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.
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.
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.
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.