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Comment by mvdtnz | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.

The Joe Rogan Experience has continued to be at the top of Spotify's podcast charts in 2023. It has the biggest weekly audience in the US (Edison Research) and is estimated to bring in 11 million listeners per episode.

It is also the top podcast worldwide on Spotify. Second place goes to Crime Junkie, which has half the listener numbers.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/07/03/top-pod...

At least Rogan is still one of the most popular podcasters in the world. They paid a similar ammount for Gimlet and that company is now completely defunct and all their hit podcasts either jumped ship or stopped. So that was probably a worse investment.

Or $25m (2019) for two podcasts featuring the Obamas. They didn't bother to make frequent appearances and attributed the poor audience figures to Spotify's exclusive rights.

Whoa I hadn't heard about this one. That's madness.

Many of them probably came in during the same growth wave:

> In 2020 and 2021, we took advantage of the opportunity presented by lower-cost capital and invested significantly in team expansion, content enhancement, marketing, and new verticals

There's no details here about which teams are effected. I imagine there's many old hands who see this as the inevitable end of an unnecessary conquer-the-world attempt

Assuming that investing in Rogan did what Spotify hoped it would (driving enough subscriptions to make a profit), not having made the investment would have meant more layoffs now.

Opposite for me. I cancelled because of that. Partially because I didn’t like Spotify endorsing his content, but also because I subscribed to Spotify for music, not podcasts.

I wanted to see them invest more in features around music and work on better compensation for artists - not spend my subscription money on shoving podcast content at me.

I wonder why they force podcasts so much. I've never listened to them, and I'm sure they have that data, and the recommendations are way, way off anything I'd consider listening to.

I guess they try to force it because they have higher margins on them.

Podcast are cheaper to produce and requires no record label sharing the profits with Spotify.

Probably the same reason they're pushing so hard into audiobooks right now. They want to be a general audio platform instead of a music platform and there are significant network effects if they can pull it off which ultimately means more customers and a more sticky product.

If they produce the podcast they don't have to pay royalties + they've aimed for exclusivity with them. They aren't going to have exclusivity with most music, so podcasts are an opportunity to bring in a new audience and lock them in.

That's, AIUI, the theory. Whether it works in practice is another story.

Why would you assume that?

We will find out soon enough because his contract is running out.

I feel like you’re implying something but I don’t get it.

To spell it out for you, $200 million could pay for well over 1,000 employee-years of salaries.

Companies exist to make money, not to be a charity for their employees.

I get what you are saying but you would be surprised how fast financial forecasts balloon at scale.

200 developers @ $150k a year = $30M

$200M/$30M = 6.5 years

It’s also not $150k/year. Employees cost far more than their salary.

Rule of thumb is double. So if you're average total comp is $150k then total cost for each of those employees is $300k/employee (office, expenses, HVAC, insurance, etc..)

I think you’re both saying the same thing. Op is saying 1 employee for 1 year is “1 employee-year”.

So you're saying companies shouldn't do acquisitions?

The implication I see is that the $200M was not worth it.

I don't know their financials, but it seems quite unlikely that a single podcast would be worth that valuation.

Rogan was not making that much less on youtube. Keep in mind pre-spotify he was literally making NFL numbers for listeners+viewers per episode.

I don't think he's that popular anymore.

According to Google Trends, he was more popular in 2020 to early 2022 with some wild spike there, but it seems stabilised for now, at similar rates as in 2018.

Less reach with Spotify

The Joe Rogan Experience is at the top of Spotify’s U.S. podcast charts, and had the biggest weekly audience in the U.S. so far this year, and is widely estimated to bring in 11 million listeners per episode.

His show is the top podcast worldwide on Spotify each of the last three years — nearly double the second-place podcast, true crime series Crime Junkie, which has an estimated 5.9 million listeners per episode.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/07/03/top-pod...

could it be that people that want to listen to his show use spotify for only listening to his show and a real podcast app to listen to regular podcasts? if i was inclined to listen to rogan that’s what i would do.

in your bubble

I personally think that he was better off pre-Spotify. Surely a bit of less money, but so does less drama. And Pre-Spotify he had the power to diversify himself in other platforms as well.

I think the drama would have come to him either way, the US has been extremely divided so he was ripe for cancellation when covid happened.

People have been saying the same thing about Howard Stern and his very large Sirius contract. And yet, SiriusXM keeps re-signing him.

Speculations

It was and still is a stupid decision to buy Joe Rogan. I don't get why people listen to him... He is not funny nor smart. It sometimes feels you get better value when watching morning tv shows...

You don’t listen to Joe Rogan to listen to Joe Rogan. You listen because he has the most interesting guests on.

And lets people spread fake news and stupid theories.

Just because they are "interesting" they should not get a free promo.

That's precisely what people like about it. Anyone can come on his show. No matter how batshit crazy. Many people don't want to be coddled and protected from viewpoints other people have decided are fake news or stupid. They can make up the balance themselves.

That's your opinion. Most guests have a wealth of knowledge that shouldn't be discounted outright.

“But but misinfo!” Man I hate where we’re at for free speech in the West.

Who defines what's "Fake"? Who defines what's stupid?

I love it when people parrot what they heard - what misinformation? Do you mean the Robert Kennedy stuff? I can have my own strong views that the vaccines were useful and still enjoy content - if you just consume what you hear and relay it of course you shouldn't be around "fake news and stupid theories". Saying that 99% of Rogans podcasts are not like this.

Joe Rogan isn't an insightful, active listener like Charlie Rose was and with actual interesting guests at a higher signal level.

>It was and still is a stupid decision to buy Joe Rogan.

>I don't get why people listen to him...

I think you just contradicted yourself here. Whether or not it was a stupid decision to buy the rights to his podcast is orthogonal to whether or not he's funny or smart or if his content gives "value" to listeners.

I feel neither positively nor negatively about Rogan himself (I've never listened to him) but it was plainly a very stupid investment on Spotify's part. Anyone could have predicted (and most of us did) that only a fraction of his audience would follow him behind the paywall and removing him from mainstream free outlets would instantly diminish his cultural relevance.

‘Diminishing his cultural relevance’ may have been the goal.

Reducing his audience, censoring his most controversial past episodes and preventing certain conversations from happening in front of his large audience in future?

Spotify paid $200 million… to tie a podcaster to their sinking-ship podcast platform (and this plan only works if they know and intend for their platform to sink)… just to get him from a big spotlight to a small spotlight?

Elon paid vastly more for Twitter, seemingly primarily as an act of activism.

In this incredibly divided world, politics has started to come before profit.

And when they paid an additional several hundred million buying up tens of random science and tech news and D&D podcasts - was that to intentionally kill those podcasts too? Or were they just a necessary sacrifice in order to create a more believable “we want our product to succeed” fascade, so that Joe didn’t realise he was getting tricked?

It wasn't a "sinking-ship podcast platform", it was Spotify's strategy to own content and thus reduce cost for per-play licensing.

They went for the Netflix strategy for growth. We now know the podcast-idea didn't translate into as many paid subscribers as they expected, but with ~25% of all Spotify subscribers listening to podcasts [1] it's not a "sinking-ship podcast platform"

[1] https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/spotify-podcast-subscr...

FWIW, there is rationale for platform to own content vs licensing deal that forces platform's hand to 'make unavailable' items their customers already purchased[1].

Not that I disagree with you.

[1]https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/?et_r...

In the last few months, several podcasts that were only available on Spotify, have become available via traditional podcast means. For example, Heavyweight. Others did so earlier, though for specific reasons (Science Vs had a spat with Rogan over "dis/misinformation", where I largely agree with them factually, but disagree with them on the use of those terms, etc.).

I think it's fair to say there's a reasonable indication that Spotify exclusivity has been a bad bet for a decent amount of their podcast portfolio. Maybe it works still for Rogan-sized podcasts, but even that's unknown.

I wouldn't be dismissive of a label of "sinking ship", even though it's stronger than how I would put it -- it's plausible enough.

The frame of reference is "was", so back in 2019 when Spotify negotiated with Joe Rogan

Ha, that's fair, I missed that. I wasn't optimistic about them in 2019, but sinking ship would definitely be a strong claim about that time, and my point is moot about that time.

Probably some motivated forgetfulness on my part, because I'm just so glad that their attempts to bind podcasts exclusively to their platform seem to be failing/diminishing.

it would have made more sense to create their own record label than to try to turn a free and open platform like podcasts into a closed platform like they tried with podcasts

That would be Spotify's Direct Distribution Contract, something they also established in 2018, shortly before (or in parallel with) their podcast acquisition strategy.

> It wasn't a "sinking-ship podcast platform”

I think you may have missed the context for this thread :) You’re talking about reality - I’m talking about the hypothesis that Spotify chained Joe Rogan to their platform because they wanted him to drown, which implies not only that the platform is sinking, but that it’s doing so deliberately.

paywall? all you have to do is sign up for the freemium version of spotify?

He’s a great podcaster.

Good enough to bring in $200M of revenue through subscriptions or ads?

Unless Spotify releases numbers none of us have a clue. Considering his youtube numbers before the move, that number was actually him selling himself short.

By definition he is since that is what spotify paid now.

that wasnt the purpose of buying him. the purpose was to buy a gigantic audience of listeners that would hopefully now use spotify as their main podcast app

yes that's his valuation since that's what Spotify paid.

He's really gone downhill lately. Looking really rough. And stoned on top of that. I wonder if he can even comprehend half of what his guests are saying.

Na he is still great

Are “it was a stupid decision to buy him” and “I don't get why people listen to him” supposed to be related statements? The business decision isn’t about your personal feelings, it’s about his objectively measurably enormous audience

I want to see how they got the 200 million back and as they have to lay off 17% of there people it looks like a stupid decision in the end.

It's a ridiculous amount of money for that content.

But looking back at those days where all platform embraced a strategy to "own ALL content", I doubt that the 2nd-best offer was significantly less.

After all, they also paid him to NOT make any further money with the podcast on YouTube or other platforms...

> But looking back at those days where all platform embraced a strategy to "own ALL content",

I don’t understand how that could have ever been a strategy without buying the businesses that own most of the popular music, such as Warner, Universal, and Sony.

Spotify is largely owned by those businesses, that was part of the deal to get them to even open their catalog

That is not true.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPOT/holders/

Any ownership by the record labels must be less than 1%.

Would you say that about any other type of media/culture/art you dislike?

"I don't get why people like the Mona Lisa, the painting is neither original nor particularly well done"

Is just as much a subjective statement. JRE is, by most released figures the top interview podcast on the planet, his interviews regularly move Charts of third party media like Book Bestseller Lists and Music Charts.

There obviously is a huge audience and value there and I can only assume their agreement over 200M was based on some pretty solid math.

> I can only assume their agreement over 200M was based on some pretty solid math.

Working at Microsoft during the Ballmer era and seeing the number of multi-billion-dollar acquisitions written-down to nothing, I would never assume corporations spend large amounts wisely.

You certainly have a point there, but I also remember being absolutely wrong about the Minecraft aquisition which has now paid for itself multiple times.

Your math doesn't have to work out, even if it's solid.

Sometimes it's the case that you do 10 investments, each $1b where one makes you $100b. But in hindsight the 9 looked stupid, but at the time you were using the same strategy to do all the 10 investments.

Not sure if it's case with Joe Rogan, but just how sometimes there's a lot of failure, while the strategy itself is solid.

I will never understand why that idiot was hired as a CEO in the first place.

I think, sometimes, buying the competition and killing it is the intended effect. Especially if you're as anti-competitive as Microsoft.

> "I don't get why people like the Mona Lisa, the painting is neither original nor particularly well done"

And it's so small, too.

The Mona Lisa is art, and it is a "you can like it or not" situation. A podcast that allows for spreading misinformation about vaccines can be responsible for the deaths of many

It's simple, different people have different opinions in life and his show is still the most popular podcast on spotify. was it worth $200 million, I have my doubts on that one.

You don't watch Joe Rogan for Joe Rogan. You watch Joe Rogan for the guests. I love his episodes with Elon Musk.

It’s light entertainment and he tends to cover topics I am interested in like BJJ/Muay Thai. If he goes on about Covid etc I just half listen, it’s rarely that long.

> I don't get why people listen to him...

People have different tastes. That's OK.

The Joe Rogan Experience has continued to be at the top of Spotify's podcast charts, bringing in 11m listeners an episode. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/07/03/top-pod...

As a scientist working in public health, this decision burned my faith in Spotify. They were taking down conspiracy theory podcasts daily while bankrolling Rogan to provide a platform with insane reach for cranks like Robert Malone. I cancelled my subscription for a few months in protest.

> for a few months

Heh. There's a zillion perfectly good competitors in this space. Why not just permanently switch to one that doesn't fund conspiracy theory wackos?

Not absolute, but pausing a sub with an explanation sends an immediate message. Which services would you recommend? I'm mostly after a broad and fresh electronic music catalogue.

I use DI.fm (lots of fresh electronic music there!) and Google Music via my YouTube subscription.

Thanks for the recommendation

"for a few months" - so you went back. Honest question - what is Spotify doing so well that you went back rather than just sticking with, say, Apple Music?

Depth and breadth of electronic music catalogue and switching cost. Former is probably narrowing rapidly. What would you recommend? Building Apple's future streaming monopoly isn't particularly appealing. Small perhaps, but pausing a sub with explanation sends a clear signal.

I use a lot of Apple devices and I’m not picky, so Apple Music works well for me. I highly doubt Apple will get a monopoly since Google is also in this space with YouTube Music, so there’s another option for you.

A lot of the smaller players have dropped out of this space, which might be a hint as to why Spotify is leaning in to the podcasts: maybe it’s hard to be independent here with Amazon, Apple, and Google being willing to not make much money on this as they build their moats.

Thanks!

> I cancelled my subscription for a few months in protest.

Good for you, I'm sure that made a huge impact.

I feel a lot of my faith in public health scientists was also burned.

I also lost faith in certain scientists (and many more politicians) during the pandemic. But be wary of generalising about a such a large and interdisciplinary group of people. Voices amplified by the media (indeed like Robert Malone on Rogan's podcast) often grossly misrepresent scientific consensus.

Joe Rogan brings in 10s millions of listeners. On the other hand it's not clear what value those employees who were let go brought. The software behind Spotify is pretty generic. Listening experience isn't much different between say Spotify,YouTube Music and Amazon Music. Software engineers might not want to hear it, but content is more important than software used to consume it. Book vs book's cover.

> Joe Rogan brings in 10s millions of listeners

Has this ever been confirmed by Spotify?

What revenue do these listeners bring?

Spotify makes money through ads for non-paying users and subscription fees from paying users. For non-paying users, time listened translates into ad impressions. New content also brings in new paid subscribers, as it makes subscription more valuable to the user allowing listening without ads.

Also, even when you pay, Rogan still has ads.

A more suitable comparison would be between the book contents and the paper and fonts of the text. I don't know how much you would enjoy a book on bad paper and bad, barely legible text.

Yes, but printing book legibly is a solved problem. So all books in the bookstore are legible. Books are competing on content, not legibility.

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