> By 2021, Spotify had paid to sign some of the biggest names in podcasting, and it was ready to start squeezing its competitors… Now, Spotify chief content officer Dawn Ostroff — a TV veteran most famous for bringing Gossip Girl to the CW — was ready to stop many of these creators and companies from sharing podcasts on Apple and Amazon, and keep the content exclusively on Spotify.
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
> 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.
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.
The problem with this strategy is that most execs don't think through the higher levels (which is what went wrong here).
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 certainly do think about the reduction of demand due to increasing price. That’s economics 101, and I would not assume a major business executive doesn’t know that.
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).
I think you give too much credit to some execs, my experience is that sometimes the short term is the only thing they pay attention to when investors' money is flowing and there's more to grab.
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
What other things? I can think of multiple other situations just in media where this hasn't worked: NFLX, AMZN, Overwatch League, YouTube Gaming/Facebook Gaming/Mixer...there are specific instances of companies doing the opposite (i.e. DIS, they just acquire something working and just pound out low-risk additive investments...and DIS only started doing this after, you guessed it, missing on some very high-risk, big budget investments like John Carter) and it working very well.
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).
The chief funders of these businesses have so much money that they often don't care about the outcome of the company as the important factor. Spotify has reshaped the podcast market into a format that the big money funders wanted to happen. It's evolved from the early stage free-for-all where small producers could make it big to a corporate controlled platform in which people have become accustomed to getting their podcast s from something more akin to an app store.
Meh, you can call it value extraction if you want, but ultimately they're paying these people. Didn't Rogan get like 100MM? Didn't they fund a bunch of studios and new podcast creators? From the article:
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.
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 use Apple Podcasts every day and experience none of these problems. Maybe give it another try if and when Spotify’s extra layer on ad logos and banners wears on you.
Trying to setup chronological podcast playback on the Apple Podcast is horrible, and they are constantly fiddling with the terrible UI. I just want to binge 5 consecutive episodes of a history podcast, but everything in the UI tries to funnel you into listening to the latest episode of multiple podcasts.
Funny thing - this works very well, so long as you don’t use the UI. At least, it has recently, I do t know if things changed.
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 also seems to be impossible to get it to automatically download episodes in chronological order. It only wants to download new episodes. So if you run out of downloaded episodes it will skip forward to the new episodes, which could be years apart.
I am slowly decreasing my use of Spotify because of the way it’s pushing podcasts while all I want is music from it.
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.
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.
If other users agree with me, then the message will be much louder and they will be much quicker to act.
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.
What do you mean by 'shoving podcasts down my throat'? I pay for Spotify and I had trouble finding the podcasts in the app, and it doesn't recommend either. I'm from Europe though, maybe that explains it?
For me, and apparently thousands of others, it was insisting on showing these bullshit podcasts at the very top of my home screen. I had to scroll down past it to see any actual music.
They were everywhere. Every search I did showed podcasts at least as prominently as music, for example. I don’t remember the details, but I think they even did popover ads in the app trying to get me to start listening to podcasts. On a paid account.
Not really... Spotify is pushing podcasts because they are slot going bust as a music streaming service and they need to pivot. When podcasts fail they will just pivot to something else even more desperately.
Even better is to drop Spotify and move to something else. Apple Music wasn't for me. I'm on Tidal right now. It's fine and I got a deal where I'm paying half of what I was for Spotify. This is the only way to be sure I'm not giving Joe Rogan my money.
Pocket Casts is what I use, lots of useful features like silence trimming, voice amplification, organizational tools, chapters, and programmable skipping of intro ads. Recently open-sourced as well.
Overall I like Overcast, definitely better than Apple’s app. I don’t like UI though — the teal blue color, oversized controls, the “+ + + +” on the playback speed slider, strange layout choices, etc. (I know that these are relatively minor things to most people).
The concept of smart speed impressed me so much I got it. I don’t use the feature a to alter speed a lot, but it’s such a clever way to speeding things up.
I used "Podcast Republic" for a long time, but it recently started downloading stuff automatically and I can't figure out how to tell it to stop. It filled up my storage with junk podcasts where I subscribed, but only listened to intermittently.
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.
I find your phrasing and mindset interesting. What you suggest somewhat maliciously as "lock others in at high rates", I read as "shower them with more cash than they could ever conceivably dream of"
I'd love if my employer "locked me in" at a higher rate lol.
Have you seen the recently published _Chokepoint Capitalism_ by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow yet?
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.
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.
Yeah, I'm not claiming that their logic was sound, just saying that their motivation isn't that surprising. I'm guessing that the real estate referred to in the origin of that meme (an infomercial, I think?) wasn't really free either.
Large company driven of the field by open source, if the tech is good enough and a comunity establishes that does not yearn for closed source features, open source can permanently poison the well so to speak.
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.
Seems like the podcasting ecosystem is a bit more resistant to walled gardens than most spaces.
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.
As a user, personally it's because I have relatively little loyalty to podcasts, and because these platform are generally a value negative not a value add to the end user. Spotify's podcast UI is horrendous, I don't know how it's possible for Spotify to reverse my sort order and lose my place in where I was in a podcast series so many times.
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. Spotify's 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.
Another thing I hated about podcasts when I used spotify: they still have ads. I find it pretty much intolerable to get ads on a paid service. But podcasts weren't near the top of the list of reasons I cut ties with spotify anyway. (Oh wait, actually their endorsement of Joe Rogan was very close to the top.)
The first platform to solve this problem by offering a paid product that revenue shares back to the creator will get my $$$ as soon as I find it. I hoped this was what Spotify was up to, but clearly not. Youtube Premium could make an easy play in that space if they cared for it.
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.
Doesn't YouTube Premium do that? I remember some creators saying they got a lot more money out of Premium views than ad views, but I don't know anything specific.
There is a lot of stiff (and free) competition when it comes to podcast players. I'm pretty happy with the now open source Pocket Casts. Previously I used the paid Dogg Catcher.
I can't imagine what features would need to exist for me to be willing to pay a recurring fee.
This is exactly my experience: Rogan moved to Spotify, podcasts became more difficult to track because of bad UI and ads were a constant irritation (I pay good money to not get ads).
Nowadays I spend my time listening to different podcasts and tune into Rogan if he has a particularly good guest on.
Some anecdatum: I stopped listening to Rogan's full podcasts when he moved to Spotify because I'm sometimes interested to listen but not enough to download a new app, sign up for a new account, etc. Bootleg (and official, I think?) accounts post his clips which I watch sometimes, I notice they have 100s of thousands or millions of views. I assume Spotify was expecting to capture all those views. If Rogan clips disappeared from YouTube I just wouldn't watch it.
I signed up (again) on Spotify for Rogan... of course, I was mostly watching on YouTube via an NVidia ShieldTV box, and Spotify didn't have video support for a long while, and even later it was just not a good app/experience for me... so when I dropped PayPal, I cancelled Spotify at the same time. I still catch clips from his JREClips channel on YouTube. It's pretty bad when Rumble has a better (not by much) AndroidTV app than Spotify, with a fraction of the revenue.
I was the same way but I ended up signing up to watch it. It was pretty painless. I'm glad Rogan is on Spotify because YouTube is getting pretty heavy handed with their strikes. They need some competition. I'm surprised Spotify hasn't ventured into video hosting more.
I'm surprised as well, it's clear that music will always be a loss leader for them. Why not do more in video, which is at least a proven monetization channel (YT, Tiktok, IG Live). MTV-style programming is due a comeback.
This point is buried but really good. YouTube is a bit at fault here. Ideally we’d all keep using rss, but it’s hard to fault podcasters for going where monetization is possible. Respect to Sam Harris for going fully listener supported.
Some of the political channels I watch feature the hosts using (very obvious to a human) coded language to refer to COVID, Hitler, Nazis, Hunter Biden, etc. because they don't want to get targeted. It's pretty dystopian and creepy.
Same here. I like the JRE podcast but not enough to use Spotify and their terrible podcasting experience. Now I really only catch an interesting YouTube clip every few weeks.
I think Spotify's podcast UI is so awkward and terrible it has held back their growth.
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.
What kind of issues do you have with it? In my listening i'm split between spotify and podcast addict and honestly haven't ever had much trouble with it's UI.
Spotify is crap for listening to Podcasts. I can never figure out what I've listened to and what I haven't. Pocket Casts is amazing, but now that Every Little Thing is canceled, I don't know if it matters anyway, as that was the only podcast I listened to.
Similar, I got a lifetime subscription. Then again, I think I also purchased all 4 options (Android, the never very good Windows Phone, the web version of the was a separate charge for that and finally the iOS version). I still find it very handy to be able to jump between Android and iOS pretty seamlessly.
I'd guess that the low upfront cost and barrier to entry contributes. Audio recording and editing sufficient for a podcast is very low lift for any passionate hosts.
If one disappears off your preferred platform, 100 more are waiting to fill the void.
Another way to put it is that there are probably very few destination podcasts for a significant number of users. While there are some podcasts that I listen to most episodes of, if one were to go to Spotify (which I don't subscribe to) as an exclusive, I'd shrug and move on.
Also the fact that Apple pretty much bought the entire space by providing free infrastructure and discovery but didn't do anything with it and so it flourished.
My guess is because both the production side and the distribution side cost so little money, it's hard for anyone to monopolize it. Once someone really solves the advertising model for podcasters, the creators will flock to it naturally like how so many people only distribute through youtube now.
The barrier is very low. If I have to go to Spotify to get your podcast, unless I’m a huge fan of you specifically, there are hundreds of others on the same topic. I suspect many people open their podcast app and just add some popular ones, or search for topics they’re interested in, and go from there.
I think it's a trait in the community. I remember the days sitting in an IRC channel listening to some bootleg live podcast/radio show broastcast over Icecast. It was sorta like pirate radio for a bit. Then podcasts started to show up more and more (in big part due to the iPod) and having a big publishing network wasn't really a thing. Sure, people could use iTunes, but a ton of us were just dropping MP3's from someone's site onto whatever MP3 player we had at the time.
I think it comes down to having no obvious pain point.
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.
Podcasting's resistance to takeover is going to be hard to replicate.
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.
Google Reader was shut down and lots of tech people were blinded by follower count self importance and early adopter bluechecks to claim Twitter was “just fine” to use instead of RSS.
A smart watch is a different thing from a quartz wrist watch but it would be foolish to act like the decline of the latter has nothing to do with the former.
I feel like I stopped seeing quartz wrist watches before smart watches were a thing, because mobile phones were always available to tell time. At least from my cohort.
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.
There's a reason I said "quartz watches" and the mid-range absolutely did get messed up by smart watches, so the only thing "dead wrong" is your reading of my post.
Lots of younger people never had a watch in the first place, sure, but smart watches appealed to people who would have otherwise bought from, say, Fossil.
But Twitter/HN/etc. are all discovery mechanisms. The fact is that I can think that a lot of interesting content is going to cross my screen sooner or later without my actively prospecting for it--and I'm mostly not wrong.
my recollection was that twitter was doing fine when Google Reader was still running, although I'm sure it did benefit some from Google reader going away.
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.
This did happen in the spanish-speaking "podcasphere" as it is usually called. Ivoox succesfully closed exclusivity contracts with a handful of succesful spanish podcasts, a few years ago. Of course, other companies are trying to do the same with more or less success (Podimo, Spotify and Amazon Audible Spain).
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.
As I understand it, licensing music in Spain is very different in the UK - in Spain you need to license individual songs, whereas in the UK you pay the Performing Rights Society for a single licence to play any recorded music. Which is why, with all due respect to the Spanish side of my family, Spanish discos tend to be wall-to-wall chunda chunda, whereas UK discos generally play pretty decent music (depending on the individual taste of the DJ...)
Only superficially relevant but my favorite podcast of all time was Tom Segura's podcast en espanyol - i'm not sure why it left spotify but it was only there for a few months it seems. Seems it's on youtube now but accessing on spotify was convenient for me
Offtopic (and feels weird to ask in English) but I'm looking for good general-interest Spanish-language podcasts. Do you have any recommendations for ways to discover new ones?
A really good one is called La Ruina. It's a live podcast and the audience tells their worst experience.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
It worked for SiriusXM, paying a handful of celebrities big money to stream exclusively on their platform. So replace live radio with radio recording, it should still work
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
I feel like Spotify going after big celebrities like the Obamas is a bit tone deaf specifically with regards to the podcasting audience.
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.
Exactly. I never listen to a podcast because it has a name attached to it. It's incredibly stupid. "Obama!", "Harry and Meghan!". So? Do I learn anything from it? Is it good content?
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.
I think the audience is different. I would wager that the intersection between people who consume mindless celebrity TV and listen to informative podcasts is almost non-existent.
> 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.
wasn’t Spotify co-founded by the creator of Napster too?
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.
All of this is pretty easy to understand. Podcasts had been free. But Spotify (and Apple too) saw an opportunity to make them paid, by funneling some money to creators. And since these creators wanted to make $$$ they said sign me up please, that sounds great!
The rise of paywalled podcasts was inevitable, and you can blame podcast creators just as much for wanting a piece of the $$$. 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.
Agreed, it seems like a natural progression. The barrier for creating a podcast is incredibly low, which is why initially there wasn't this type of middleman. But monetizing a podcast, especially to the point that you can quit your day job is much harder.
There’s already plenty of paid podcasts, what Apple and Spotify offer is frictionless payments. And for all the people complaining about Apples 30% cut on the App Store, there’s plenty of podcasters willing to give them exactly the same cut, as an alternate option to their own payment system.
> By 2021, Spotify had paid to sign some of the biggest names in podcasting.
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.
> was ready to stop many of these creators and companies from sharing podcasts on Apple and Amazon, and keep the content exclusively on Spotify
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?
Reminds me of an ad I saw on the tube for an online furniture company (Made.com?) claiming to 'cut out the middleman' - wtf are you if not a middleman! Always made me chuckle.
Yep. I didn’t even associate Spotify with podcasts. Then they went and bought Joe Rogan, a show I enjoyed listening to on YouTube. That just made me think ‘screw them’.
This was my reaction as well. I enjoyed watching Rogan on YouTube.
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.
Spotify was/is more than a middleman. They acquired multiple publishing tools (Megaphone and Anchor), analytics (Chartable, Podsight) entire studios like Gimlet and had a huge network for both advertisers and paid subscribers. They were trying to acquire their way into becoming YouTube for podcasting. I think the biggest hindrance is that podcasting still isn't social the way video is.
> Spotify saw a space without middleman and thus an opportunity to lock itself in as the middleman.
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.
The sad part is how hard they fail at the basics, like playing audio through a web page. Before you can establish yourself as a gatekeeper you need to at least provide a functional walled garden.
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.
I think they should have built a separate app. Music is different than Podcasts in multiple ways, and shoving them into the same app just negatively affects both experiences.
That's the move that would've been better for users, but it doesn't allow Spotify to use their already-popular product to bolster their nascent one, which is probably why they didn't do that.
It's far from new behavior for Spotify, though. They've been constantly twiddling with UI, algorithms, etc trying to optimize for profit margins over user happiness for years at this point. Last I knew their entire engineering structure is optimized for that, with the desktop client for example being carved up into wholly separate iframe "islands" (complete with dependencies in duplicate, triplicate, etc) managed by different teams to allow A/B testing of each pane without communicating with the teams responsible for other panes.
> but it doesn't allow Spotify to use their already-popular product to bolster their nascent one, which is probably why they didn't do that.
I think a good counter-example is Uber, with a separate app for ordering rides (Uber) and for ordering food (Uber Eats). Both apps are still bolstering each other by the brand recognition.
Additionally, the apps could still cross-reference each other in a subtle way. E.g. maybe when you type a podcast name in the regular Spotify it could redirect you to the Spotify Podcast app. Just like the Uber app sometimes nudges you to also order food.
EDIT: as one of the comments points out, you can actually order food from the Uber app, my bad, that's not how I remembered it!
You can order food in the Uber app - there's a big tab at the top in iOS.
I think there's huge pressure to "everything app" very disparate services. I've also noticed that Amazon now lets you pull up your Whole Foods code or pull up the Whole Foods storefront from the Amazon app.
Except it's not quite the same as Spotify - when you try to order a ride, Uber doesn't dilute and replace found rides with food offerings which you don't need or want at that time. That's what Spotify did - they actually undermined their main feature to push podcasts and hurt/cannibalized their main value proposition to try to push another product that we didn't want when we opened the app.
Honestly, I think this could go much better if they just organized their damn software better and not damage their music offering with forced podcasts. Many of us would probably stay loyal and use it for podcasts as well if they made the experience great instead of forced.
Uber Eats seemed to be it's own thing, but now they seem to be tying them a bit more together. I've even seen the Uber app offering me the option to have food delivery setup while on my ride. Basically trying to give you the option to have food delivery arranged to show up to your destination around the same time you arrive.
But I believe you're right that initially they were more separate entities, but now it's kinda merged.
In the case of Uber, I think it's more likely that someone who's used their ride service may be interested in ordering food than it would be for someone who's used Spotify for music to be interested in podcasts.
I do think you're right that more subtle nudges are probably fine. Some might begrudge them but such promotions are a lot more tolerable than directly pulling an entirely separate app into your existing app and then placing the newly imported bits in the spotlight.
Uber also is famous for having a GIANT app binary for "what should be a simple app", which they've gone on record as defending as necessary for international use. Maybe they didn't want to or couldn't continue to bloat the app.
Yeah this tracks with my experience in tech. All packaged and hyped under the brand of "Data Science".
Can't tell you how many times I was able to directly prove a change lead to a bad user experience only to be met with "Yeah but the data shows..." by some corpo cock sleeve of a manager or team lead.
All these shithead corps are actively monitoring AND MODIFYING USER BEHAVIOR without understanding human psychology or behavior science, because "The data shows"
IMO nothing short of a complete revolt in whatever fucking form that looks like.
I don't think two apps is the answer, they should just build a better distinction between music and podcasts into the existing app. A toggle at the top of the app that let you switch between music and podcasts would work, and that way you could still include the option to slot in a few songs between podcasts if that is how you enjoy your listen experience.
Maybe another example where one app does two things: AirBnB.
I am a host (holiday house) but regularly also travel and become a traveler. The experience and need is very different. In one “mode” I need offline availability and help in navigating the checkin time and the location and in the other one the calendar, bookings and money is my main concern.
You can easily click on “switch to hosting” in the same app.
On mobile this is exactly how it works for Spotify. There is a filter at the top for podcasts and then it just shows podcasts. Good for finding something when going for a walk. The UI/UX on Apple's podcast app didn't work well enough for me (could be a me problem) to figure things out, sometimes their UI/UX decisions are odd burying things in menus.
I was like this too until last year when I finally found a podcast which told me something new. Most podcasts just recycle the same rubbish, and I think that is a real problem.
Anyway, I now think it's fine to have the podcasts in the same app; I honestly wouldn't want to switch to another app on my phone to switch to real music after listening to a podcast. Should be toggable though for people like you.
I'll never know, because I'm afraid to click on a podcast in Spotify for fear it will shove more of them in my face.
Using Spotify in CarPlay, for several months it used up most of the screen real estate to promote podcasts. When I open Spotify it's for music discovery, and the number of podcasts I'm interested in listening to at that moment is zero.
edit: in case it's relevant, I pay for Spotify Premium. This isn't a complaint about ads in an ad-supported product.
Yep, it definitely gets worse if you interact. After a week or so of Spotify recommending a podcast on my home screen with the shape of a penis as it's cover image, I finally got annoyed enough to start looking for a "I don't want to see this" button. I never found one, but I spent enough time poking around for the cast to somehow get promoted to one of "my shows" with an even more prominent place in the UI.
I feel the same - to the point where I’ve considered dumping Spotify.
I don’t want music and podcasts mixing - and I resent the fact that screen estate that should be given to helping me find great new music is instead given to desperate attempts to shove podcasts in my face.
Yes. I used Spotify for podcasts for a long time (because it was convenient and I had a music subscription), and then gave up. The only user visible changes I ever saw were ads for podcasts I didn't care about pushed into my face. I would search online for some problem I had and see that it had been reported years ago by other users and no improvement ever came.
Their service has always been very reliable, I'll give them that. But the app just doesn't improve over the course of years. What on earth are they actually working on at this point? And what kind of podcasting strategy doesn't include making the app good for podcasts?
What if they did a better job of segregating music vs. podcasts in the same app? So you can search and "save your place" separately between podcast and music? That's my biggest gripe - I can't just pickup separately between the two, I have to search again, find my spot etc. It makes it tempting to just use a different app for podcasts.
I genuinely can't understand how they haven't fixed this already. If you listen to a podcast and then half way through switch over to music, there is no easy way to resume that podcast you were on, and good luck finding that one episode among the list of hundreds of episodes. It makes me think Spotify employees don't even use the app themselves.
I hate their interface, and there are a number of annoying podcast specific bugs. But for this use case you actually can find and resume your most recent few podcasts. You go to Library >> New Episodes, and at the top under Continue Listening there are your 3 most recent podcast episodes listed which you can click to resume.
I disagree, I love using the Spotify app for podcasts. I have podcast addict and never use it because frankly I already go to Spotify for all-things-audio.
Now they allow paid podcasts as well, so my playlist is complete.
When I started using Spotify back in 2011, I was excited to not have to use N apps for music. I want to stick to not having to use more than 1 app for audio.
I sort of agree but there are many product reasons not to do that. They could also have segregated the content in their existing app(s) more strictly. I, like you, am hardly ever interested in seeing both music and podcasts. Keep the "home" pages music-only and let me navigate to podcasts when that's what I'm interested in.
I somewhat disagree. The key to profitability in the audio space is moving listeners from pay-per-stream content (music) to owned content (podcasts, shows, etc.). For that latter costs are fixed even as listenership grows. The only profitable subscription audio service is SiriusXM, and they do this through exclusive licensed content (Howard Stern being the most notable example). Getting people to switch back and forth between apps makes it hard to get people to substitute the profitable content for the unprofitable.
This is a big reason why I left Spotify. Seemed like they kept pushing me to lower cost content like covers and live performances instead.
The other is that unfortunately things are ecosystems these days. Spotify just didn't seem to work as well on Google Home and Android Auto. Probably not their fault as Google can barely keep their shit working.
Even Sirius isn't THAT profitable...they have several satelites that will need to be replaced in the next few years, each of which will eat about 9 months of profit.
Assuming that app didn't suck, I'd actually use it. Instead of actively avoiding anything related to podcasts in the music app because as soon as you accidentally interact with any of the podcast content that triggers it to start shoving it in your face even more.
Specifically with JRE, the AndroidTV app for Spotify was horrible and I cancelled when I dropped PayPal, and didn't bother looking to resubscribe another way. As far as I know it's still pretty bad.
I'm not sure why the podcasts are so hated in Spotify. Yes the home screen podcast
carousel unnecessarily ate some premium space, but for me they otherwise stayed out of view.
Also, I do like them in the same app. Never in my life had I ever listened to a podcast before trying Fall of Civilizations in Spotify. Podcasts were totally irrelevant to me as a concept, similar to radio. But I've now added this to my habits, so I guess the strategy works when targeting casual listeners.
From a dev perspective, it seems close to trivial to "enable podcasts" in the current app. I think most of the work there was just on organization UIs.
A separate app could be a great marketing tool for people looking for a good podcast app alternative (assuming Spotify was serious about investing in a solid app from what die-hard podcast listeners like to see in it), and monetize with ads unless they become a paying Spotify user (then the music gets enabled too).
The entire point is to leverage one's leading position in one market to try to dominate another market. It's one of the primary plays in the anti-competitive playbook, a key that anti-trust enforcers should be watching for.
If not for their belief they could do this, why would they bother with podcasts at all? Let alone try to break them, making them no-longer-podcasts, but only consumable via their own app?
The play here was to get a higher %age of listening time in the app spent on free content (ie the long tail of podcasts). Use a few paid big names to create exclusivity and then funnel listeners to the freebies they don't have to pay for while collecting your monthly subscription.
They didn’t build a separate app precisely because they want people listening to less music where they have to pay the music industry for each play and move to content that just had a fix cost
It’s funny because I listen to music quietly in the background while my podcasts play, so I can’t use Spotify for podcasts _because_ they’re in the same app.
so agree here. i've used Pocketcasts and Spotify since my first smart phone. i have no philosophical opposition to Spotify acquiring exclusive content...whatever, play that game spotify. but end of the day, i want the best possible podcast experience, and you're not giving it to me. happy to keep them separate
As a user, I'm pretty irritated by Spotify's "Let's shove podcasts down your throat, whether you like it or not" approach. I can't turn them off. I just want music. It is actively harmful to spam podcasts to those with AD(H)D-like tendencies.
> "Let's shove podcasts down your throat, whether you like it or not" approach
Unless I have incorrect data, they have to pay like 70% of their revenue to record labels because they hold the rights.
Knowing that, it feels like podcasts was their "big bet" to "own" some content of their own and be able to receive a bigger share? Just an educated guess really on my end.
It's a similar to Apple's app store model. 70% gets passed on to whomever owns the rights and it is often a record company, but not always. As I understand it, some artists (like Paul Simon) own the rights to their music.
Sony Music owns 2.5% of Spotify and Universal Music owns 3.5%. I sometimes wonder if those publishers have made more money on the stock or on royalty payments? It also creates a bit of a conflict of interest for the companies in that they benefit in more than one way when by getting their artists on Spotify.
The record companies were early investors. As I understand it, Spotify gave the big record companies pre-IPO stock in exchange for putting their catalogs on the service.
It may just be culture. Tidal tried to be a music app with exclusives, and got a couple of big names, but people are used to being able to listen to everything on their preferred platform and get annoyed at artists who go for an exclusive. I think games have the same thing to some extent.
I would note that there have been some "artists" showing up on Spotify's recommended playlists who haven't been heard of anywhere else, which are suspected of being their "store brand" (where Spotify have presumably paid some session musicians to record the song but keep all the rights).
There are plenty of books which are released exclusively on Amazon and/or Audible.
For music: Well they tried. Apple Music and Spotify had a little exclusives war in the beginning, but I think neither managed to grab enough that it mattered
I'm an executive in the music industry and I'm familiar with the details of the situation. I can't talk about the specifics, but I can tell you that your guess is very close to the reality. There is one additional twist, but you really have to understand how the music industry works to guess it.
I totally get why they wanted to do it - but I also found their integration into the UI off-putting. The patterns of listening to podcasts and songs are just so different and they offered little support on mixing the two (no separate queues, etc). It felt very half-baked from a UI / UX perspective.
I had the same issue with Shorts on YouTube. I'd spend hours mindlessly scrolling through shorts because they shove it in your face and can't be turned on. In the end I've resorted to a modified binary called uYou+ on ios to turn it off (turns out it has some other nice features such as ad blocking, sponsor skip and 3x speed support).
I never listen to podcasts and when I launch Spotify on my phone, half the screen is filled with podcasts. One day I was on autoplay and it even thought it was a good idea to play a random podcast instead of music.
I tried Apple Music for the last few months, and while it's very bad on so many points, I like that they made a separate Podcasts app. I'm still not decided on whether I'll stick with Spotify or Apple music mainly because of the podcasts thing.
Podcasts in the Spotify app drove me to try Apple Music. Apple Music has even more UX problems. In particular around their music podcasts/shows. Like Elton John has one called Rocket Hour. This may have changed but there was no way to bookmark or favorite Rocket Hour or keep track of which episode you listened to last or even to get back to it without searching for it. Other users literally suggest keeping a notes doc with the link (https://music.apple.com/us/curator/rocket-hour/993269779) and then just tapping that.
I dunno if the space needs more competition or what but UI/UX does not seem to be a priority for the main players.
Playlists. I can migrate them to Apple Music but the order in which I added each of these songs is important to me and the last time I tried to export them, such an order was lost.
I know I might be the minority but that's what happened to me the last time I wanted to try something different from Spotify.
Apple requires you to sign up for their developer program ($99/yr) to use the Apple Music API, so you'd either have to pony up some money or do something fancy.
I think it is same with Amazon Music. All I want to do is play some songs while driving without these fucking podcast shows in my face every single time. It somehow tries to block me discovering/ searching any music and keep nudging me to podcasts.
I never understood how companies worth billions can fumble having the most basic features across all of their platforms. For example, Spotify's desktop UI for podcasts: on mobile, I'm able to look at my liked podcasts and have a chronological list of the newest episodes across all of them. On the desktop app, that entire feature is missing. I have to check each individual podcast on the desktop app to find new episodes. It's such a frustrating experience and it's been like this for years.
Also, my understanding is that you cannot purchase podcast subscriptions on Spotify. One of my favorite podcasts "Serious Trouble" (previously All the Presidents' Lawyers) moved to a subscription model to unlock longer episodes, and it seems crazy to me that I cannot just pay to subscribe through Spotify. Instead, they publish those podcasts through Substack, which seems like such a missed opportunity for Spotify.
Separate from podcasts but another Spotify annoyance: Spotify (recently?) added 'enhanced playlists' that auto-adds songs to your Liked Songs. I actually like this feature. But those auto-added songs do not appear on the Desktop app, so I can only use this feature if I exclusively use my phone to stream music. I can't imagine what the internal justification for not prioritizing having the same features across platforms.
A combination of churning the app constantly and focusing on analytics, I think. “Well, not many of our users use the desktop app, and only 15% of the users make use of the feature.” In a vacuum that looks great, but many long-lived products are successful precisely because they cater to every possible need you could have.
> Often it's because they have one Product Manager for Web, one for iOS, one for Android etc.
Not sure what it's like now, but several years ago, this wasn't the case. Squads usually had people for Android, iOS, and desktop, and the product owner oversaw all of the platforms.
if Substack is like Patreon you can listen to the paid feed on any podcast app via RSS feed, except Spotify which doesn't allow users to manually add RSS feeds.
I do think that podcasting is ripe for disruption and a great candidate for a "super app" that can end up being people's go-to to listen to podcasts and be exposed to new ones.
Spotify did literally nothing to actually support podcasting as another vertical--which it 100% is. Podcasting isn't just "music" and it's a profound misunderstanding to believe that it is. It's honestly embarrassing that their biz dev people were like: "just buy out Joe Rogan, that should do the trick." To this day, I mostly listen to podcasts on YouTube. Spotify doesn't have transcripts, scrubbing, chapters, discoverability, "shorts," etc., etc. I run an open source Spotify player[1] and their API doesn't even have a podcast type/category (lol, they are actually "music videos" in the JSON payload). It's like podcasts don't even exist.
> I do think that podcasting is ripe for disruption and a great candidate for a "super app" that can end up being people's go-to to listen to podcasts and be exposed to new ones.
What would a disruptive new "super app" bring to the table compared to every other podcast app that already does this?
Same here. I don't use Spotify for podcasts, even though I pay for premium, because I have Pocket Casts.
I listen to podcasts at 2.7x. Not the 2.5x or 3.0x speeds Spotify insists I have to choose among.
I have podcast-specific settings. Podcasts like Lex Fridman start at exactly 7 minutes in, so that I avoid predictable ad segments.
The player cuts out silence and skips pauses automatically. It's nice that it tells me how many hundreds of hours I saved last year just by skipping silence.
Pocket Casts doesn't put up one banner after another warning me to learn more about Covid, just in case people in the episode say something that the official narrative won't catch up to for 6~18 more months.
Also Pocket Casts doesn't put banners on its home page reminding me to tamp down my assumed racism and avoid beating up Asian people.
If Spotify made a podcast player better than Pocket Casts and stuck to letting me listen to podcasts without US-centric political banners, then I'd be using Spotify.
Has pocketcasts added the ability to replace all silences with a fixed length one? While I like the silence skipping feature, I've found that sometimes its a bit TOO effective, and you lose a little bit of speaking cadence. I'd love to replace all silences longer than 1s with just a 1s silence
If you're a native speaker listening to native speakers, you can probably easily do 2x after a few hours of getting used to it.
If you're listening to someone with an accent you might have to slow it down a lot.
Likewise if your audio quality isn't very good or if you're concentrating too much on another task.
E.g. when I'm walking in familiar neighborhoods 2.7x is easy but when the area is even somewhat unfamiliar I either slow it down to 1.x or turn it off, because I suddenly find it hard to grok the content.
I first started speeding up my podcasts when I heard that blind people can listen above 4x ~ 6x speed without missing a beat.
This is an optimization I am happy to live without. I usually digest podcasts in pieces, and very rarely, outside of driving, listen to one from start to finish. I consume audio books the same way.
By contrast, Spotify's Episode Search is the best in the business, bar none. At least on Android. All the other options are so fucking bad, it makes me mad. Let's say I want to search not for a podcast, but all podcasts featuring "Alex Honnold". Well, when I type that in to Spotify, it gives me loads of podcasts he's appeared on, with the option to start playing the episode immediately.
All the other apps that I've tried, AntennaPod, PocketCasts, Podcast Addict, are in stone age. How do these other apps expect me to discover podcasts? They are just glorified RSS feeds, these other apps.
Having said that, I don't want to pollute my music with my podcasts, so I don't use Spotify for podcasts anyway :)
I used to use Player.fm as my main podcast app, and it had a pretty good episode search feature.
> All the other apps that I've tried, AntennaPod, PocketCasts, Podcast Addict, are in stone age. How do these other apps expect me to discover podcasts? They are just glorified RSS feeds, these other apps.
I didn't know PocketCasts was lacking this too! When I switched to AntennaPod, this was the only feature I really missed. But by now, I've gotten used to just websearching for podcast episodes and then opening them in AntennaPod after the fact.
The Google Podcasts app has search like that on Android as well. I agree that it's amazing that there is such a dearth of usable podcast apps out there, especially on Android.
The problem there is you need to install the Google app in addition to the podcast app, something I refuse to do. I just don't get why podcast search is so appalling, and why it's not a bigger deal. It drives me bananas.
Pocket Casts has a whole “Discover” tab with both algorithmic and human-curated recommendations, as well as browsing by category. I’m not sure what more you could ask for except for maybe user-generated shareable playlists.
Pocket Casts even has this excellent feature where you can share a link to the current time stamp in an episode and share it. The recipient of the link doesn’t even need to download the app; the shared snippet is playable right in the browser.
Read my lips: "Episodes". I want to search through bloody episodes! I want it to go through it's entire index of ALL episode titles, show-notes and transcripts and find me relevant podcast episodes where the phrase I searched is relevant.
I don't want discovery, I don't want AI, and I certainly don't care for any sharing things. I want to be able to find content. And I don't want to go join a series on Episode 592 and go backwards. I'm interested in a topic: Jennifer Aniston, Alex Honnold, Dieter Rams, GUI libraries in Rust, C++ game development, Financial Independence. I just want it to show me individual episodes!
It'd be like searching google for "GUI library in Rust" and it showing me the Rust website and saying "good luck out there!" It should just search the bloody websites and show me the relevant webpage.
Podcasting 2.0 and PodcastIndex.org are helping a lot. I use the Fountain.FM app and get lots of new features through it that Apple Podcasts doesn't have.
Chapters, chapter art, support producers directly through streaming sats and tipping extra through "boosts". It's great! I don't make much use of it, but there are cross-app comments, live stream notifications, and more.
Apple Podcasts is atrocious from a usability standpoint and unless you know exactly what you're looking for, discoverability is extremely opaque. No "trending," no "new podcasts," no "shorts." Compare the Apple Podcast experience to something like TikTok or even the YouTube algorithm.
> Compare the Apple Podcast experience to something like TikTok or even the YouTube algorithm.
I've compared these and Apple Podcast, as bad as it is, is miles better. YouTube shorts is a waste of screen real estate and TikTok is a waste of time altogether. I want a tool for finding things, not a funnel for delivering ads.
Am I missing something? Apple Podcasts is nothing but discovery -- It's 3/4 of the main tabs. On "Listen Now" you get popular and personalized suggestions, on "Browse" you get new, trending, top shows, top episodes, top channels, and a bunch of categories. If that's not enough if you go to "Search" and pick a genre you get top, new, and subgenres.
Maybe it's just me, but Apple Podcasts only shows me NPR and NYT podcasts on listen now, and Browse is pretty much the same but with some republican outlets thrown in. I've never discovered a great podcast on there.
Why would I want any of that garbage? The only one of those suggestions that's remotely worthwhile is "shorts" for podcasts to post best-of clip shows without requiring you listen to full episodes.
I think one of the reasons Lex Friedman and Andrew Huberman's respective podcasts increased in popularity was the hole left on youtube platform by Rogan leaving to spotify.
For me, the main reason not to use Spotify for podcasts is that their goal is transparently to turn a (still somewhat) open ecosystem into a walled garden under their control. If this had succeeded, and they'd taken the market from Apple, anybody could predict there would have been a heel turn where Spotify locked down podcast distribution and charged more money for it. As a start.
It felt from the beginning like they were saying "well, we're enough of a force in the music industry that artists, labels, and fans have to just accept the new terms we've set. I'm betting we're big enough to do that to podcasting, too. Let's find out!"
I like Joe Rogan, but I don't like the UX that Spotify offers, which is why I've never managed to move over to Spotify for music or for podcasts. Joe Rogan's nice just resulted in me watching him MUCH less, I think I watched two maybe three podcasts since he moved there. I think that YouTube is just that much better for video and obviously that more familiar to me. As for music, I mostly listen to it either locally or on YouTube Music (which can lead to me taking music, that I like, locally).
Don't get me wrong I tried to switch to Spotify many times but it never stick. I still remember trying for multiple hours to open my friends most played of the year playlist without success, I still don't know what I was doing wrong, I even tried creating a new account, but it didn't work, while other friends could listen to that playlist without problems, to me it didn't even show.
As for video the controls felt a bit of and selecting the size of the video was a bit strange too.
Thus I remain on YouTube. I do, from time to time go and check if Joe Rogan had any interesting guests, but the bat for me to watch it is much higher then it was on YouTube, where I watched a lot of Joe Rogan, I'd say at least one episode per week!
But hey, we still get clips on YouTube, so that's something ^^
Same here. There was a Spotify dev on twitter who was saying that Spotify only hires the best and that's why they are so successful. Very arrogant.
But like okay, if you are so great why can I only watch at 1x playback speed for video?
I'm just not willing to watch at that rate. The other thing was clips of Rogan on YouTube showed me if I wanted to watch the full thing. Spotify doesn't really offer that in the same way at least.
It's a big downgrade from YT over some UX and features that aren't that hard to create
> But like okay, if you are so great why can I only watch at 1x playback speed for video?
Maybe they updated this recently since you last tried, but you can most certainly change the playback speed for podcast videos (0.5x–3.5x). I just did it. Of course, the UX could definitely be improved in other ways, such as providing a more organized & easily filterable feed rather than a somewhat random assortment of 'Your shows' and 'Episodes for you'.
Actually I double checked this. The web player (which is how I use Spotify) STILL does not support more than 1x video playback. So I guess my original point still holds true.
Spotify with all their "genius" engineers still don't have the basic functionality you would expect.
Speed adjustment is available for video podcasts on spotify desktop. I just tried it directly on a rogan podcast, and can use it on both linux and windows desktop.
They must have updated it recently because the Convo I had with him was a few months back. He just went on and on about how no one wants the feature etc.
Ack, YouTube Music did this thing where it was playing random YouTube videos from people who uploaded the song, rather than an "official" release, and I fled wildly. I want nothing to do with YouTube when I load in YouTube Music; I want as close to the "official" source as I can get, and anything else bothers me. Spotify at least delivers that for me.
Did they stop doing that? I might ponder moving back to YouTube Music if so...
I've never had that happen. I only use the mobile app, though.
I've read complaints of people getting YouTube recommendations in their YTM. When I first got it, I created a second account/channel in YouTube (same login, just click on your profile pic and add an account) and I used that for YTM so they don't cross contaminate. They really should tell you this.
I turned off video in the YTM app settings, because I'm listening not watching. But it still will let you listen to a video with no visuals. This is the best part of YTM; if you listen to a lot of unpublished stuff it won't be on Spotify, but there's almost always a YouTube version. It treats it like any other track, and you can add it to playlists, etc. I've never had it show a YouTube video as the first hit if there is a published version of the song. The videos are near the bottom of the results in a separate section unless it's the only result.
I have also only seen a couple JRE episodes since the Spotify takeover, but the UI is not my problem. My problem is Spotify trying to seize control of an open ecosystem.
I believe they said UX. to me, Spotify has always been an example of good UI, but not so for its UX
Spotify used to have this great thing where if you long-pressed a song, it’d play ~15s from the main hook. it was amazing for quickly getting the sense of a playlist or recognising a song, but they removed it because not enough people used it.
and there’s the big one everyone talks about: Radio. Spotify radio used to be fantastic. in goes a song and out comes exciting new songs, with a few you know sprinkled in. for a lot of people I know, this was why they chose spotify over anything else
then at some point the metrics will have shown that - shock! - people prefer songs they already know??? so now radio crams in as many songs you know as the genre will allow
of course the numbers show that people like what they’re already familiar with! but that’s not the point of a fucking radio
Seeing a lot of hate for Spotify's implementation of podcasts; does anyone here regularly use the app for Podcast listening?
I do, and it's fine. It doesn't blow me away, and I expect they're trying to, but it's not like... unusable or anything. My one complaint is that it plays episodes in the opposite order; like, if I discover a new podcast, I want to start from the beginning, but it only wants to let me play backwards (older and older episodes). It lets you sort in reverse order, but I don't think it plays them in that sort order (or it didn't last time I looked anyway).
But yeah, a lot of "Spotify generally sucks" or "what Spotify is trying to do sucks" but not a lot of "I use Spotify for podcasts and I don't love it".
I think it's important to understand why people use spotify for podcasts. They use spotify because they already have spotify for music. No one is buying spotify for the podcasts. So the player has to be.... fine. It needs to be just good enough not to actively force people away from it. Spotify podcasts fits the corporate software quality model. And podcast players have been around for about 15 years anyway by now, so it's not rocket science. Anyone who doesn't like it... there are dozens of other podcast apps out there that are great.
I buy Spotify for podcasts (as a listener of Heavyweight which is now exclusive to Spotify).
It sucks, and about 40% of the time an ad comes on, it crashes or loses my place in the episode completely when I try to skip (or I'm unable to skip). It's literally the worst podcast player I've ever used.
I don't know what other exclusives they've gotten with a captive audience, but it's at least a reasonably logical play. Reply All would have kept me on the platform too had it not ended.
But I stay because that's where my playlists and recs are, and those serve me well enough too.
I use it frequently, and there has been a major bug since launch that seems present on multiple platforms (desktop, mobile, Android, Apple). Seemingly at random, though I have suspicions that it's related to ads, the currently playing podcast will skip to the next unplayed episode before the current one is finished. This happens anywhere from a few minutes in to a few hours in. I would never watch another podcast in the Spotify app if the podcast I want to watch was available elsewhere.
They launched a half-baked product that was missing some of the most basic features you could imagine. It has since improved to the point where it's almost usable, but it can't compete with anything else from a UX/quality perspective.
It's also missing the discussion/community aspect that you get with a platform like YouTube.
Another annoyance is that I've had a Premium family subscription for years, but I still get ads on podcasts.
Last I used Spotify for podcasts, it didn't have chapter support, didn't have shownotes support, didn't have smart speed (skipping silinces), don't think it had any concept of playlists or queues, and so on. Some of that may have changed but those are pretty basic features for a podcast player.
I do and my biggest gripe is that offline/syncing of new episodes has been broken for some time now.
Here's what I expect: If I'm subscribed to a podcast and have it marked as "download", Spotify should sync new episodes as they become available and I will later be able to listen to them offline.
This used to work but does not anymore. Sometimes I will even preemptively open the Android Spotify app in the foreground, only to leave the house and later discover that nothing got downloaded.
I've also in recent months noticed weird latencies of downloaded content which is only present when Spotify servers are not reachable (such as when not connected to internet). Pressing "play" or navigating to a new episode will do nothing for 5-20 seconds, despite all necessary data already being downloaded. This is the same for podcasts and songs.
Oh, and also getting a nag-overlay about Google Play Services whenever I try to use Connect, despite my setup not relying on it.
All these are regressions: They used to work fine but got worse. As another commenter noted, it's amazing how they can spend so much resources when basic table stakes and seemingly trivially fixable UX regressions like this is what will actually drive me away from using Spotify for podcasts.
It's complete shit. It constantly loses my spot in an episode the next time I open it up, resetting me back to the beginning so I have to find the timestamp again. This is a basic 101 feature and they cannot get that right on Android.
As a European consumer of mostly American podcasts I find it very limiting when I hear them say some weird platform I never heard of. I'm mostly on youtube, and if it's not on youtube I do very little effort to try and find where it is.
But regardless if it's youtube or iTunes, people generally don't feel like signing up for a bunch of different services.
A lot of podcast owners are very clever these days, the days of 360 deals and naive young artists being exploited by big media are in the past.
That's why Spotify only got a licensing deal with Rogan, as an example. Freedom is more and more important for experienced content creators.
I want to see content creators use all available platforms. Just like they post to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at the same time.
> After one particularly charged Rogan blowup in 2021 (he said of Caitlyn Jenner that “maybe if you live with crazy bitches long enough, they fucking turn you into one,”) Reply All co-host Alex Goldman wrote in an open Spotify Slack channel that he had been contacted by a Vice journalist who was looking to speak anonymously with Spotify staff about how they felt about Rogan’s comments and previous episodes about trans issues. Staff immediately flagged the Slacks to company higher ups, who reprimanded Goldman, and forced him and several other employees to post apologies written by the company in Slack.
I don't know what's more frustrating - that Alex Goldman - an ostensibly technical person - would be stupid enough to put a callout to journalists seeking to speak employees anonymously in a company Slack, or that the company would think it smarter to force him to apologize publicly rather than deleting the message and reprimanding him privately.
One of the most egregious aspects of Spotify’s podcast is when it triggers an ad when you click the 15 second rewind. I’ve paid for Spotify for nearly 10-years.
I’d pay more to not have any ads. Making ads trigger on rewinding is so offensive to me that I’m tempted to pirate JRE in the future.
Every product and service in America gets progressively more exploitative over time. It’s an endless inspiration of cynicism.
1. There’s a big behemoth corporation. Loaded with money, 100K+ employees, bazillion features, complex, slow clunky product that a lot of users hate. They can’t grow by adding more value so they resort to money extraction tactics by making user experience worse.
2. New startup realizes they can build 80% of product in a few months with a small team. They build a sleek, swift, sweet product that takes off.
3. The tech behemoth first ignores it, then tries to trample it and then gets angry, but too late. Someone stole their lunch.
4. The new startup is hiring like crazy. Their growth is slowing, their investors are asking for new avenues. PMs are resorting to shady growth tactics. Ads in users faces, app is becoming complex, clunky and dog shit slow. Who cares though? Growth at any cost, gotta increase market cap.
5. The startup is the behemoth. A large chunk of their users hate it and want something better.
to be a fly on the wall at rogan's right now.. yeah he made the money, but I wonder sometimes if it tanked his show. Almost nobody talks about him or his guest's antics anymore when just 2yrs ago he was approaching howard stern status.
You can’t single out moving to Spotify as the cause because there are two other confounding factors - moving to Texas and his reaction to everything around Covid.
And even if it was because of Spotify… well, that’s what the money is for - they paid him enough to be okay with it.
I think it was his move to spotify that was the inflection point. I used to watch a handful of his podcasts on youtube each year, whenever I saw that he had interesting guests on (and not just his unfunny comedian friends or MMA fighters...) But since he moved to spotify I haven't seen a single one of his interviews. I'm not installing some dumb app to watch a dump ape a few times a year.
I don't think him moving to Texas had anything to do with it.
I do think he became deeply unpopular in many circles because of the anti COVID takes though. He went from a bro-y, kinda douchey guy who seemed harmless to a spokesperson for antivaxers. Lots of folks in the middle who didn't have much of an opinion, or care too much about him, that ended up writing him off completely.
TBH his podcast just got boring before then. I had pretty much stopped listening because I got bored with Joe interrupting the guest to talk about apes or something like that. He didn't really seem to make an effort to understand his guests a lot, especially when it was something he might be politically against. It just became uninteresting. I forgot who it was that he had on, but they were talking about how in another world where team sports were gender-mixed instead of what they are now, we'd value different things in teams (like the different qualities brought by the different types of players, or their ability to work together to succeed, not just worship at individual superstar athletes as is common now) and Joe was just like "but guys are the best, I don't understand". Like, it wasn't really a hard concept to grasp, even if you don't think sports teams should be gender-mixed.
The covid thing is interesting because there are people who will flock TO someone for being so against it. In the basketball world saw the same thing with Kyrie Irving. Is it enough to offset all the people who see that and nope out? No clue but there is at least a vocal minority who are so incredibly anti-vaccine now.
I find Spotify in general to be greatly inferior to Youtube and I listen to JRE a lot less since his move there. I'll catch all his high profile guests but I find I never listen to random podcasts because the Joe Rogan "Experience" downright sucks on Spotify.
- The constant ads in the US, they're skippable but they're obnoxiously long and frequent and annoy the crap out of me.
- Spotify app performs poorly, seeking is slow, random freezes/hangs, sometimes I have to close the app completely to get an updated list of shows for a podcaster for some reason.
- The interface for viewing shows is inferior. Thumbnails for shows are tiny while they have a ton of wasted space on a typical 1440p monitor.
I also think he's greatly bought into the mob's demands and engages political topics a lot less frequently since at least COVID, despite being lied about repeatedly and basically being correct in almost everything he ever said or questioned.
My favorite Joe Rogan episode was with Jesse Ventura where he tried to inject testosterone into the conversation and Ventura promptly shut him down. I find the podcast full of pseudoscience and the guests are for the most part nobodies or resume fabulists. He is a likable guy and a lot of people do love the MMA stuff so I don't see him going away anytime soon.
I, as one data point, refused to make a Spotify account just to continue listening to Rogan.
I already have a paid Pandora account, that's more than a decade old and I really like. I have all the same "features" a paid Spotify account has (offline listening, playlists, choose any song, etc) and what I feel is a vastly superior "radio" aka. suggested listening.
I have no reason to use Spotify, except Rogan - and that wasn't enough.
So, Rogan lost me as a regular listener, and Spotify's plan was thwarted (in a single case at least). Although... I'm probably not alone here.
Rogan already got paid, so I'm sure he won't be too bothered. He's also kept the YouTube channel alive with occasional clips and fight companions, and would presumably switch back should things turn sour with Spotify.
I'm really curious what kinds of numbers he's been getting since switching to Spotify. My perception has been that his cultural importance has waned significantly since the switch, but I don't have any hard numbers to back this up, it's just vibes.
We can't know for sure because sirius doesn't publish ratings like terrestrial radio. We do know sirius had put incentives in his contract where if they reached X more subscribers after Stern announced he was moving, he'd get a bonus. He met these almost instantly.
More than his radio show, Stern also lost TV around the same time he switched to sirius.
Rogan would love nothing more than being less popular.
What do you imagine the benefit of being more famous to be? It is all downside once you get past being able to ask anyone to be on your show or go for dinner and most of them say yes.
I wish famous people would openly talk about what a pain in the ass and actual security risk it is to be even remotely famous.
I think your insight isn't a bad one but -- The famous people I've interacted with would be pretty quick to agree with the downsides (they are painful and huge) .. but also very generous about admitting the upsides. Depending on the level of fame they can be enormous. The special access of famous people's lives is.. hard to understand if you don't have it (I don't have it, but I've witnessed and experienced the tiniest bits of it and holy shit). I don't think a single one of them would trade it / go back.
Would they really not give up the fame but keep the money if they could? I feel like the advantage of getting free shit doesn't really matter when you have a 9 figure net worth like Rogan.
I was so annoyed by them forcing podcasts down my throat that I left the platform. Sample size of one, but give me a break people! Make it a separate tab in the app at least. Makes you wonder if this tested well with a bunch of users that aren't me or if they didn't even test with a user!
I like Spotify. I like podcasts. What I didn't need was podcasts popping up when I wanted to listen to music. Or vice-versa. Trying to mix together the two in a single app always seemed pretty awkward to me.
I've never had this happen. If I'm listening to podcasts, the stream is purely podcasts. If I listen to music, the stream is purely music. I don't recall anything "popping up". My front page can have mix, but they're all podcasts I listen to, with a couple of recommendations thrown in.
But, I suppose, for those that don't listen to podcasts, being able to turn them off completely would be pretty desirable.
I see a really common pattern of "thing people like if they don't pay for it" being confused with "thing that we can use to print money if we make them pay for it instead."
I'm very curious to see if Twitter tries to push further down that road. It hasn't worked well for others. Quibi is probably the highest-profile example so far, misreading the market for short-form downtime video.
It's the cable TV model, in many ways, except missing the bit where cable quickly started to give you new exclusive channels that people couldn't get anything like anywhere else (HBO, ESPN) instead of just repackaging your locals.
Kind of unfair to include at the end the only one important sentence for a publicly traded company.
"Spotify touted major user growth to finish out the year, and after announcing that it had best revenue expectations, the company’s stock price jumped."
Then, why would this author choose as title this: "Spotify's podcast bet went wrong"?
Not as professional as I would expect. Just another publisher seeking controversy and clickbait.
There are always deals gone wrong and bad management decisions in a company with the size and notoriety of Spotify. But, its not cool to post a piece that doesn't balance out all valuable info.
Spotify is in a tight spot (ba-dum-tsh). Valued at a lofty 7.7x gross profit because they pay out most revenue to record labels. First they try to improve profitability by buying Rogan and other podcasters, but that didn't drive enough listening. So now they tell investors they'll be the YouTube of audio. Which means the product changes away from music will keep coming. Can they keep users happy while pushing them to listen to user uploaded audio?
> First they try to improve profitability by buying Rogan and other podcasters, but that didn't drive enough listening.
Spotify is reportedly very happy with Rogan listeners. It is, reportedly, like a new Taylor Swift album dropping every single episode. Investors are very happy with Spotify's commercial success in the podcast space.
> “In hindsight, I probably got a little carried away and overinvested relative to the uncertainty we saw shaping up in the market,” Ek said on an earnings call in January
Then why is management abandoning that strategy? That's what the entire article is about...
It might be that they are happy with some podcasts, but only some. Meaning that it was a bad idea to capitalize this much on podcasts when only a few actually turned out to be performing well.
The core strategy was spending a lot of money on podcasts exclusive to Spotify. I'm not doubting that some were a success, but they no long want to spend money on exclusive content. That's a huge shift.
The Spotify Android app is terrible for podcasts. There has been a long standing bug where it will suddenly stop in the middle of an episode and jump ahead to the beginning of the next episode. Multiple reviewers have complained about this on the Google Play store. Why are the Spotify developers so lazy and incompetent that they can't make such basic functionality work reliably?
So I've always been pretty against listening to Podcasts via Spotify, so much so that I completely stopped listening to Last Podcast on the Left when they announced they were moving to Spotify.
I was driving recently though and tried to use Spotify to listen to a podcast. I just wanted to queue the whole season from episode 1 to episode N. The listing seemed to mix both seasons, and episodes were in some random order. I had to manually add the episodes to my queue which seemed.. odd.
>"So we are shifting to focus on tightening our spend and becoming more efficient."
Ah yes the pivot to "efficiency"! This has practically become a meme at this point. It's like the rallying cry of CEOs presiding over money furnaces everywhere.
Their app sucks for podcasts. That's where they went wrong. I stopped listening to several podcasts that went Spotify-only because their desktop app is so bad that it does not have an option to notify you of new episodes. That's ridiculous.
It is possible that the resources were allocated towards initiatives that the decision-makers believed to be valuable and aligned with their own goals. Permit me to offer a few examples in a respectful manner:
1. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex
2. Michelle Obama
3. Kim Kardashian
4. Brené Brown
With all due respect, it appears that these particular selections exhibit a marked bias and detachment from the preferences of the average podcast listener.
Such choices may be seen as lacking a true appreciation and understanding of the diverse range of tastes and interests within the broader podcast community.
And if they were then based on Apple Charts they would be apolitical and not interested in your diverse range of tastes and interests. Which I assume means not left-wing based on the not so subtle examples you listed.
It is worth noting that, with the exception of Joe Rogan, the examples I have enumerated are among the most significant podcast investments made by Spotify.
Speaking of subtlety, it bears repeating that the decision-making process of the team appears to be subject to a considerable degree of bias that is not particularly subtle.
I never hopped on the Spotify bandwagon. I wrote music streaming off because their players are consistently inferior to foobar2000, and I don't usually spend more than $10-$15 a month on new music anyways. I'm glad their play at capturing the podcast market seems to be failing. As much as people like the unlimited cheap music, I think Spotify has been a net negative for the industry and their plans for podcasts are nothing but bad news for everyone other than their shareholders.
Podcasting works fine with open standards like RSS. I refuse to listen to the same podcasts through Spotify and let them create a walled garden or some other lock-in.
Podcast experience on desktop is absolutely miserable. I just want a list of the most recent unplayed episodes in chronological order, is that too much to ask? Like jeez, it sounds like the most basic feature imaginable that should be part of an MvP for crying out loud.
Only reason I still use it is because it's easier to cast to my google nest minis than Apple Podcasts.
> ”Spotify was a one-company podcast bubble. Its drastic cuts have triggered a podcast winter”
I don’t Spotify was responsible for the podcast bubble. I am also not sure there is a podcast “bubble” at all. I sure don’t think we are in a “podcast winter”.
I agree Spotify’s bet on podcast might have gone wrong. But podcast industry seems to be going fine.
I think that depends on your lifestyle. Specifically, for how much of your day/week are podcasts the only viable form of media? While driving a car, there's a very limited amount of Reddit that can be read or TikToks that can be watched. If your lifestyle doesn't include long stretches of drive time, or the radio's sufficiently interesting for you, then you've never needed podcasts as a source of entertainment.
I've never listened to a Podcast on Spotify. I never intend to. I wish I could turn off the podcast spam that clutters the homepage of the app, and just focus on music.
I miss Google Play Music (before it too got cluttered with Podcrap) and Grooveshark
No shit, it was always clear that's what's gone happen.
Any podcast that goes exclusive on Spotify is simply a podcast I'm not gone listen to anymore. Luckily some of the podcast that were bought by Spotify are still available normally.
I'll be one person to say I like podcasts in spotify. It gives a unified experience across my phone, laptop, and car. Starting a podcast on my laptop, then getting in the car, it remembers where I was. I like that.
I've tried using Spotify for podcasts, but the UI is abysmal. Simple features like the ability to play a single podcast without autoplaying the next are not available.
good riddance. Spotify tried to erect a walled garden around RSS and failed. it's also a fairly crappy podcast player (way, way too willing to skip to the next podcast on the slightest mistake because its such a basic port of the music player). denying RSS and MP3 downloads on the episodes pages. you deserved to fail.
I used to listen podcasts on the Apple Podcast app but then I tried to listen to the same podcasts in Spotify and the audio quality was so much better. Anyone else felt the same? I mainly listen to Lex Fridman
“ and Joe Rogan, whose rambling, hours-long podcasts had somewhat confoundingly become the biggest hit in podcasting since Serial.”
WTF is “Serial”? And how can Rogan be the biggest thing since something I have never heard of? And how can it even be since “Serial” when he has been doing this for over a decade, before podcasting was a legit thing?
Serial was probably the first "killer app" of podcasting, with an episodic look at a crime that they (arguably) had a hand in reversing the decision for. Every bit of True Crime podcasting owes something to Serial, and it was a normie-friendly product that wasn't being published anywhere else, in any other formats. Journalists also bigged it up, which meant it got a lot of hype, as well.
For those who weren’t around when it came out, Serial was a genuine media phenomenon. I’d say it was on par with a big Netflix series (like squid game or Wednesday) in the sense that you would see it parodied in popular culture and could have “water cooler chats” with coworkers about it. I think it’s hard to understate how much this show did to introduce podcasts to the general population.
There’s also S-Town¹, from Serial (and This American Life). If you’re on the fence regarding its runtime², I recommend listening to the first two chapters in full and reevaluate then. So far, everyone I gave that recommendation to gladly stuck with it.
> He's a fairly toxic human being and I have no idea why people love him.
You've answered your own question.
Give it an honest good faith attempt to understand why people might like someone, and you'll probably find some sort of virtue. If you're cemented in your reality bubble and starting off with "he's a fairly toxic human" than you're not going to go anywhere.
I think your guess would be wrong too. Hacker news is still insulated enough that overly simplistic comments will down voted regardless of ideologically alignment.
> Hacker news is still insulated enough that overly simplistic comments will down voted regardless of ideologically alignment.
I think there is always some bias, regardless of perceived insulation from external influence. I'm guessing HN attracts entrepreneurial types and Joe Rogan is well-liked by male entrepreneurs.
And you are trying to spin masculinity in general as toxic. There is no such thing as toxic masculinity or toxic femininity. Some people are just jerks.
You seem to think he has the biggest show in the world but yet nobody actually watches him? Of course it got downvoted vehemently because he has a huge audience and his audience likes him. Not to mention all the misinformation that is constantly being spread about him leads people to want to defend him. Not rocket science.
Agreed! I switched from Spotify to Deezer one year ago.
The UX getting more and more clunky due to the podcast push really soured me, but the fact that part of my monthly subscription went to fund that person was what got me to click on the cancel button.
The switch to Deezer was really positive: the Flow auto-generated playlist is a lot more relevant to me than the Spotify weekly mixes.
You must be the resident Saint by the looks of it. Now, having said that, you do realize that bringing people down is actually far more toxic than having an opinion that's different from another person, right?
>"Joe Rogan, whose rambling, hours-long podcasts had somewhat confoundingly become the biggest hit in podcasting"
Rogan has some of the best guests on his show, they are informative and entertaining.
Also, does the author of this post even know how to skip whole episodes if he doesnt like the guest, or does he know how to 'scrub' (FF or RW)
-
You dont listen to the Rogan podcast for Rogan (typically) you listen to it for the guests.
The other best Podcast is Lex Fridman. Although I have to listen to that sped up ~1.25 usually, because lex talks too slowly for my taste - and the other frustrating fact is that Lex oft forgets/omits some of the obvious questions one would have for a guest -- or he hasnt informed himself well enough with the subject matter, he doesnt know to ask what others would find obvious.
But yeah - spotify's UX is so bad, I still just use YT JRE clips to get what I need from Rogan's episodes.
Honestly this is just a microcosm of the internet these days..."it's not part of my political bubble so if it's popular it's confounding".
Honestly "confoundingly" is probably fair compared to what you typically see...which is closer to "everyone who doesn't think the same as me is evil/wrong".
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