are huge flops. They took some serious gambles there on name recognition with no proven podcasting chops.
They misjudged commitment to the podcaster, the way XM radio did. Howard Stern and Joe Rohan are now pale echoes of the cultural forces they were before they let for pay middlemen in between them and their listeners.
You see people sending videos to each other, or hosting videos on their web page and ask their friends come to watch, you'll probably want to create such a middleman of videos - just like YouTube.
Then should we bash Spotify for this, the specific creators, or just stop behaving like entitled babies? I doubt that Spotify threatened to de-platform any creator on the basis of exclusivity. They just offered money for exclusivity and the creators took it.
This happens for everything related to entertainment. Why we're not e.g. blaming Steam/Sony/Nintendo for paying for platform exclusives?
There's a famous podcaster they paid millions to sign with them. When I open up the page of episodes, the content isn't up to date. The video never plays at all. Even worse, they constantly suggest I install an application I can only assume is horribly bloated.
The advertisements are often in the wrong language. Even if they could get me to stick around and listen to their ads, there's no way to monetize!
Recommendations are another area where they fail, but at least that is somewhat subjective.
So did I and I did something about it:
https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast
Spodcast is a caching Spotify podcast to RSS proxy. Using Spodcast you can follow Spotify-hosted netcasts/podcasts using any player which supports RSS, thus enabling the use of older hardware which is not compatible with the Spotify (web) app. Spodcast consists of the main Spodcast application - a Python 3 command line tool - and a PHP-based RSS feed generator. It uses the librespot-python library to access the Spotift API. To use Spodcast you need a (free) Spotify account. Spodcast only supports the Spotify podcast service, it does not interface with the music streaming service.
I have noticed Spotify trying to funnel a decentralized podcasting ecosystem based on RSS into their own walled garden, with some pretty big plays -- it would be really encouraging if they fail at this! I sure hope so. And that nobody else can pull it off either.
> The company saw podcasting as a rapidly growing space without middlemen.
Anyone else see the irony there? Without middlemen? Spotify was trying to cement itself as the middleman in as much podcasting as possible, right? Or maybe it's not irony, it's exactly that, Spotify saw a space without middleman and thus an opportunity to lock itself in as the middleman.
Of course it's not over yet, and Spotify remains in the game, along with others trying to capture podcasting in walled gardens.
> The company said in 2021 that it overtook Apple as the biggest platform in podcasts, and the company is similarly neck-and-neck with SiriusXM as the biggest podcast network, making the company both one of the biggest producers of podcasts and the place where most people listen to them