Spotify is killing the open podcast ecosystem (2020)

I believe Spotify, unless they buy an exclusive or something, still consumes RSS feeds to make podcasts work, so most anything on Spotify is freely available.

I feel same way! Also paying, also using other app, because spotify podcasting misses the features I want.

Not very related... The reason I canceled Spotify Account is because I couldn’t downvote songs in a playlist. The music suggestions for some artists were horrible, and I couldn’t opt out of them.

Lately, I've even been scared of listening to music other than my usual taste (e.g. a radio hit, a foreign song, song in one of those instagram videos) because their algorithm seems to amplify my "smart" playlists with anything that's different.

There should be an option to turn off simple things like that: turn off podcasts, pause learning from my music for then next 30 minutes, etc.

I always thought the advantage of standalone apps like Spotify(updated anytime) vs something like Apple Music(updated on big iOS releases) is that they can iterate faster. But seems like they are throwing more eggs in content creation basket than UX.

I recently gave Spotify a try for about 8 months but just switched back to Apple Music. My reason for switching back had nothing to do with podcasts, it was simply Spotify's terrible interface that makes it impossible to just browse all the music in your library. But I had also started to notice podcasts infiltrating UI that used to be only music playlists. A few times I even mistakenly clicked on a podcast thinking that it was a music playlist that sounded interesting.

Audible has been doing similarly recently and it’s quite frustrating.

I understand everyone’s doing it and you as a company feel entitled to a slice of whatever podcast pie.

What I don’t understand is how that can take focus when your audio player has been getting steadily worse - corrupted offline download, buggy buffering, choppy audio after jumping back 30s.

If your bread and butter - what I’m actually paying for - doesn’t work I’ll gladly save a few bucks and go to the public library.

I did just that about a month ago. I don't give a shit about their podcasts, I'm only interested in their music, the home screen is garbage now. I moved to Qobuz (which has other problems, but it's generally fine).

They could lose them in the other direction as well. Unlike you, I don't mind podcasts being thrown at me. However, having come to enjoy a couple of the podcasts on offer, I'm not offered a way to subscribe to the pay versions of those podcasts, so I end up subscribing directly. Unfortunately, the Spotify app doesn't provide me a way to add my private RSS feeds from those subscriptions, so I spend much less time on Spotify and question whether I need the service at all.

Yup, I've been noticing that. Indeed, I've been preparing to cancel my subscription (backing up my "library"/playlists externally etc.), and their push into podcasts (and pushing them on me) is one of the reasons.

Spotify is also not good as a music player. You have no real control.

That is why I use YT Music. Podcasts are in a different Google realm (Google podcasts), and get no podspaming. I also find spotify too in your face in general, like an over eager salesman.

Can you tell me how Spotify is with playlists of comedy albums?

I started falling asleep to comedy a couple months ago to manage poor sleep based on a generally negative attitude. It was fine on YT Music for a while, but now a lot of the community playlists are garbage, or most of the clips have been pulled (I assume some copyright issues).

I'd move to Spotify for that, and pay, if they had a catalog of decent standup comedy.

Podcasts have really ruined Spotify's mobile app. The worst part is that there is space for a "Podcasts" tab in the bottom bar that would have made everyone happy by clearly separating types of content.

Apple has gone a similar route recently with reducing the Activity/Fitness app to just two/three tabs, mushing all sorts of content together. I hope this doesn't become another user-hostile UI trend.

Any fixed cost business will inherently have large sunk costs and will not experience net profits until you've worked your way down the cost curve. Content businesses have marginal costs that approach zero as a function of time -- of course without any operating cost of delivery. There's no need for "early industry rumors" to understand the fixed cost business of streaming.

"The Office" was paid for in full, distributed in a first-party network, then syndicated, then digitally licensed, and now back to its first-party network. The total revenue value of that decade long investment is not the same as a variable cost businesses like ecommerce, delivery services, or Moviepass.

I mean, the point still kinda stands. Spotify can throw money at podcasting until the cows go home, but if they aren't buying something for their money it's just going to waste. Podcasts on Spotify aren't all that good, and every podcast I (and everyone I know) actually listen to is accessible elsewhere.

As someone who uses Spotify for music, and another podcast app for podcasts, I find it annoying to scroll past podcasts to get to music. I'm skeptical that someone who has no interest in podcasts will decide that instead of putting on music they want to listen to a podcast - at least in most situations.

This is me.

I have Spotify Premium for listening to music while I work but I started listening to podcasts while doing mindless chores like laundry or dishes.

It's convenient to just have the one app.

OT but AntennaPod is amazing, and open source. I switched from Pocket Casts and it's amazing.

These bullets are conspicuously free of important details.

"Podcast usage has been a factor" - okay, how much? Answer: no idea.

"The strength in Ad-Supported revenue was led by our Podcast, Direct, and Ad Studio channels, with Podcast and Ad Studio both growing over 100% on a Y/Y basis" - okay, but from what starting point and how much did it contribute? Answer: not saying.

"25% of our Total MAUs engaged with podcast content" - okay, how much? Answer: not saying.

Obviously podcasts help increase metrics, but even Spotify either doesn't know or won't say, meanwhile all this discussion ignores the flip side of the coin which is how much this is all costing the company.

I use Pocket Casts. I just like it a lot, and I don't want to switch because it does everything I need. Spotify seems like it wouldn't be as configurable, but I haven't even felt the need to check.

Plus, I don't like a monoculture.

Castro on iOS. It uses an inbox triage model that lets me subscribe to a lot of podcasts and keep up with what they’re doing, without cluttering my queue or inducing decision fatigue. It has more granular (per-podcast) controls for smart speed, silence skipping, voice leveling, skipping intros and automatic triage than Spotify. It also lets me upload custom audio and subscribe to custom/private feeds. Support for scripting listening and feed management with iOS shortcuts is above a useful threshold.

Prior to Castro, I used Overcast and Pocket Casts, which have similar features.

I’m sure Spotify is the future but these third party clients are great for heavy listeners who want more control.

I use PocketCasts (on iOS) and I'm happy enough to pay for a subscription (extra benefits are marginal though).

It's less about features, I think, and more about the overall experience. It's probably quite personal too, but in no particular order:

- Smoother and more responsive UI

- Less cluttered and more dense UI eg visual overview of all my subscriptions

- Silence trimming

- Sharing from a given place in a podcast

I do use Spotify for music though so I'm not completely anti the Spotify experience. In fairness to the Spotify designers I do think that they have a more difficult job in integrating podcasts into an app that is mainly a music player.

Spotify still doesn't allow the user to add an RSS feed in the app, right? Until they support that it makes no sense to use as my main podcast app because the (admittedly few) podcasts I listen to are mostly either too behind the times to be on Spotify or I pay for their Patreon and need to be able to use the subscriber feed. I use AntennaPod on Android and the built-in Podcasts app on iOS.

Overcast. It has a “smart speed” feature that cuts out breaks and pauses in a way that’s almost unnoticeable but will save/gain you hundreds of hours. And audio clip sharing and great leveling in addition to privacy features.

https://overcast.fm/

There’s numerous small developers out there putting in much more care than Spotify.

I've been using iCatcher on ios for years now. It has all the things you mention but also a nice set of sorting logic to choose from as well as other per-podcast options like prioritization and number of episodes to download/display etc.

I've heard Joe Rogan jokingly refered to as "Oprah for middle aged white dudes".

Eh, Rogan normalizes hate speech in ways that if you or I were to try to do would get us fired/unfriended.

I don't think that's "fine", but it's also not really topical to the submission so I'll leave it at that.

Edit: if folks want to start a discussion about this with me, let's create an email thread about it. My email is in my profile, I'll wait until three folks mention their interest before getting started, if that works. I really didn't mean to upset or try to dodge anything, I just don't think a protracted discussion about Joe Rogan will be very interesting to most people on HN.

People also try to ignore that Spotify did exactly what everybody thought they would do - started watering down the guests and removing so-called controversial episodes.

A big part of the Rogan show charm was the fringe guests, and his audience doesnt care the least for the kind of corporate virtue signalling Spotify is eminating.

In effect, it went from offering somewhat novel things to being plain boring - like everything else you’d expect from a Spotify podcast. I dont find Rogan particularly charismatic as a host either so why listen anymore?

The only podcasts I listen religiously are the intelligence by the economist and revolutions by Mike Duncan. I can listen to the intelligence via the economist app and Revolutions is ending this year (and I get it through the standard podcast app on iOS.)

I have a few I've considered indispensable that have shifted over time. Reply All is consistently good (but I'm a couple months behind at this point, less podcast time). Dan Carlin's Hardcore History is a treat when it comes out, but that's like every 4-6 months usually. This is only a test from tested.com is good, and even though it's weekly it's topical enough I can skip a week or two and not feel like I need to go back and listen. My most recent favorite is Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod, which perfectly encapsulates that feeling I used to get when I sat down with a good friend and we started talking about/ranting about some interesting thing one of us did a deep dive on recently.

Not that you actually asked. ;)

Yeah, youtube was my preferred way to consume JRE. I'm not one to put on a podcast in the background, because I don't like having something I find interesting going on while I'm trying to do other stuff that requires thought, and if it's not interesting why would I put it on?

Having the interesting moments distilled into two to three 10-15 minute clips was ideal, and if I found the conversation really interesting I might try to watch the whole show for that day.

... I was under the impression they had stopped doing that, but I just checked and there are a lot of clips showing on PowerfulJRE, so maybe they just screwed up their recommendation rating? I just know that when they went to spotify I stopped getting them recommended to me, but there's been a few the last couple weeks now.

Plus you can always skip them with a couple of button presses.

> There's no privacy invasion

Slight but worrying privacy invasion. Podcasts are increasingly inserting targeted ads based on download analytics. Just the other day, I was listening to a British podcast that advertised for a local company in Seattle, where my IP address tells them I'm from.

The extent to which a podcast can target users has been somewhat limited until now. But if you use Spotify, they know what content you're listening to, and your exact listening behavior, as well as who you are. There's no doubt in my mind that they pay attention to that data internally, and very little doubt that they'll move to expose more and more of it to advertisers.

Have you been listening to Harmontown or That Happens? The hosts literally do small improv bits for every ad.

To add to your point, the only time I've ever consciously bought something from an ad was through a podcast, and I've done it several times now.

I also resent being tracked especially when I am a paying customer.

The strangest thing about Spotify for me is that I pay for Premium as well but that doesn't save me from Joe Rogan's own commercials he inserts into his spotify podcasts. They're skippable by simply moving the seek bar to the end but why if I'm paying for Premium are they even there? They're not baked into the podcast itself but rather the player pauses the playback of the podcast and cues up multiple 120(!) second ads.

They're also a royal PITA to skip in my car because the spotify app on iPhone and PC are both awful but the mobile app is awful squared.

The key word here is "trying" - still open whether they will succeed.

Agree that they should be stopped though, if it looks like they are succeeding.

So this is what Apple did with the app store.

Applications used to be distributed everywhere, but Apple tightly controlled the platform and crippled the web browser. They even prevented Flash and other runtimes so they would be the only way to get native control on the device.

They "rolled up" computing.

What scummy behavior.

That's not what a rollup is.

A rollup is where you merge businesses doing functionally similar things, gaining economies of scale on costs. Its most often used for geographically distributed family businesses, such as Dentists. Dentists all need a lot of back office support, marketing, and sales functions. Having a rollup with a dozen Dental offices allows you to centralize all the insurance claim handling, direct marketing and put them under a single brand you can advertise on more mass market media.

You are correct that where rollups are used in regulated industries that limit entrants such as radio, they lead to oligopolies. If you own most of the radio stations in a single city you not only get the rollup cost benefits, you can also increase your prices for advertising.

But this is a direct effect of the market limitations that would occur either way, even if owners weren't allowed to reduce costs by buying stations in the same city to combine back office and operations, they would still do it to get oligarchic pricing power. And if you try to rollup most of the Dentist offices in a single city to raise prices you can only succeed temporarily, because it's a free market and your higher prices will attract lots of new entrants.

Of course the other criticisms of rollups is they reduce diversity of offerings. In the case of radio it leads to homogenization of station playlists. Which is exactly what the BBC does in Britain, so I don't see the issue. Especially since radio is being gutted by the internet anyways.

> I'm pretty sure that Spotify's API allows access to podcasts outside the official app.

I wouldn't be too sure about this. I know its API (or at least some parts of it) are only available to premium users, because they can't serve ads via third-party integrations.

I don't know if there's an exception for podcasts, but I wouldn't be surprised if your option is either the app or paying to not use the official app.

Disagree on this, like discord, third party apps are frowned upon. There is no youtube-dl for spotify (not a good one at least) so while I do agree that creators should not be burdened by the distribution aspect, spotify is ultimately vendor lock-in. while with itunes you can easily fetch the rss feed of their podcasts, such a thing is not possible with spotify.

No, I don’t think so. The api [0] only returns metadata and Spotify urls that are played in their player. There’s no way I can find to get the actual audio file or audio stream on binary format.

Of course it also requires a Spotify dev account so that’s limiting too.

I’m discounting the publishing and distribution part because we have examples of podcasts that moved from regular to Spotify (eg, JRE) and the content didn’t change at all.

Podcasts are pretty awesome as the distribution costs are low and are pretty similar whether your distributing via Spotify or your own CDN.

With regular you get discoverability via Apple and many others so that’s bigger than Spotify.

This is a “solved” problem in that creators have been easily doing this for 10 years. The technical aspects are minimal and completely abstracted through many services available that are dollars per month.

[0] https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...

Oh, I seriously thought your reply would be that they should not be called podcasts [1] since that's more of an iPod thing. Or at least with the same modus operandi of downloading files (published from iTunes or RSS or whatever) to listen to later. But then, maybe I'm just too old.

Or maybe podcasts have just evolved again, and now it's reincarnation is into streaming platforms and clubhouse rooms.

[1] This is where the word was invented, according to the Wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/feb/12/broadcasting.d...

Yep, I was going to say that it was actually Apple Music / Podcasts that killed podcasts, because that was the first site I saw podcast creators exclusively link to versus an aggregator or RSS feed. It marked the turning of the tide, where it even started to be considered acceptable not to have an RSS feed.

To be fair, this effect was limited at the time to "podcasts" released by relatively wealthy people mostly in New York, among whom not using Apple products was basically unheard of. Spotify seems to be taking this mainstream, but I think the problem started before they got into the podcast business.

I wish radio stations in my country played music that I like. Perhaps then I'd ever have listened to one. Not to mention that you can't pick what a broadcast radio plays. Aside from that they can both play audio, it seems rather incomparable to me...

The real issue is the audience care about those historical conversations. The Alex Jones podcast was probably the most hilarious JRE episode full stop. I'm not going to get outraged but I don't care to watch as many episodes as I did.

> Joe Rogan was free (not just free, well compensated) as an indy and could have kept his lucrative gig, but spotify dumped a truck load of money in his lawn and he decided he'd rather have that.

I mean obviously we can't know for sure without access to his finances, but I remember seeing some estimates that he could've earned the amount of money Spotify gave to him in like two years or so.

So his choice was money upfront or earning it via traditional means in a couple of years. In my view, he made the wrong choice.

I'm faced with a similar dilemma right now (but with losing money instead of gaining it) by investing in a NAS that would pay off in a little over two years by downscaling the servers I'm renting.

It was open until people realized they couldn't make any significant money off it that way

It's gotten worse recently. The second row on my home screen are now dedicated to "Spotify original & exclusive shows" (when it used to be your weekly recommendation channels). There's another 2-3 rows dedicated to podcasts as you keep going down.

For reference, I don't listen to podcasts in Spotify.

Maybe we are in different A/B groups but for me the podcasts are now in row 3 minimum, sometimes in the second row on home screen. So at times I see them.

> Joe is getting less likeable lately...

Agreed - he always had a noticeable tilt on issues but lately it seems to be all about scoring sick dunks on SJW's. I was also surprised how little prep he apparently does before podcasts. During the latest Elon Musk episode he learned on-air that the reusable rockets land propulsively (as opposed to using parachutes or otherwise). It's odd to have possibly the richest man in the world on for 3 multi-hour podcasts and not know the most basic facts about their accomplishments.

Couple reasons for me:

Mainly, when I'm looking for something to listen to, I go to my podcast app. There's a list of latest episodes. I browse and pick one. JRE never appears on that list, so out of sight, out of mind.

But also, his show has taken a nosedive in quality in the last 6 months. Feels like discussions are always (a) COVID mask rules are dumb (or maybe they're not?, depends on the guest), (b) The Comedy Cellar was hella tight back in the day, (c) Texas is awesome, California is basically a dystopian hellhole.

None of those points bother me that much. Whatever. But when they're recycled ad nauseam on every episode, it's just boring.

So now I just don't bother. I have the Spotify app. But it's not something I think about for podcasting.

How about montonony and repetition?

There are > 1000 episodes of JRE, each 1-3 hours long. An enormous amount of repetition results from this. I have watched less than 50 episodes and I know I have to FFWD when Rogan starts talking about divorce laws in California, using the same example of one unnamed friend who lost everything to his ex-wife.

Podcasts with other comedians are unlistenable due to the constant navel-gazing about The Comedy Store and cancel culture.

But that's just Google controlling your content rather than Spotify. Not really open either way.

I believe paying someone directly for an exclusive podcast makes more sense than paying to be on a platform. The whole idea of a podcast is for it to be accessible on any device using any player of their choice, and spotify does not fit that idea. I'm not saying my mindset is the "correct" one but how I feel.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and there are some premium ones where you pay to get access, but once you pay, the way you access them is basically the same as all other podcasts. Hiding the actual podcast behind a certain protocol is what I raise an eyebrow to.

Also, this is my opinion only, spotify is terrible at podcasts from a usability standpoint.

>if someone like Joe Rogan had a paid for subscription plan where you were paying him directly, instead of being forced into a membership with Spotify, would that in a sense be more open

Yes, because podcasts were previously open on numerous fronts. Any person can create a podcast that can be listened to be any person on any device. That is three points of openness. Adding a price on only restrict one of those points, the "listened to by any person". It still wouldn't stop any person's ability to create them or any device's ability to play them. Spotify (and presumably Apple) restricts both those points of openness too.

So now Apple gets 15-30% of the payment to podcasters? Pass

Well its not really. There are a lot of places to get podcasts from now, but there wasn't then.

> You don't have to juggle what's on your phone anymore.

Unfortunately, sometimes you have. Apps can not moved to SD card depending on Android version or vendor.

Also, I use a Syncthing oneway folder to automatic sync downloaded music to phone.

The Spotify move sort of coincided with him moving from LA to Austin. After that move he's not been getting many interesting guests.

Lately it feels like it's been a 45/45/10 mix of (to me) uninteresting comedians, uninteresting martial arts personalities and misc. Sometimes there's someone interesting in the misc category.

People have been saying this every year for half a decade now. But it's the same podcast as it ever was.

Eric Weinstein was fantastic, Freddie Gibbs and Brian Moses were hilarious, Tim Dillion was the exact amount of ridiculous you'd expect. Then there's the episodes with professors like Brian Greene and Avi Loeb, and then fighters like GSP and Dan Gable. Nothing has changed except the platform.

He's been pretty far along the "Covid isn't a real problem", "I'm not getting vaccinated", you can treat it with honey and mustard and HydroChloroquine arc...