Will Spotify Ruin Podcasting?

mattstoller.substack.com

7 pointscjbest3 comments

> Spotify is rolling up the internet audio market, which their CEO, Daniel Ek, thinks will grow from $100 billion in revenue a year to somewhere near the video market, which is $1 trillion. People spend about the same amount of time consuming audio as video content. “Are our eyes,” he asks, “really worth 10 times more than our ears?”

An economist might be able to articulate this better than me, but this is likely due to simple supply and demand. Audio content is easier to produce, which makes a higher supply and a lower price. It is quite possible that audio is undervalued, but there is no reason to believe that a 10x difference between audio and video is unreasonable.

How much do people care about what they listen to? What kind of pricing power can the best stuff command?

I think it might not be as simple as supply and demand, because a) you can't just trade one piece of content for another and b) the marginal cost is ~$0.

Put another way: there are only so many hours in your life when you can listen to stuff. If Spotify has all the best stuff, it might be worth it to pay quite a lot, even if that stuff was cheap to produce.

If they succeed, yes.

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