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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

> By 2021, Spotify had paid to sign some of the biggest names in podcasting, and it was ready to start squeezing its competitors… Now, Spotify chief content officer Dawn Ostroff — a TV veteran most famous for bringing Gossip Girl to the CW — was ready to stop many of these creators and companies from sharing podcasts on Apple and Amazon, and keep the content exclusively on Spotify.

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

View on HN

> 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.

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.

As the meme goes, "it's free real estate!"

Jim Boonie isn't as interested as they thought.

If they fail, trying to occupy that real estate could cost them billions

Yeah, I'm not claiming that their logic was sound, just saying that their motivation isn't that surprising. I'm guessing that the real estate referred to in the origin of that meme (an infomercial, I think?) wasn't really free either.

Meh, you can call it value extraction if you want, but ultimately they're paying these people. Didn't Rogan get like 100MM? Didn't they fund a bunch of studios and new podcast creators? From the article:

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"

Try Overcast.

Used it for years but Pocket Casts beats it in all aspects.

Overall I like Overcast, definitely better than Apple’s app. I don’t like UI though — the teal blue color, oversized controls, the “+ + + +” on the playback speed slider, strange layout choices, etc. (I know that these are relatively minor things to most people).

you can change the colors if you get the premium version.

The concept of smart speed impressed me so much I got it. I don’t use the feature a to alter speed a lot, but it’s such a clever way to speeding things up.

> Didn't Rogan get like 100MM?

They fund early people to get momentum and lock others in at high rates once they build out an audience.

Have you seen the recently published _Chokepoint Capitalism_ by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow yet?

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 find your phrasing and mindset interesting. What you suggest somewhat maliciously as "lock others in at high rates", I read as "shower them with more cash than they could ever conceivably dream of"

I'd love if my employer "locked me in" at a higher rate lol.

I meant the equivalent here of high publisher royalty rate, high cut/fee percentage would have been more clear.

You are on iPhone or Android? Or some other platform?

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.

iPhone - I'm happy to take recommendations.

Pocket Casts is what I use, lots of useful features like silence trimming, voice amplification, organizational tools, chapters, and programmable skipping of intro ads. Recently open-sourced as well.

Castro is my favorite.

i like overcast

Having tried most podcast apps, I always come back to Pocketcast.

I am slowly decreasing my use of Spotify because of the way it’s pushing podcasts while all I want is music from it.

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.

Even better is to drop Spotify and move to something else. Apple Music wasn't for me. I'm on Tidal right now. It's fine and I got a deal where I'm paying half of what I was for Spotify. This is the only way to be sure I'm not giving Joe Rogan my money.

Why is it so important to you as a goal, to not give money to Joe Rogan?

What I did was stop paying them because they kept trying to shove podcasts down my throat.

And I told them why I unsubscribed.

Pretty sure that’s better still.

What do you mean by 'shoving podcasts down my throat'? I pay for Spotify and I had trouble finding the podcasts in the app, and it doesn't recommend either. I'm from Europe though, maybe that explains it?

For me, and apparently thousands of others, it was insisting on showing these bullshit podcasts at the very top of my home screen. I had to scroll down past it to see any actual music.

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.

They were everywhere. Every search I did showed podcasts at least as prominently as music, for example. I don’t remember the details, but I think they even did popover ads in the app trying to get me to start listening to podcasts. On a paid account.

Pretty sure that’s better still.

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.

If other users agree with me, then the message will be much louder and they will be much quicker to act.

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.

Not really... Spotify is pushing podcasts because they are slot going bust as a music streaming service and they need to pivot. When podcasts fail they will just pivot to something else even more desperately.

> Also, I've tried 4 different podcast players and they're all terrible except for Spotify's.

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.

"Terrible" was too strong of a word -- I actually like Overcast, but find Spotify superior.

> 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 use Apple Podcasts every day and experience none of these problems. Maybe give it another try if and when Spotify’s extra layer on ad logos and banners wears on you.

Trying to setup chronological podcast playback on the Apple Podcast is horrible, and they are constantly fiddling with the terrible UI. I just want to binge 5 consecutive episodes of a history podcast, but everything in the UI tries to funnel you into listening to the latest episode of multiple podcasts.

It also seems to be impossible to get it to automatically download episodes in chronological order. It only wants to download new episodes. So if you run out of downloaded episodes it will skip forward to the new episodes, which could be years apart.

Funny thing - this works very well, so long as you don’t use the UI. At least, it has recently, I do t know if things changed.

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.

There is a Recently Played screen.

It is accessible from Listen Now at the very bottom.

Oh damn. See, that’s what I mean with bad UX: I’ve been searching for that since they swapped everything around last summer.

The Google Podcasts app works for me. It has a minimalist feel to it.

Have you tried overcast?

I used "Podcast Republic" for a long time, but it recently started downloading stuff automatically and I can't figure out how to tell it to stop. It filled up my storage with junk podcasts where I subscribed, but only listened to intermittently.

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.

The problem with this strategy is that most execs don't think through the higher levels (which is what went wrong here).

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 certainly do think about the reduction of demand due to increasing price. That’s economics 101, and I would not assume a major business executive doesn’t know that.

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.

> They must have simply thought

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).

I think you give too much credit to some execs, my experience is that sometimes the short term is the only thing they pay attention to when investors' money is flowing and there's more to grab.

The only reason we see this headline is because dumb money ran out last year'

Well that strategy has worked for other things.

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

What other things? I can think of multiple other situations just in media where this hasn't worked: NFLX, AMZN, Overwatch League, YouTube Gaming/Facebook Gaming/Mixer...there are specific instances of companies doing the opposite (i.e. DIS, they just acquire something working and just pound out low-risk additive investments...and DIS only started doing this after, you guessed it, missing on some very high-risk, big budget investments like John Carter) and it working very well.

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.

The chief funders of these businesses have so much money that they often don't care about the outcome of the company as the important factor. Spotify has reshaped the podcast market into a format that the big money funders wanted to happen. It's evolved from the early stage free-for-all where small producers could make it big to a corporate controlled platform in which people have become accustomed to getting their podcast s from something more akin to an app store.

Cory Doctorow even wrote an entire book recently documenting this practice across half a dozen companies over the past two decades.

Large company driven of the field by open source, if the tech is good enough and a comunity establishes that does not yearn for closed source features, open source can permanently poison the well so to speak.

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.

Seems like the podcasting ecosystem is a bit more resistant to walled gardens than most spaces.

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.

rss

Same reason plain web browsers beat AOL and Compuserv

Then why did Twitter displace RSS readers for the Web?

Twitter is a different thing.

A smart watch is a different thing from a quartz wrist watch but it would be foolish to act like the decline of the latter has nothing to do with the former.

I feel like I stopped seeing quartz wrist watches before smart watches were a thing, because mobile phones were always available to tell time. At least from my cohort.

Smartwatches (namely Apple Watch) then became a thing because it provided more than time, such as vibrating alerts, fitness tracking, etc.

Not only that, but the high end of the old-school watch industry has never been healthier than it is now. ( https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/luxury-watches-for-men-... )

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.

There's a reason I said "quartz watches" and the mid-range absolutely did get messed up by smart watches, so the only thing "dead wrong" is your reading of my post.

Mea culpa, looks like you win the Internet.

Lots of younger people never had a watch in the first place, sure, but smart watches appealed to people who would have otherwise bought from, say, Fossil.

But Twitter/HN/etc. are all discovery mechanisms. The fact is that I can think that a lot of interesting content is going to cross my screen sooner or later without my actively prospecting for it--and I'm mostly not wrong.

Twitter replaced the 'web' portion - the publishing of content part that people used RSS to subscribe to.

Google Reader was shut down and lots of tech people were blinded by follower count self importance and early adopter bluechecks to claim Twitter was “just fine” to use instead of RSS.

my recollection was that twitter was doing fine when Google Reader was still running, although I'm sure it did benefit some from Google reader going away.

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.

I'd guess that the low upfront cost and barrier to entry contributes. Audio recording and editing sufficient for a podcast is very low lift for any passionate hosts.

If one disappears off your preferred platform, 100 more are waiting to fill the void.

Another way to put it is that there are probably very few destination podcasts for a significant number of users. While there are some podcasts that I listen to most episodes of, if one were to go to Spotify (which I don't subscribe to) as an exclusive, I'd shrug and move on.

Also the fact that Apple pretty much bought the entire space by providing free infrastructure and discovery but didn't do anything with it and so it flourished.

The barrier is very low. If I have to go to Spotify to get your podcast, unless I’m a huge fan of you specifically, there are hundreds of others on the same topic. I suspect many people open their podcast app and just add some popular ones, or search for topics they’re interested in, and go from there.

>I wonder why?

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.

Some anecdatum: I stopped listening to Rogan's full podcasts when he moved to Spotify because I'm sometimes interested to listen but not enough to download a new app, sign up for a new account, etc. Bootleg (and official, I think?) accounts post his clips which I watch sometimes, I notice they have 100s of thousands or millions of views. I assume Spotify was expecting to capture all those views. If Rogan clips disappeared from YouTube I just wouldn't watch it.

I was the same way but I ended up signing up to watch it. It was pretty painless. I'm glad Rogan is on Spotify because YouTube is getting pretty heavy handed with their strikes. They need some competition. I'm surprised Spotify hasn't ventured into video hosting more.

This point is buried but really good. YouTube is a bit at fault here. Ideally we’d all keep using rss, but it’s hard to fault podcasters for going where monetization is possible. Respect to Sam Harris for going fully listener supported.

Some of the political channels I watch feature the hosts using (very obvious to a human) coded language to refer to COVID, Hitler, Nazis, Hunter Biden, etc. because they don't want to get targeted. It's pretty dystopian and creepy.

The Quartering? The only channel heard I code names for. And God is he sloppy!

FD, I dont watch him anymore as he is becoming increasingly less interesting.

I'm surprised as well, it's clear that music will always be a loss leader for them. Why not do more in video, which is at least a proven monetization channel (YT, Tiktok, IG Live). MTV-style programming is due a comeback.

What do you watch that YouTube's getting heavy handed with strikes?

I signed up (again) on Spotify for Rogan... of course, I was mostly watching on YouTube via an NVidia ShieldTV box, and Spotify didn't have video support for a long while, and even later it was just not a good app/experience for me... so when I dropped PayPal, I cancelled Spotify at the same time. I still catch clips from his JREClips channel on YouTube. It's pretty bad when Rumble has a better (not by much) AndroidTV app than Spotify, with a fraction of the revenue.

You can watch eps here: https://www.dailymotion.com/chupa-official/videos and https://www.dailymotion.com/RoyalsFamily/videos

Use https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp to grab what you need before the account is nuked.

Same here. I like the JRE podcast but not enough to use Spotify and their terrible podcasting experience. Now I really only catch an interesting YouTube clip every few weeks.

My guess is because both the production side and the distribution side cost so little money, it's hard for anyone to monopolize it. Once someone really solves the advertising model for podcasters, the creators will flock to it naturally like how so many people only distribute through youtube now.

> Once someone really solves the advertising model for podcasters

Do you think solving the problem includes making it difficult to skip the ads?

As a user, personally it's because I have relatively little loyalty to podcasts, and because these platform are generally a value negative not a value add to the end user. Spotify's podcast UI is horrendous, I don't know how it's possible for Spotify to reverse my sort order and lose my place in where I was in a podcast series so many times.

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.

Another thing I hated about podcasts when I used spotify: they still have ads. I find it pretty much intolerable to get ads on a paid service. But podcasts weren't near the top of the list of reasons I cut ties with spotify anyway. (Oh wait, actually their endorsement of Joe Rogan was very close to the top.)

Spotify injects ads into the podcast?

no, the podcasts (or to be precise their distribution software) does. https://community.spotify.com/t5/Subscriptions/Ads-on-podcas...

The first platform to solve this problem by offering a paid product that revenue shares back to the creator will get my $$$ as soon as I find it. I hoped this was what Spotify was up to, but clearly not. Youtube Premium could make an easy play in that space if they cared for it.

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.

Doesn't YouTube Premium do that? I remember some creators saying they got a lot more money out of Premium views than ad views, but I don't know anything specific.

(late reply) - yes, but not for podcasts.

There is a lot of stiff (and free) competition when it comes to podcast players. I'm pretty happy with the now open source Pocket Casts. Previously I used the paid Dogg Catcher.

I can't imagine what features would need to exist for me to be willing to pay a recurring fee.

This is exactly my experience: Rogan moved to Spotify, podcasts became more difficult to track because of bad UI and ads were a constant irritation (I pay good money to not get ads).

Nowadays I spend my time listening to different podcasts and tune into Rogan if he has a particularly good guest on.

I think it’s a loyalty thing too, but it’s not so much about the platform but more about the podcast

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

I think it comes down to having no obvious pain point.

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.

I paid for Spotify but I won't listen to podcasts in their app. I use Pocket Casts, which I've loved for years.

Spotify is crap for listening to Podcasts. I can never figure out what I've listened to and what I haven't. Pocket Casts is amazing, but now that Every Little Thing is canceled, I don't know if it matters anyway, as that was the only podcast I listened to.

Ugh I used to love Pocket Cast, even sprung for the paid app.

Then they changed their monetization model to a subscription and left their previous customers with... nothing.

Screw them.

Previous customers got “Pocket Casts Plus, Lifetime membership” and a “thanks for your support”.

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.

Similar, I got a lifetime subscription. Then again, I think I also purchased all 4 options (Android, the never very good Windows Phone, the web version of the was a separate charge for that and finally the iOS version). I still find it very handy to be able to jump between Android and iOS pretty seamlessly.

I don't remember ever making an account, I just bought it on Google Play.

I‘m using Pocket Casts and never have paid anything edit: as far as I remember

Not true. I got grandfathered in, as other people have said.

I didn't get grandfathered in, and I had purchased the premium version back when it was a single purchase. Some of us definitely got fucked by that.

I'd like to thank Adam Curry and the Podcasting 2.0 team for helping ensure that it stays that way.

https://podcastindex.org/

ITM!

I think it's a trait in the community. I remember the days sitting in an IRC channel listening to some bootleg live podcast/radio show broastcast over Icecast. It was sorta like pirate radio for a bit. Then podcasts started to show up more and more (in big part due to the iPod) and having a big publishing network wasn't really a thing. Sure, people could use iTunes, but a ton of us were just dropping MP3's from someone's site onto whatever MP3 player we had at the time.

I think Spotify's podcast UI is so awkward and terrible it has held back their growth.

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.

What kind of issues do you have with it? In my listening i'm split between spotify and podcast addict and honestly haven't ever had much trouble with it's UI.

Podcasting's resistance to takeover is going to be hard to replicate.

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.

This did happen in the spanish-speaking "podcasphere" as it is usually called. Ivoox succesfully closed exclusivity contracts with a handful of succesful spanish podcasts, a few years ago. Of course, other companies are trying to do the same with more or less success (Podimo, Spotify and Amazon Audible Spain).

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.

As I understand it, licensing music in Spain is very different in the UK - in Spain you need to license individual songs, whereas in the UK you pay the Performing Rights Society for a single licence to play any recorded music. Which is why, with all due respect to the Spanish side of my family, Spanish discos tend to be wall-to-wall chunda chunda, whereas UK discos generally play pretty decent music (depending on the individual taste of the DJ...)

Offtopic (and feels weird to ask in English) but I'm looking for good general-interest Spanish-language podcasts. Do you have any recommendations for ways to discover new ones?

A really good one is called La Ruina. It's a live podcast and the audience tells their worst experience.

> 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

RSS: https://www.ivoox.com/ruina_fg_f1661078_filtro_1.xml

Wow so this is why it's so hard finding RSS links for spanish podcasts...

edit: nevermind, iVoox offer rss links.

Only superficially relevant but my favorite podcast of all time was Tom Segura's podcast en espanyol - i'm not sure why it left spotify but it was only there for a few months it seems. Seems it's on youtube now but accessing on spotify was convenient for me

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.

It worked for SiriusXM, paying a handful of celebrities big money to stream exclusively on their platform. So replace live radio with radio recording, it should still work

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

Exactly. I never listen to a podcast because it has a name attached to it. It's incredibly stupid. "Obama!", "Harry and Meghan!". So? Do I learn anything from it? Is it good content?

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.

I dunno, haven’t people like the Kardashians made plenty of money out of exactly that?

I think the audience is different. I would wager that the intersection between people who consume mindless celebrity TV and listen to informative podcasts is almost non-existent.

I feel like Spotify going after big celebrities like the Obamas is a bit tone deaf specifically with regards to the podcasting audience.

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.

wasn’t Spotify co-founded by the creator of Napster too?

No. Daniel Elk was a CTO and then freelance developer and Martin Lorentzon was co-founder of a digital marketing company (and the initial money)

I was referring to Sean Parker, apparently he joined a bit later as an early investor (bought 5% in 2010)

> I have noticed Spotify trying to funnel a decentralized podcasting ecosystem based on RSS into their own walled garden

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.

All of this is pretty easy to understand. Podcasts had been free. But Spotify (and Apple too) saw an opportunity to make them paid, by funneling some money to creators. And since these creators wanted to make $$$ they said sign me up please, that sounds great!

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.

I did not even know one could pay Apple for podcasts until your post.

https://podcasters.apple.com/

Agreed, it seems like a natural progression. The barrier for creating a podcast is incredibly low, which is why initially there wasn't this type of middleman. But monetizing a podcast, especially to the point that you can quit your day job is much harder.

There’s already plenty of paid podcasts, what Apple and Spotify offer is frictionless payments. And for all the people complaining about Apples 30% cut on the App Store, there’s plenty of podcasters willing to give them exactly the same cut, as an alternate option to their own payment system.

> By 2021, Spotify had paid to sign some of the biggest names in podcasting.

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.

> was ready to stop many of these creators and companies from sharing podcasts on Apple and Amazon, and keep the content exclusively on Spotify

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?

Reminds me of an ad I saw on the tube for an online furniture company (Made.com?) claiming to 'cut out the middleman' - wtf are you if not a middleman! Always made me chuckle.

Yep. I didn’t even associate Spotify with podcasts. Then they went and bought Joe Rogan, a show I enjoyed listening to on YouTube. That just made me think ‘screw them’.

This was my reaction as well. I enjoyed watching Rogan on YouTube.

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.

Spotify was/is more than a middleman. They acquired multiple publishing tools (Megaphone and Anchor), analytics (Chartable, Podsight) entire studios like Gimlet and had a huge network for both advertisers and paid subscribers. They were trying to acquire their way into becoming YouTube for podcasting. I think the biggest hindrance is that podcasting still isn't social the way video is.

They can't compete on quality of their player so they have to try and by exclusive content - it's pretty sad.

> Spotify saw a space without middleman and thus an opportunity to lock itself in as the middleman.

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.

The sad part is how hard they fail at the basics, like playing audio through a web page. Before you can establish yourself as a gatekeeper you need to at least provide a functional walled garden.

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.

Is there any value add in being middleman? I.e. can they deliver same or new podcasts better, possibly by curation or AI?

I don't think it's ironic; it's the entire point. They saw a market opportunity.

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