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Comment by skohan | Hacker News Reader

It will be interesting to see how it goes. On the one hand, this could be a lot like Stern going to satellite radio: he went from being one of the biggest personalities in media to someone I don't ever think about.

At the same time, it's super interesting that Rogan negotiated a deal which appears to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars for Spotify to licence his content for 3 years, after which point he could put it all back on YouTube if he wanted. The fact that he had that kind of leverage as an independent creator who started by recording his friends clowning around at his house and now has presidential candidates knocking at his door begging for an interview shows the power of independent media

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Don’t make too many assumptions about Stern just because he dropped off your radar in ‘06. His show on SiriusXM continues to be renewed (though it might actually end soon - he’s getting exhausted).

As of 2015 his contract was worth $80 million PER YEAR and the estimates were that his audience is around 3.5 million highly engaged listeners. Yes, a fraction of what JRE gets in downloads, but hey...$80 million per year.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/16/business/media/howard-ste...

Not to say that $80 million/3.5 million listeners is anything to scoff at, but it's hard to argue that his cultural significance is vastly diminished. Others have said he was reaching 25 million listeners at his peak so 3.5 million is quite a step down from that.

Now that might be just fine for Howard Stern, like it might be just fine for Joe Rogan, but I think it's fairly likely that this kind of deal does come down to trading cultural cache, and one's status as a household name for cold hard cash at the end of the day. In that sense, Rogan's move to spotify might be more like a popular touring act being put to pasture as a headliner in Vegas than it represents him taking on the mantle of mainstream media.

I suspect Rogan will see somewhat less of a drop-off than stern since the barrier to entry for Spotify is significantly less than satellite radio, but I suspect we will see that the medium has been a major component of his success: his show is pretty good when it's free and when it's everywhere. In other words, like Howard Stern was the best thing you could find when flipping channels on the way to work, Joe Rogan's content is often worth a click in a sea of mediocre content. Whether people will actively seek it out remains to be seen.

As much as I hate to admit it, I think more casual users use Spotify than use podcasts. Anything that isn’t available in my podcast player is invisible to me personally. But I’m probably in the minority. Just like anything that doesn’t have an RSS feed is invisible to me. But again, I realize that I’m in the minority.

I sort of wonder if I would like using Spotify for podcasts. One thing that I like is that I have one button on my phone which I press when I want to listen to music, and another when I want to listen to podcasts. If I have mixed content, and for instance if autoplay will sometimes play music and sometimes a podcast I feel like this will make Spotify worse for music as well.

This isn't an issue on Spotify. You can't heart/star a podcast in the same way you can add music to your library. Podcasts have a separate library tab. The playback interface actually changes as well, instead of shuffle/repeat you have skip forward/back 10 seconds like an audio book.

I have premium, so one gotcha maybe whether you can download podcasts for free? I would be annoyed if I had to sit through both Spotify's ads and the product placement in podcasts. (does Spotify insert inline ads into podcasts as well?)

From what I understand, no. The initial purpose of getting podcast is not for advertising, but every minute someone spends listening to a podcast is a minute they are not spending listening to music that Spotify has to pay the music industry. They won’t embed advertising in third party podcast - for now.

It’s assumed that the second phase is to allow podcasters to embed ads to allow them to monetize their podcasts, but it will be opt in.

I feel like generic embedded advertising would be a step backwards in podcast monetization. It seems to me that interstitial adds in podcasts are incredibly powerful because they are usually in the voice of the pod-caster, so on average the listener is probably going to be much more attentive to the add since it's closely related to the content they're actively paying attention to. Without that people will just tune them out like every other ad

You probably spend most of your time listening to popular podcasts with a large enough listenership that they can get advertisers. There are thousands of smaller podcasters that can’t get advertisers.

Also, most podcast ads are for direct response ads where the effectiveness of the ad campaigns can be tracked somewhat via coupon codes and that either are for large purchases (Casper, Warby Parker) or for subscriptions where the lifetime value of the customer and churn rate can be estimated.

You don’t hear that many brand advertisements on podcasts. That’s the market Spotify wants to go after.

Besides, an advertiser doesn’t need fine grained targeting to know that for instance anyone listening to “The Talk Show” or “Accidental Tech Podcast” is a probably a computer geek with lots of disposable income.

> As of 2015 his contract was worth $80 million PER YEAR

Yeah and stephen marbury went to china and made millions, but he became irrelevant. We all know why stern went with sirius, for the money. But he became culturally irrelevant in the process. But the writing was on the wall. He was getting old and "shock jock" is a young man's game. So he was going to get irrelevant no matter what.

Stern had bonuses to grow the sirius audience if I remember correctly. Amazing considering Sirius had like 600k subscribers at the time!

Stern was at his height in 2001-2004 I think was peaking at 25m listeners in the mornings on terrestrial radio. Which was fucking massive. Dropped off huge on day 1 at Sirius and I don't think ever recovered most of his audience.

Interesting that audience size != what's a good deal for the broadcaster. Like music however I suspect the REAL value is in the 'back catalog'.

> Like music however I suspect the REAL value is in the 'back catalog'.

Really?

As a semi frequent JRE listener, if I missed an interesting guest I'll still go back and listen, but I'm not particularly motivated to go and listen to an interview from 1 year ago, or any historical one for that matter.

It needs to be current for me, I'm not convinced it has the replayability of music, or a tv show like friends say.

There's a 3rd option between latest vs replay called older episodes you haven't watched yet.

He has almost 1500 episodes covering thousands of hours. Many people listen to the back catalog while waiting for the latest episodes or more content from the interesting guests and topics.

Agreed. Most of what he talks about is timely/topical. I suspect maybe in 5-10 more years it could get interesting again.

Really? If a guest I'm interested in did an interview two years ago and none since, I don't really have a choice, I'm going to listen to that interview.

If Reddit, HN and similar sites are any indication, you're right. Views, clicks, comments, etc., fall of a cliff for content older than N units of time.

The ones with Duncan Trussell are highly rewatchable if you like him. He's always talking about philosophy and mysticism and other crazy shit he reads/talks about with others on his podcast. He just teamed up with the creator of Adventure Time to animate some of his podcasts for a show called The Midnight Gospel on Netflix, so they age pretty well.

Is the back catalog valuable without a system like YouTube's? There are countless small clips of the Joe Rogan show that are constantly recommended by the algorithm. Is there any indication that Spotify is capable of replacing that?

The clips stay on YouTube.

The long-form format is a huge part. The regular media is not incentivized to air a 3-hour interview with a thoughtful interviewer. No, you'll get a 2-minute clip on CNN designed to extract click-bait soundbites from the guest.

I have been watching his podcast for a while but I won’t follow him to Spotify. I would switch to Spotify if Spotify would create a proper Apple Watch app with LTE streaming. Unfortunately, Spotify seems intent on trying to “punish” Apple.

I think the JRE brand will be diminished but only time will tell.

Don't get it mistaken. Spotify hate all of their users, not just the Apple crowd. They tinker with their app too much, and with seemingly little value.

Yep, I'm still pissed about removing long press to preview

At least the Spotify UX is still better than Apple Music! I'd love it if Spotify would let you sort your playlists by last listened to like Pandora somewhere in the app. Currently I have to search and scroll every time to nearly the bottom of the library to find my Workout playlist which I use religiously at the gym.

I don't get the love for video podcasts. I find it far more efficient to just listen while doing something else (such as driving or working at my computer).

As long as I can get Rogan on my podcast app, nothing really changes for me.

To each their own. JRE is the only podcast I watch. You miss detail on his show if you can’t see the discussion. The episodes with Elon Musk come to mind. Seeing his facial expressions and reactions is more powerful than just hearing it. And, obviously, seeing him smoke a blunt was surreal and not something you can capture in an audio feed.

My point was that you could enjoy JRE the way you wanted to. Now you’ll have to enjoy it the way Spotify tells you to. As far as I know his episodes will be pulled off other platforms in September.

Agreed. But I did enjoy watching the podcast more when they actually showed the videos they were talking about. Now they still talk about videos, but never show them due to copyright concerns. That can be a bit annoying, although I know it's not JR's fault.

I feel like that's one example that everyone cites - sort of proving the rule that 99% of his podcasts can be listened to without missing anything.

It’s the most obvious one. But I don’t need to explain myself to you further. I prefer JRE video podcasts.

I would wager most people who watch podcasts on youtube are using it as a second screen while on their phone, tablet, laptop etc

Undoubtedly that is what will happen with Joe Rogan too. Money talks. PewDiePie went through roughly the same transition.

I don't think they are exactly comparable circumstances because podcasts on Spotify are still free, where as Stern made the switch to a paid-platform.

In my case, I'll probably stop listening because my specific podcast app (podkicker) doesn't look like it can pull from spotify (maybe none can).

> ... shows the power of independent media

Yes, as in "it's possible", the same as it's possible for an unknown author to be a best selling author (like JK Rowling). No as in it's an outlier or the exception. How many cases like this do we have? , esp. considering the consolidation of mass media in a few companies?

I'm curious what your point is. Do you expect that anyone with a mic ought to be able to experience Rogan's success?

The point I believe is that you can't say that "independent media" is now such a strong force when the amount of people that have achieved success within that field is incredibly small (compared to existing large media). Can agree or not, but i believe it's the point.

I disagree. There are many YouTube political commentators pulling in more daily views than CNN. Younger people hate the typical mainstream media outlet because they know it's full of propaganda.

Does propaganda here mean organized baloney as opposed to individual baloney?

Yes. Someone stating their honest-to-god opinion and how they came to it is not propaganda but organised attempts to push certain narratives are. Individuals can definitely shill for their side, but then they wouldn't be very popular with the audience.

I don't have data, but I suspect if you surveyed the viewing habits of people 25 and under you would find they spend a massively disproportionate amount of time on youtube/podcasts/twitch compared to traditional media.

With moves like this one, and also the acquisition of Gimlet for 200+ million, I think we're starting to see the shift of these kinds of outlets from the periphery to the center of media.

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