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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

One of my favourite podcasts is moving to become spotify exclusive. It is hard to put the betrayal I felt into words, when they first announced it.

I know it is a little silly and they probably do what is (in the short term) the best financial decision for them, but I already accepted that this is it and I won't listen to them anymore.

If you go exclusive to any plattform you never do it for your fans, but essentially against them. They might have a podcatcher they listen to you on they used for years, which they now should change because you want to limit the plattforms you are on.

The german podcast scene gladly seems to be quite resistant against these kind of things and they say they earn more through direct donations than spotify and/or audible is able to give them anyways.

Why would you voluntarily give up that freedom? And why is it so often US podcasters who do it first (they are also much more plastered with ads)?

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A typical independent podcast with small-medium viewership really struggles to monetize.

It’s great if things in the German podcast scene are different than rest of the world, enabling German podcasts to make more from donations than Spotify.

But if that’s not the case elsewhere, can you really blame the podcasters? Let’s say you decide to bake specialty cookies and give them away while relying on donations. Months in, you realize the donations aren’t really covering your expenses and effort. Then someone comes along and offers you a multiple of your donations for an exclusive, enabling you to make a decent wage.

I guess you could say “you’re doing it against your cookie-loving fans”. But I could just as easily argue “your original fans didn’t help you get fair comp, so you found another set of fans/arrangement to get fair comp”

Yes of course you could argue that. But they never asked for donations, they never asked their fans for the amount of money they need to do the thing they do.

The US values free speech very much, yet for some reason you will have a hard time to find any podcast who isn't dependend on or tied to some coporate interest (and be it the Nord VPN thing they are selling).

I am btw. willing to throw money their way, as I do with other podcasts. But the option wasn't there to begin with.

Most people don't want the hassle of running subscriptions. It's not as simple as putting a Patreon or PayPal link online - as soon as people become paying customers they start demanding things. It takes a lot of the joy out of being creative and turns it in to a job.

Having one sponsor like Spotify means you get paid but also retain a lot of freedom and distance from the audience. If I was a podcaster I'd much rather take that route, even if I lost some listeners.

> The US values free speech very much, yet for some reason you will have a hard time to find any podcast who isn't dependend on or tied to some coporate interest (and be it the Nord VPN thing they are selling).

I'm not sure I understand the "yet" here. Freedom of speech protects the ability to say things but has few implications on the incentives for saying things. It seems to frequently be cited as a variety of different things that are tangentially related to public discourse. Anyway, I'd hardly expect people in the 18th century to come up with a comprehensive framework for protecting against media outlets depending on corporate interests to monetize, if that's your concern.

I guess the point was that for a people that react very strongly to even the slightest hints of decreasing individual freedom, it's kind of ironic to have so many podcasts financed by corporate interests, which decreases their constitutional right to freely express their opinions on whatever subject.

For the podcasts I listen to, at least, they don't ever seem to feel constrained by their advertisers. At worst they seem bored by them; they don't particularly want to advertise underwear and mattresses. But generally, the advertisers are trying to reach a market that shares an interest with the people who make the podcast, and it just seems unlikely that they're ever being paid off to promote or avoid topics that they wouldn't naturally gravitate to (or from).

Perhaps that's because I'm selecting content with little political or controversial content. But even there, I suspect that people who do want that content will find that the advertisers who want them are the ones who naturally appeal to them anyway.

Consumerism in general is always insidious, but that's hardly limited to podcasting. There are a lot of paradoxes associated with being wealthy enough to be in an advertiser's demographic, and yet still be vulnerable to wanting something to make you happy.

I also do pay for podcasts, some via patreon and paypal but if I can find the IBAN I rather pay directly every month. I'm not paying much but (about 1 EUR / month / podcast) but I do it consistently.

The same thing happens when TV shows get sold or actors/hosts get contracts on other networks. I used to like the Colbert Report, but when he took over the late show I could never watch it because CBS wasn't on Hulu or any other streaming platforms. Recently I got Youtube TV, and I still can't watch anything on Comedy Central since Viacom won't put anything there or on Hulu.

The TV world is so fragmented these days, almost nobody will have access to every show on every network and streaming platform. Similarly in music even, not many people have Spotify and Apple Music and Tidal to have access to all the exclusive music. The openness of the podcast world is pretty great, but I won't be surprised if it goes the same way with more and more exclusives.

The flip side, though, is there's more really good TV content these days than ever before, it's just expensive (& annoying) to access it all.

My experience exactly with Last Podcast on the Left, which is just now going Spotify exclusive. The frustrating part is how many fans defend such an anti-listener action.

I'm aggravated by this too. Having donated by Patreon but listened via Overcast, I feel a bit offended to be told "thanks for all the money, we're going over here to be free but behind a wall". I won't be installing Spotify, the convenience of a single app is not something I'll give up. My loss and not theirs, sure. But galling, a bit, that the $58k/month Patreon income[0] plus whatever they get from ads, touring, merch etc isn't enough for them to keep it out in the open :/

[0] https://www.patreon.com/lastpodcastontheleft

It's a risk they'll take. Look at what happened to ninja and shroud when they switched to mixer from twitch. They are probably down 70%+ on their viewers (based on me checking in infrequently) and mixer isn't even walled off. It is incredibly hard to wall off something in this age of plentiful entertainment and maintain the viewers you once had.

Twitch really could use some competition, but I thought their self-promotion was a bit dishonest. They tried to portrait themselves as the underdog. True, compared to twitch perhaps, but they are still owned by Microsoft. And on the topic on content discrimination you probably wouldn't want that as a viewr.

I pay for a Spotify premium family membership, and I used to listen to LPotL through Spotify. I switched to another podcast app a few weeks ago when Spotify started making noise about inserting targeted ads into podcasts, and I'll drop LPotL once they go exclusive. The absolute last thing I want is Spotify exerting Facebook-like control over audio.

Well it is voices they trust who tell them it's allright. And if tou had spotify installed anyways you might convince yourself it isn't such a big deal.

From the perspective of the podcaster the question is: what kind of fans will they loose with such a move, and what kind will they gain in return?

Also money.

Fewer, or different fans, but a funded show may be worth a lot more than more / great fans and an unfunded show.

I think it's also because Markus always wanted to have a music Podcast, and I think Spotify will help with the licensing/integration for that?

If any of the dozens podcasts I listen to moved to Spotify I’d stop listening to them pronto.

I don’t know, but there aren’t many podcasts I’d switch platforms for. I’d much sooner find other podcasts.

And the thing is: you don't even need a plattform. A podcast could be as easy as a feed pointing to the latest compressed audio file of yours.

The most expensive thing in podcasting is the gear and your time.

That's kind of like I do it [1], I only have a RSS file and the mp3 uploaded to the server. I send that RSS link to that one iTunes service so it indexes the RSS file so that all the podcast apps which use their API for their search can find my podcast and subscribe to the RSS file on my server and download the mp3's from my server.

For the gear, I went fairly cheap, I got a Zoom H5 [2], which is super small, light and portable and two lavalier mics, one for me and one for the person I interview.

I then upload the two WAV files to Auphonic [3] and they add the jingles to it, clean up the sound, normalize it and let me download the mono mp3 which is really small but good quality, which I then upload to my server.

The whole workflow is surprisingly easy and fast. The most time I spend on finding people to talk to and trying to arrange a meeting at a specific time and place.

[1] https://jeena.net/pods.rss [2] https://zoom-na.com/products/field-video-recording/field-rec... [3] https://auphonic.com/

When I rebooted my podcast last year, Auphonic was a great discovery. It does a lot of cleanup and leveling with zero effort that, in some cases, could take hours of work previously if the volume levels varied a lot for whatever reason.

It's still good to get a decent quality recording. But seeing all the people who do video and broadcasts from trade show floors and the like got me to a point where I don't sweat it if I don't have pristine near-studio conditions. As long as I get interesting guests, 20-25 minutes of conversation IMO comes out pretty well without a huge amount of work.

Would you mind sharing the URL to your podcast? I like to listen to the smaller ones instead of what everybody seems to listen to.

Innovate @Open

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/innovate-open/id498373...

Your time is very expensive. A good podcast is a full-time job. Some can be pulled off as a hobby, but most of my favorite podcasters are either full-timers. For a living wage in the US, that's perhaps $30-$40,000 a year... which is a lot of mattresses and underwear to hawk, or a lot of donations to cajole. Which requires even more time spent managing that, tipping it further to being a full-time job.

Indeed - its not really a podcast anymore.

> The german podcast scene gladly seems to be quite resistant against these kind of things and they say they earn more through direct donations than spotify and/or audible is able to give them anyways.

Fest & Flauschig?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fest_%26_Flauschig

Gemischtes Hack, for another example. In fact, the only podcasts that came to mind for me here were German!

I support a few English-language podcasts on Patreon and that model seems to work quite well for them. Meanwhile, I rely on fan-supplied RSS feeds to keep up with F&F and GH :)

I'd be interested to see their listener numbers after they switched to spotify (and rebranded). Unfortunately it's hard to get any meaningful statistics in the podcast world except for downloads.

I was a regular listener of Sanft & Sorgfältig back in the days and stopped after their switch to spotify because it was just inconvenient to use compared to overcast. I'd probably do the same with other podcasts I regularly consume.

Well, they seem to be pretty popular as they just got another day to air. They also get a live even every year.

I get it through a Telegram group where someone rips the casts ;)

Would you mind saying which podcast it is? Trying to track the ones moving in a Google Sheet which I will share.

The Besties is now Spotify exclusive. It's my favorite video game podcast.

The fact that half of its hosts are Justin and Griffin McElroy makes me worried the whole McElroy family of podcasts might flip eventually.

The entire Last Podcast Network is going Spotify Exclusive. Last Podcast on the Left, Wizard and the Bruiser, the Story Must Be Told, Page 7, The Brighter Side, others I haven't listened to. They are somehow taking their entire back catalog with them as well.

Why not link to the sheet already?

I've been dreading that. I am a voracious consumer of podcasts (over 20 hours per week). I donate via Patreon and other tipping platforms, considerably more than I spend on Netflix, but I'm well aware that this is almost certainly not enough.

I'd be happy to funnel that money through Spotify, but I suspect there won't be enough to fund the truly jaw-dropping array of content that I've been getting for free for years. And I'd miss my existing podcast app (Pocket Casts), which I'm a very comfortable with.

I'll be very sad if my favorite podcasts decide to jump to Spotify, discover there's no money there either, and drop out.

if the choice is between them not existing vs selling out, do you still blame them? at least there's an avenue to consume their content

> Why would you voluntarily give up that freedom?

i don't even need a word to answer that: $.

I tried to search for a list of Spotify exclusive podcasts and it's nearly impossible to find. I'm not even sure if I'd notice if a podcast I listen to became a Spotify exclusive.

I agree if you’re already using Spotify to listen to podcasts. But if you’re not, you’d definitely notice a move to Spotify Exclusive because you’d need to have two podcast apps.

Plus your experience would degrade substantially, since before, you could have a music play queue for times you want to listen to music, and a podcast play queue for times you want to listen to podcasts. Now you'd have to manually push things in and out of a single play queue.

Why do people actually do that?

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