How Spotify's podcast bet went wrong
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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
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.
Same reason plain web browsers beat AOL and Compuserv
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.
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.
If one disappears off your preferred platform, 100 more are waiting to fill the void.
Some guesses.
People didn't historically pay for talk radio. (OK, Serius in part. But that was always a pretty narrow slice.)
A lot of podcast content is pretty niche and not especially mainstream. Not sure how easy to monetize outside of advertising/sponsorships.
It started out very grass roots.
FD, I dont watch him anymore as he is becoming increasingly less interesting.
Use https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp to grab what you need before the account is nuked.
Do you think solving the problem includes making it difficult to skip the ads?
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.
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.
I can't imagine what features would need to exist for me to be willing to pay a recurring fee.
Nowadays I spend my time listening to different podcasts and tune into Rogan if he has a particularly good guest on.
With TV shows, if my friends talk about it, I want to watch it too
With podcasts, I don’t seem to really care. If I can’t listen to a podcast because it’s not available, I won’t miss it
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.
Then they changed their monetization model to a subscription and left their previous customers with... nothing.
Screw them.
If they wouldn’t have I would have dropped it when they changed monetisation models.
You might want to log in to your account again since you have the premium for free.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@laruinashow
edit: nevermind, iVoox offer rss links.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit - updated wording:
+ "found Spotify's player to best of the bunch"
- "they're all terrible except for Spotify's"
They fund early people to get momentum and lock others in at high rates once they build out an audience.
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.
— https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
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.
I'd love if my employer "locked me in" at a higher rate lol.
Because on these platforms if I list best 4 podcast apps, Spotify won’t come within miles of that short list.
I am slowly decreasing my use of Spotify because of the way it’s pushing podcasts while all I want is music from it. Nothing else.
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.
And I told them why I unsubscribed.
Pretty sure that’s better still.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/All-Platforms-Po...
After a year or two of this they finally moved it further down the page where I don't have to see it every day, though.
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.
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.
You’re the first person I’ve heard with anything positive to say about their podcast UI, so I’m really curious what those four are.
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 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 is accessible from Listen Now at the very bottom.
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.
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 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).
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
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).
> Podcasts probably just aren't that profitable.
You think? I thought their "bet" wasn't dumb.
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.
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.
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.
wasn’t Spotify co-founded by the creator of Napster too?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
So did I and I did something about it:
https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
My initial claim only works for Uber Eats. It can only be used for ordering food. There's a button to order a ride but it redirects to the Uber app.
But I believe you're right that initially they were more separate entities, but now it's kinda merged.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The disconnect between Sales/Management and the Dev/UX team is plain as day.
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?
My god man so many big companies have such crazy shit show experiences, it really makes me wonder.
I think once you have people addicted or 'needing' something, then great experience goes down the toilet.
The funny thing is, I'll bet there are very good economics behind good design ... aka good design will payoff, and usually it's measurable. It's odd.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...
How come services can produce exclusive games, podcasts, tv shows and even movies, but not music or books?
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).
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
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...
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.
I dunno if the space needs more competition or what but UI/UX does not seem to be a priority for the main players.
The podcast: Joe Rogan Experience
There is already an extension to completely hide podcasts[2].
[2]: https://github.com/theRealPadster/spicetify-hide-podcasts
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.
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 user-friendly interface
It is the worst interface I have the misfortune of having to use (don't ask).
And because they have different demographics they may request features in different order and so you end up with this incomplete experience.
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.
Plus, as other folks have mentioned, their podcast support itself is so much worse than dedicated podcast apps.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
What would a disruptive new "super app" bring to the table compared to every other podcast app that already does this?
I'm partial to Pocket Casts personally.
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.
But I don't see how they ever can do that.
Jesus lord. And here I go at 1.25x and sometimes 1.5x and think that's fast as fuck.
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.
I'm still trying to break the 3x barrier.
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.
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!"
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 ^^
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
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'.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Mac/Adjust-video-sp...
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.
Glad they have it now.
Spotify with all their "genius" engineers still don't have the basic functionality you would expect.
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
Did they stop doing that? I might ponder moving back to YouTube Music if so...
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 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just bad judgement all around.
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.
More than his radio show, Stern also lost TV around the same time he switched to sirius.
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.
Not enough to make you transfer across, but maybe enough to make some people transfer across.
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.
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 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.
- 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.
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.
Seems ideal though, anonymous wealth :)
But, I suppose, for those that don't listen to podcasts, being able to turn them off completely would be pretty desirable.
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.
"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.
Surprising to me that investors are buying it.
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.
Then why is management abandoning that strategy? That's what the entire article is about...
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.
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.
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.
Yet, there are definitely outliers!
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.
Source: https://www.quillpodcasting.com/blog-posts/spotify-podcasts
Only reason I still use it is because it's easier to cast to my google nest minis than Apple Podcasts.
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 miss Google Play Music (before it too got cluttered with Podcrap) and Grooveshark
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.
unified? find "new episodes" tab on desktop
I wish they'd bring Gimlet's old shows back to the internet. Really been fancying a StartUp relisten recently.
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?
² About seven hours, one per episode.
Spotify's problem is its abhorrent UX/UI!
And this sentence is just lame AF:
>"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)
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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 "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".