Do Spotify actually manage to sell any significant number of subscriptions due to podcasts?
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.
No, but they could lose subscribers due to Podcasts.
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 recently gave Spotify a try for about 8 months but just switched back to Apple Music. My reason for switching back had nothing to do with podcasts, it was simply Spotify's terrible interface that makes it impossible to just browse all the music in your library. But I had also started to notice podcasts infiltrating UI that used to be only music playlists. A few times I even mistakenly clicked on a podcast thinking that it was a music playlist that sounded interesting.
Not very related... The reason I canceled Spotify Account is because I couldn’t downvote songs in a playlist. The music suggestions for some artists were horrible, and I couldn’t opt out of them.
Audible has been doing similarly recently and it’s quite frustrating.
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.
Lately, I've even been scared of listening to music other than my usual taste (e.g. a radio hit, a foreign song, song in one of those instagram videos) because their algorithm seems to amplify my "smart" playlists with anything that's different.
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.
Podcasts have really ruined Spotify's mobile app. The worst part is that there is space for a "Podcasts" tab in the bottom bar that would have made everyone happy by clearly separating types of content.
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.
Yup, I've been noticing that. Indeed, I've been preparing to cancel my subscription (backing up my "library"/playlists externally etc.), and their push into podcasts (and pushing them on me) is one of the reasons.
That is why I use YT Music. Podcasts are in a different Google realm (Google podcasts), and get no podspaming. I also find spotify too in your face in general, like an over eager salesman.
They could lose them in the other direction as well. Unlike you, I don't mind podcasts being thrown at me. However, having come to enjoy a couple of the podcasts on offer, I'm not offered a way to subscribe to the pay versions of those podcasts, so I end up subscribing directly. Unfortunately, the Spotify app doesn't provide me a way to add my private RSS feeds from those subscriptions, so I spend much less time on Spotify and question whether I need the service at all.
Can you tell me how Spotify is with playlists of comedy albums?
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.
I did just that about a month ago. I don't give a shit about their podcasts, I'm only interested in their music, the home screen is garbage now.
I moved to Qobuz (which has other problems, but it's generally fine).
They don't really need to. In fact, some early industry rumors say that are not close to recouping costs. They're instead doing the classic SV play of selling customers a dollar for 50 cents until they are addicted and then pulling the rug. They want to cripple the open market by firehosing cash until everyone else gives up, then they can do what they want.
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.
Any fixed cost business will inherently have large sunk costs and will not experience net profits until you've worked your way down the cost curve. Content businesses have marginal costs that approach zero as a function of time -- of course without any operating cost of delivery. There's no need for "early industry rumors" to understand the fixed cost business of streaming.
"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.
I mean, the point still kinda stands. Spotify can throw money at podcasting until the cows go home, but if they aren't buying something for their money it's just going to waste. Podcasts on Spotify aren't all that good, and every podcast I (and everyone I know) actually listen to is accessible elsewhere.
Beware though that "available on Spotify" (idk Podimo) doesn't necessarily mean that it's exclusive there. But it's very common around here and many people use it for convenience (and the podcasts can advertise it as "look we are in this fancy mainstream app", not weird (?) RSS, while they likely offer that too). I myself used Spotify for freely available podcasts too, only recently switched to Podcast Addict for nerdy automatic download settings
I believe Spotify, unless they buy an exclusive or something, still consumes RSS feeds to make podcasts work, so most anything on Spotify is freely available.
Happy to be corrected on this but does a minute spent on Spotify listening to a podcast (that they haven't paid for) vs listening to music reduce their costs?
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.
Well, an important reason for spotify to have podcasts is $$. Unlike music producers, Podcasters are not paid by play count. The ones from openweb are not paid at all by Spotify, I am not sure about the ones that have deals with Spotify directly, like Joe Rogan.
Anyway, the more time users spend listening to podcasts, the less they have to pay to music producers. which means more EBITDA! And my friend, its all about EBITDA.
Wait till they start to control a significant part of public discourse. They will receive money to recommend some podcast, and bury others. The young Facebook was a great place to advertise your business. Now you have to pay for it.
> 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.
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.
Don't underestimate it longer term. I rarely,if ever, listen to podcasts and I don't use Spotify, however Spotify is already a household brand. It's like Netflix: every time I speak to someone about a movie,or a series,the first question is whether it's on Netflix and if the answer is No,they often get disappointed.
Spotify is targeting the millions of customers that already use their app who aren't regular podcast listeners. These people will now get exposed to the podcast ecosystem through Spotify and that'll help boost subscriber retention.
As someone who uses Spotify for music, and another podcast app for podcasts, I find it annoying to scroll past podcasts to get to music. I'm skeptical that someone who has no interest in podcasts will decide that instead of putting on music they want to listen to a podcast - at least in most situations.
It probably depends on the market. In Germany a very famous podcast by TV host Jan Böhmermann https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_B%C3%B6hmermann is only available via spotify. That certainly impacts people. Maybe not for being the sole reason for being Spotify users, but relevant attention.
Other communities certainly have their relevant content.
Will offer some data points from Spotify's Investor Relations [1] that add some additional color to the anecdotes from previous comments:
- 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)
These bullets are conspicuously free of important details.
"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.
Spotify's reason for getting people on podcasts is not only lock-in, every hour you listen to a podcast is an hour they don't have to pay music royalties for.
> 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.
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.
I think cars are reason. Spotify wants in cars. Daniel Ek has said this thing like many times now. If Spotify can corner podcast market then car companies has to do deals with Spotify and they cannot just use custom build apps or some other competitors.
I guess Spotify is paying "celebrities" to host their podcasts, even at a loss, as a way to get more people to subscribe. It is a well known game that was played by satellite radio stations a decade ago.
What do they talk about on those podcasts? I have never tried because of the feeling that it will be a fake politically correct filtered content written to not offend anyone.
Seriously, I think that there are a number of reasons why this won't pan out as predicted:
- There aren't really any tent-pole, must listen podcasts. They thought Joe Rogan was one but I'm hearing a lot of people have stopped listening to him on Spotify (I have).
- Spotify (and others) don't have the money to buy out the whole podcast ecosystem and many podcast makers I think would resist going Spotify exclusive.
- I like my podcast player a lot and there is no way I'm giving it up for the inferior Spotify experience.
I see podcasting as being more like YouTubing - sure there are outfits generating substantial revenue from advertising but many have more diverse revenue streams and reaching the largest audience is more important that an uplift in advertising revenue. Plus not everyone on YouTube is there for the $$$
Rogan is fine (if dumb) light entertainment to have in the background. I haven’t listened to a single episode since the move now that it’s not on YouTube anymore. Spotify is also totally awful for podcasts as the UX is for a music player. Besides Lex now fills that hole with a lot more intelligence
People also try to ignore that Spotify did exactly what everybody thought they would do - started watering down the guests and removing so-called controversial episodes.
A big part of the Rogan show charm was the fringe guests, and his audience doesnt care the least for the kind of corporate virtue signalling Spotify is eminating.
In effect, it went from offering somewhat novel things to being plain boring - like everything else you’d expect from a Spotify podcast. I dont find Rogan particularly charismatic as a host either so why listen anymore?
Eh, Rogan normalizes hate speech in ways that if you or I were to try to do would get us fired/unfriended.
I don't think that's "fine", but it's also not really topical to the submission so I'll leave it at that.
Edit: if folks want to start a discussion about this with me, let's create an email thread about it. My email is in my profile, I'll wait until three folks mention their interest before getting started, if that works. I really didn't mean to upset or try to dodge anything, I just don't think a protracted discussion about Joe Rogan will be very interesting to most people on HN.
Yeah I really wish there is a way to see the engagement with JRE on spotify ... on youtube it was immediately available (views count / comments / likes dislikes) ... in a sense youtube provided the end user with the content, a way to evaluate it (analytics) and ability to have a community around it (comment section).
Spotify doesn't offer any of those.. I too was a daily JRE listener and not anymore, but the good news is that I feel like I upgraded by choosing more specialized podcasts based on my interests.
Yeah, youtube was my preferred way to consume JRE. I'm not one to put on a podcast in the background, because I don't like having something I find interesting going on while I'm trying to do other stuff that requires thought, and if it's not interesting why would I put it on?
Having the interesting moments distilled into two to three 10-15 minute clips was ideal, and if I found the conversation really interesting I might try to watch the whole show for that day.
... I was under the impression they had stopped doing that, but I just checked and there are a lot of clips showing on PowerfulJRE, so maybe they just screwed up their recommendation rating? I just know that when they went to spotify I stopped getting them recommended to me, but there's been a few the last couple weeks now.
Joe Rogan will occasionally have guests that attract people who wouldn't otherwise be interested in common JRE topics. In my case, it was podcasts with Billy Corgan and Shirley Manson (of Smashing Pumpkins and Garbage, respectively).
I enjoyed those episodes a lot, plus a few he has with comedians I find funny. But it wasn't enough to make me subscribe. I doubt there is any podcast that I consider indispensable enough to subscribe.
I have a few I've considered indispensable that have shifted over time. Reply All is consistently good (but I'm a couple months behind at this point, less podcast time). Dan Carlin's Hardcore History is a treat when it comes out, but that's like every 4-6 months usually. This is only a test from tested.com is good, and even though it's weekly it's topical enough I can skip a week or two and not feel like I need to go back and listen. My most recent favorite is Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod, which perfectly encapsulates that feeling I used to get when I sat down with a good friend and we started talking about/ranting about some interesting thing one of us did a deep dive on recently.
The only podcasts I listen religiously are the intelligence by the economist and revolutions by Mike Duncan. I can listen to the intelligence via the economist app and Revolutions is ending this year (and I get it through the standard podcast app on iOS.)
I don't follow Joe Rogan or really very many podcasts, and the ones I do are fairly topical. I'm not going to go relisten to old episodes the same way I would rewatch The Office. It really shifts the focus to creators and away from the IP. I don't think that's really a set in stone thing though, it's just the nature of the type of audio content that's popular right now.
I'll admit I'm a podcast novice, but what player are you using and what does it offer beyond Spotify? I find, download, and play podcasts through Spotify without issues, and the few features I need (speed adjustment, offline access, and show notes/links) are all available on Spotify.
If there is a better way to listen, I'd love to hear about it.
I use PocketCasts (on iOS) and I'm happy enough to pay for a subscription (extra benefits are marginal though).
It's less about features, I think, and more about the overall experience. It's probably quite personal too, but in no particular order:
- Smoother and more responsive UI
- Less cluttered and more dense UI eg visual overview of all my subscriptions
- Silence trimming
- Sharing from a given place in a podcast
I do use Spotify for music though so I'm not completely anti the Spotify experience. In fairness to the Spotify designers I do think that they have a more difficult job in integrating podcasts into an app that is mainly a music player.
I use Pocket Casts. I just like it a lot, and I don't want to switch because it does everything I need. Spotify seems like it wouldn't be as configurable, but I haven't even felt the need to check.
Overcast. It has a “smart speed” feature that cuts out breaks and pauses in a way that’s almost unnoticeable but will save/gain you hundreds of hours. And audio clip sharing and great leveling in addition to privacy features.
Spotify still doesn't allow the user to add an RSS feed in the app, right? Until they support that it makes no sense to use as my main podcast app because the (admittedly few) podcasts I listen to are mostly either too behind the times to be on Spotify or I pay for their Patreon and need to be able to use the subscriber feed. I use AntennaPod on Android and the built-in Podcasts app on iOS.
Castro on iOS. It uses an inbox triage model that lets me subscribe to a lot of podcasts and keep up with what they’re doing, without cluttering my queue or inducing decision fatigue. It has more granular (per-podcast) controls for smart speed, silence skipping, voice leveling, skipping intros and automatic triage than Spotify. It also lets me upload custom audio and subscribe to custom/private feeds. Support for scripting listening and feed management with iOS shortcuts is above a useful threshold.
Prior to Castro, I used Overcast and Pocket Casts, which have similar features.
I’m sure Spotify is the future but these third party clients are great for heavy listeners who want more control.
I've been using iCatcher on ios for years now. It has all the things you mention but also a nice set of sorting logic to choose from as well as other per-podcast options like prioritization and number of episodes to download/display etc.
This post is essentially a funding pitch for Spotify. I talks a lot about they are going to try and kill the open podcast ecosystem but no evidence that they are making any progress. The podcast ecosystem is very different from other media markets-- it started open, it grew up open, and people are actually willing to directly pay content producers either for bonus content, to avoid ad reads, or just to keep the train chugging along.
I immediately unsub from any podcast where there is some jarring dynamic ad insertion. I've watch all of the once great Gimlet podcasts wither, and some die since their acquisition.
Yea there is a market for the low-est common denominator stuff like low-brow true crime stuff and the joe rogans, but I don't see those as competition, either for sponsors or ears to the healthy, robust, mature open podcast ecosystem.
Even without paying for podcasts, ad reads in podcasts are pretty much the most consumer-friendly form of advertising on the internet. There's no privacy invasion. The ads are pretty well targeted because podcast producers generally know and try to respect their audiences. And they can even be pretty funny and entertaining when hosts can stray a bit off-script.
Slight but worrying privacy invasion. Podcasts are increasingly inserting targeted ads based on download analytics. Just the other day, I was listening to a British podcast that advertised for a local company in Seattle, where my IP address tells them I'm from.
The extent to which a podcast can target users has been somewhat limited until now. But if you use Spotify, they know what content you're listening to, and your exact listening behavior, as well as who you are. There's no doubt in my mind that they pay attention to that data internally, and very little doubt that they'll move to expose more and more of it to advertisers.
What Spotify is trying to do is called a roll-up. This is a well tread business tactic favored by aspiring monopolists and the strategy is simple: acquire most of the distribution in the space, then jack up the price. (In the podcast world, "distribution" equates to "listeners" and price equates to "Spotify's subscription and ad revenue.")
The harm caused to both consumers and producers by a roll-up is well-documented. The legality is questionable but US regulators have been asleep on the job for decades.
A rollup is where you merge businesses doing functionally similar things, gaining economies of scale on costs. Its most often used for geographically distributed family businesses, such as Dentists. Dentists all need a lot of back office support, marketing, and sales functions. Having a rollup with a dozen Dental offices allows you to centralize all the insurance claim handling, direct marketing and put them under a single brand you can advertise on more mass market media.
You are correct that where rollups are used in regulated industries that limit entrants such as radio, they lead to oligopolies. If you own most of the radio stations in a single city you not only get the rollup cost benefits, you can also increase your prices for advertising.
But this is a direct effect of the market limitations that would occur either way, even if owners weren't allowed to reduce costs by buying stations in the same city to combine back office and operations, they would still do it to get oligarchic pricing power. And if you try to rollup most of the Dentist offices in a single city to raise prices you can only succeed temporarily, because it's a free market and your higher prices will attract lots of new entrants.
Of course the other criticisms of rollups is they reduce diversity of offerings. In the case of radio it leads to homogenization of station playlists. Which is exactly what the BBC does in Britain, so I don't see the issue. Especially since radio is being gutted by the internet anyways.
Applications used to be distributed everywhere, but Apple tightly controlled the platform and crippled the web browser. They even prevented Flash and other runtimes so they would be the only way to get native control on the device.
It's still good to call out they are a bad actor in the podcast ecosystem. They can't compete on software, so they try to buy content and make it exclusive. There is no benefit to the user to their activities.
If what they have done to the Joe Rogan Experience is any indication, they will fail at this endeavor. How they have handled it is so bad that it can only be explained by incompetence.
Over six months after switching to Spotify, when I venture back in to try to listen to an episode, it'll randomly stop playing for no apparent reason. It'll jump to another episode for no apparent reason. It'll pause playing and then resume anywhere from 5-30 seconds later. And why they insist on displaying total playing time as "mm:ss" instead of "hh:mm:ss" is beyond me.
I stopped listening to Rogan when he fell off my preferred PodCast app, and I am a Paying Spotify Premium user but I do not use Spotify for PodCasts because I like to keep my PodCasts and Music Separate
The strangest thing about Spotify for me is that I pay for Premium as well but that doesn't save me from Joe Rogan's own commercials he inserts into his spotify podcasts. They're skippable by simply moving the seek bar to the end but why if I'm paying for Premium are they even there? They're not baked into the podcast itself but rather the player pauses the playback of the podcast and cues up multiple 120(!) second ads.
They're also a royal PITA to skip in my car because the spotify app on iPhone and PC are both awful but the mobile app is awful squared.
I'm pretty sure that Spotify's API allows access to podcasts outside the official app. I'm already using software that can stream Spotify content to local devices that don't support Spotify. Creating an RSS feed is only an implementation detail.
And I wouldn't discount the publishing and distribution part of making a podcast content available. Without Spotify or a similar platform, the burden of putting content online, making it discoverable and getting audience analytics falls on the creators. I'm pretty sure that most creators would be pretty disinterested in spending time on these tasks.
No, I don’t think so. The api [0] only returns metadata and Spotify urls that are played in their player. There’s no way I can find to get the actual audio file or audio stream on binary format.
Of course it also requires a Spotify dev account so that’s limiting too.
I’m discounting the publishing and distribution part because we have examples of podcasts that moved from regular to Spotify (eg, JRE) and the content didn’t change at all.
Podcasts are pretty awesome as the distribution costs are low and are pretty similar whether your distributing via Spotify or your own CDN.
With regular you get discoverability via Apple and many others so that’s bigger than Spotify.
This is a “solved” problem in that creators have been easily doing this for 10 years. The technical aspects are minimal and completely abstracted through many services available that are dollars per month.
Disagree on this, like discord, third party apps are frowned upon. There is no youtube-dl for spotify (not a good one at least) so while I do agree that creators should not be burdened by the distribution aspect, spotify is ultimately vendor lock-in. while with itunes you can easily fetch the rss feed of their podcasts, such a thing is not possible with spotify.
> I'm pretty sure that Spotify's API allows access to podcasts outside the official app.
I wouldn't be too sure about this. I know its API (or at least some parts of it) are only available to premium users, because they can't serve ads via third-party integrations.
I don't know if there's an exception for podcasts, but I wouldn't be surprised if your option is either the app or paying to not use the official app.
Oh, I seriously thought your reply would be that they should not be called podcasts [1] since that's more of an iPod thing. Or at least with the same modus operandi of downloading files (published from iTunes or RSS or whatever) to listen to later. But then, maybe I'm just too old.
Or maybe podcasts have just evolved again, and now it's reincarnation is into streaming platforms and clubhouse rooms.
Yep, I was going to say that it was actually Apple Music / Podcasts that killed podcasts, because that was the first site I saw podcast creators exclusively link to versus an aggregator or RSS feed. It marked the turning of the tide, where it even started to be considered acceptable not to have an RSS feed.
To be fair, this effect was limited at the time to "podcasts" released by relatively wealthy people mostly in New York, among whom not using Apple products was basically unheard of. Spotify seems to be taking this mainstream, but I think the problem started before they got into the podcast business.
I wish radio stations in my country played music that I like. Perhaps then I'd ever have listened to one. Not to mention that you can't pick what a broadcast radio plays. Aside from that they can both play audio, it seems rather incomparable to me...
Spotify also made podcast ads as terrible as TV/radio.
I was never bothered by podcast ads since it was coming straight from the podcaster. E.g. Tim Ferriss - for the most part I trusted he actually supported the products. Comedians, the ad reads are often pretty funny
Spotify instead interrupts the podcast whenever they want with "HEY! <radio ad voice selling a product>"
Yeah, it's really awful. Many podcasts I choose to listen to because the hosts have soothing voices and there isn't any annoying yelling, but when Spotify inserts the ads in there, it absolutely ruins the experience since the ads are so jarring when compared to the podcast itself.
I loved spotify for music suggestions and playlists, but are finding it highly annoying lately for the podcasts it keeps trying to push at me taking up prime real-estate in the app. Like for example if I open it now the second row is a whole list of podcast about "Get Educated about Voter Suppression". All that stuff sucks for you guys but I am Canadian and don't want to listen to 5 podcasts about American voting.
I only listen to podcasts on my iphone and already have a nice feed in the podcast app, I am good. I haven't even listened to more then 3 hours of podcasts in the last year since I am not on transit every day with covid/work from home.
Readit News
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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)
[1] https://investors.spotify.com/financials/default.aspx
"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.
Seriously, I think that there are a number of reasons why this won't pan out as predicted:
- There aren't really any tent-pole, must listen podcasts. They thought Joe Rogan was one but I'm hearing a lot of people have stopped listening to him on Spotify (I have).
- Spotify (and others) don't have the money to buy out the whole podcast ecosystem and many podcast makers I think would resist going Spotify exclusive.
- I like my podcast player a lot and there is no way I'm giving it up for the inferior Spotify experience.
I see podcasting as being more like YouTubing - sure there are outfits generating substantial revenue from advertising but many have more diverse revenue streams and reaching the largest audience is more important that an uplift in advertising revenue. Plus not everyone on YouTube is there for the $$$
A big part of the Rogan show charm was the fringe guests, and his audience doesnt care the least for the kind of corporate virtue signalling Spotify is eminating.
In effect, it went from offering somewhat novel things to being plain boring - like everything else you’d expect from a Spotify podcast. I dont find Rogan particularly charismatic as a host either so why listen anymore?
I don't think that's "fine", but it's also not really topical to the submission so I'll leave it at that.
Edit: if folks want to start a discussion about this with me, let's create an email thread about it. My email is in my profile, I'll wait until three folks mention their interest before getting started, if that works. I really didn't mean to upset or try to dodge anything, I just don't think a protracted discussion about Joe Rogan will be very interesting to most people on HN.
Spotify doesn't offer any of those.. I too was a daily JRE listener and not anymore, but the good news is that I feel like I upgraded by choosing more specialized podcasts based on my interests.
Having the interesting moments distilled into two to three 10-15 minute clips was ideal, and if I found the conversation really interesting I might try to watch the whole show for that day.
... I was under the impression they had stopped doing that, but I just checked and there are a lot of clips showing on PowerfulJRE, so maybe they just screwed up their recommendation rating? I just know that when they went to spotify I stopped getting them recommended to me, but there's been a few the last couple weeks now.
I enjoyed those episodes a lot, plus a few he has with comedians I find funny. But it wasn't enough to make me subscribe. I doubt there is any podcast that I consider indispensable enough to subscribe.
Not that you actually asked. ;)
If there is a better way to listen, I'd love to hear about it.
It's less about features, I think, and more about the overall experience. It's probably quite personal too, but in no particular order:
- Smoother and more responsive UI
- Less cluttered and more dense UI eg visual overview of all my subscriptions
- Silence trimming
- Sharing from a given place in a podcast
I do use Spotify for music though so I'm not completely anti the Spotify experience. In fairness to the Spotify designers I do think that they have a more difficult job in integrating podcasts into an app that is mainly a music player.
Plus, I don't like a monoculture.
https://overcast.fm/
There’s numerous small developers out there putting in much more care than Spotify.
Prior to Castro, I used Overcast and Pocket Casts, which have similar features.
I’m sure Spotify is the future but these third party clients are great for heavy listeners who want more control.
Yea there is a market for the low-est common denominator stuff like low-brow true crime stuff and the joe rogans, but I don't see those as competition, either for sponsors or ears to the healthy, robust, mature open podcast ecosystem.
Even without paying for podcasts, ad reads in podcasts are pretty much the most consumer-friendly form of advertising on the internet. There's no privacy invasion. The ads are pretty well targeted because podcast producers generally know and try to respect their audiences. And they can even be pretty funny and entertaining when hosts can stray a bit off-script.
Slight but worrying privacy invasion. Podcasts are increasingly inserting targeted ads based on download analytics. Just the other day, I was listening to a British podcast that advertised for a local company in Seattle, where my IP address tells them I'm from.
The extent to which a podcast can target users has been somewhat limited until now. But if you use Spotify, they know what content you're listening to, and your exact listening behavior, as well as who you are. There's no doubt in my mind that they pay attention to that data internally, and very little doubt that they'll move to expose more and more of it to advertisers.
The harm caused to both consumers and producers by a roll-up is well-documented. The legality is questionable but US regulators have been asleep on the job for decades.
Fortunately Americans are starting to wake up.
Matt Stoller did a piece on this last year: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/will-spotify-ruin-podcast...
Agree that they should be stopped though, if it looks like they are succeeding.
A rollup is where you merge businesses doing functionally similar things, gaining economies of scale on costs. Its most often used for geographically distributed family businesses, such as Dentists. Dentists all need a lot of back office support, marketing, and sales functions. Having a rollup with a dozen Dental offices allows you to centralize all the insurance claim handling, direct marketing and put them under a single brand you can advertise on more mass market media.
You are correct that where rollups are used in regulated industries that limit entrants such as radio, they lead to oligopolies. If you own most of the radio stations in a single city you not only get the rollup cost benefits, you can also increase your prices for advertising.
But this is a direct effect of the market limitations that would occur either way, even if owners weren't allowed to reduce costs by buying stations in the same city to combine back office and operations, they would still do it to get oligarchic pricing power. And if you try to rollup most of the Dentist offices in a single city to raise prices you can only succeed temporarily, because it's a free market and your higher prices will attract lots of new entrants.
Of course the other criticisms of rollups is they reduce diversity of offerings. In the case of radio it leads to homogenization of station playlists. Which is exactly what the BBC does in Britain, so I don't see the issue. Especially since radio is being gutted by the internet anyways.
Applications used to be distributed everywhere, but Apple tightly controlled the platform and crippled the web browser. They even prevented Flash and other runtimes so they would be the only way to get native control on the device.
They "rolled up" computing.
What scummy behavior.
Over six months after switching to Spotify, when I venture back in to try to listen to an episode, it'll randomly stop playing for no apparent reason. It'll jump to another episode for no apparent reason. It'll pause playing and then resume anywhere from 5-30 seconds later. And why they insist on displaying total playing time as "mm:ss" instead of "hh:mm:ss" is beyond me.
They're also a royal PITA to skip in my car because the spotify app on iPhone and PC are both awful but the mobile app is awful squared.
Podcasts using RSS was genius and a great “protocol” for distributing content that fit into the original web idea of information available anywhere.
I hope Spotify loses and regular podcasts stick and thrive. I’m more worried about people like NPR requiring their own app x 1000.
And I wouldn't discount the publishing and distribution part of making a podcast content available. Without Spotify or a similar platform, the burden of putting content online, making it discoverable and getting audience analytics falls on the creators. I'm pretty sure that most creators would be pretty disinterested in spending time on these tasks.
Of course it also requires a Spotify dev account so that’s limiting too.
I’m discounting the publishing and distribution part because we have examples of podcasts that moved from regular to Spotify (eg, JRE) and the content didn’t change at all.
Podcasts are pretty awesome as the distribution costs are low and are pretty similar whether your distributing via Spotify or your own CDN.
With regular you get discoverability via Apple and many others so that’s bigger than Spotify.
This is a “solved” problem in that creators have been easily doing this for 10 years. The technical aspects are minimal and completely abstracted through many services available that are dollars per month.
[0] https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
I wouldn't be too sure about this. I know its API (or at least some parts of it) are only available to premium users, because they can't serve ads via third-party integrations.
I don't know if there's an exception for podcasts, but I wouldn't be surprised if your option is either the app or paying to not use the official app.
There are a couple (imo, "real") podcasts I subscribe to and pay for, but I pay the creators directly and they generally self-host the files.
Any other business model is just a network-exclusive TV or radio show, not a podcast.
They're time-shifted audio shows sure, but not podcasts.
Or maybe podcasts have just evolved again, and now it's reincarnation is into streaming platforms and clubhouse rooms.
[1] This is where the word was invented, according to the Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/feb/12/broadcasting.d...
To be fair, this effect was limited at the time to "podcasts" released by relatively wealthy people mostly in New York, among whom not using Apple products was basically unheard of. Spotify seems to be taking this mainstream, but I think the problem started before they got into the podcast business.
That's where the money is. Spotify isn't a tech company, it's a radio station that exists to sell subscriptions plus ads.
I was never bothered by podcast ads since it was coming straight from the podcaster. E.g. Tim Ferriss - for the most part I trusted he actually supported the products. Comedians, the ad reads are often pretty funny
Spotify instead interrupts the podcast whenever they want with "HEY! <radio ad voice selling a product>"
I only listen to podcasts on my iphone and already have a nice feed in the podcast app, I am good. I haven't even listened to more then 3 hours of podcasts in the last year since I am not on transit every day with covid/work from home.
https://podnews.net/update/podcast-index-open-directory
https://www.entrepreneurability.nl/2020/12/04/the-emergence-...