And I suppose more famously they did make Joe Rogan exclusive to Spotify as well, and he's probably the biggest name in podcasting
by essentially no ownership what I mean is that the amount of ownership granted to workers via equity is negotiated as part of overall compensation in wage labor market (market means it's as low as each company can competitively get away with, so just saying the share exists does not mean it's of the same class), the majority ownership is elsewhere and there are a lot of non-workers who need to get rich off their work. commenting that ESOPs give workers and their owners the same sense of stakeholder ownership is as interesting as saying america has a universally flat ownership class structure because everyone can buy a share on the market
I rarely watch it since the move away from YouTube but as far as I'm aware they haven't released numbers.
During the pandemic he had a lot of notoriety and relevance because he would platform opinion contrary to the establishment governmental health authorities. To a large degree because of the mis/disinformation guidelines on social media sites, his podcast was the only place a lot of that information could be found and his show gained popularity with a new silo of listeners. He achieved a lot of relevance from that group…and the media because of it, which was hellbent on attempting to “correct” his allegedly dangerous opinions.
Don't forget also forcefully add Podcasts to the UI and not allow hiding them. Also some irritating prompts in the initial rollout that kept begging you to try podcasts.
I basically unsubscribed and switched to YT Music because of that.
It's one thing for a company to offer a new service, it's another to try and push shit on consumers that aren't interested.
Not at Spotify, it happens too many places.