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...
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...
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.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPOT/holders/
Any ownership by the record labels must be less than 1%.
"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.
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.
Your math doesn't have to work out, even if it's solid.
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.
And it's so small, too.
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...
Just because they are "interesting" they should not get a free promo.
>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.
Reducing his audience, censoring his most controversial past episodes and preventing certain conversations from happening in front of his large audience in future?
In this incredibly divided world, politics has started to come before profit.
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...
Not that I disagree with you.
[1]https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/?et_r...
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.
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.
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.