[HN Gopher] How Spotify's podcast bet went wrong
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How Spotify's podcast bet went wrong
Author : lxm
Score : 174 points
Date : 2023-02-14 17:53 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.semafor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.semafor.com)
| cschep wrote:
| I was so annoyed by them forcing podcasts down my throat that I
| left the platform. Sample size of one, but give me a break
| people! Make it a separate tab in the app at least. Makes you
| wonder if this tested well with a bunch of users that aren't me
| or if they didn't even test with a user!
| DeathFindsAWay wrote:
| [dead]
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > 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
| masklinn wrote:
| > 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.
| saghm wrote:
| As the meme goes, "it's free real estate!"
| jack_pp wrote:
| If they fail, trying to occupy that real estate could cost
| them billions
| k12sosse wrote:
| Jim Boonie isn't as interested as they thought.
| cccybernetic wrote:
| 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"
| budu3 wrote:
| The Google Podcasts app works for me. It has a minimalist
| feel to it.
| simonh wrote:
| Try Overcast.
| cccybernetic wrote:
| 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).
| suction wrote:
| [dead]
| cma wrote:
| > 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.
| cccybernetic wrote:
| 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| 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.
| Adraghast wrote:
| > 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.
| eastbound wrote:
| > 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.
| threeseed wrote:
| There is a Recently Played screen.
|
| It is accessible from Listen Now at the very bottom.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| 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.
| hnzix wrote:
| 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.
| cccybernetic wrote:
| "Terrible" was too strong of a word -- I actually like
| Overcast, but find Spotify superior.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| 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.
| cccybernetic wrote:
| iPhone - I'm happy to take recommendations.
| ryeights wrote:
| 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.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Castro is my favorite.
| dotBen wrote:
| _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.
| Fr0styMatt88 wrote:
| 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'.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I did not even know one could pay Apple for podcasts until
| your post.
|
| https://podcasters.apple.com/
| vlunkr wrote:
| 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.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| 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.
| notahacker wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I don't think it's ironic; it's the entire point. They saw a
| market opportunity.
| vanilla_nut wrote:
| 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.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| > Once someone really solves the advertising model for
| podcasters
|
| Do you think solving the problem includes making it
| difficult to skip the ads?
| faeriechangling wrote:
| 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.
| soiler wrote:
| 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.)
| moneywoes wrote:
| Spotify injects ads into the podcast?
| e40 wrote:
| I paid for Spotify but I won't listen to podcasts in their
| app. I use Pocket Casts, which I've loved for years.
| malermeister wrote:
| 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.
| e40 wrote:
| Not true. I got grandfathered in, as other people have
| said.
| suction wrote:
| [dead]
| tapland wrote:
| 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.
| fencepost wrote:
| 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.
| malermeister wrote:
| I don't remember ever making an account, I just bought it
| on Google Play.
| JanSt wrote:
| I'm using Pocket Casts and never have paid anything edit:
| as far as I remember
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| misterprime wrote:
| I'd like to thank Adam Curry and the Podcasting 2.0 team for
| helping ensure that it stays that way.
|
| https://podcastindex.org/
| knewter wrote:
| ITM!
| metalliqaz wrote:
| rss
|
| Same reason plain web browsers beat AOL and Compuserv
| emodendroket wrote:
| Then why did Twitter displace RSS readers for the Web?
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| 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.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| Twitter replaced the 'web' portion - the publishing of
| content part that people used RSS to subscribe to.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Twitter is a different thing.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Mea culpa, looks like you win the Internet.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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.
| rv3392 wrote:
| 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.
| gibolt wrote:
| 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.
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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.
| tracker1 wrote:
| 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.
| Clubber wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| bnjms wrote:
| 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.
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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.
| k12sosse wrote:
| What do you watch that YouTube's getting heavy handed
| with strikes?
| pathartl wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| BonitaPersona wrote:
| 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.
| thenewwazoo wrote:
| 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?
| simlevesque wrote:
| A really good one is called La Ruina. It's a live podcast
| and the audience tells their worst experience.
|
| > Tomas Fuentes e Ignasi Taltavull comentan y juzgan la
| peor anecdota de la gente que viene de publico al programa.
| La historia mas miserable se lleva un premio.
|
| YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@laruinashow
|
| RSS: https://www.ivoox.com/ruina_fg_f1661078_filtro_1.xml
| simlevesque wrote:
| Wow so this is why it's so hard finding RSS links for spanish
| podcasts...
|
| edit: nevermind, iVoox offer rss links.
| frereubu wrote:
| 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...)
| dieselgate wrote:
| 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
| dantheman wrote:
| They can't compete on quality of their player so they have to
| try and by exclusive content - it's pretty sad.
| shmatt wrote:
| 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
| kiawe_fire wrote:
| 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.
| papito wrote:
| 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.
| cjrp wrote:
| I dunno, haven't people like the Kardashians made plenty of
| money out of exactly that?
| drexlspivey wrote:
| > 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.
|
| wasn't Spotify co-founded by the creator of Napster too?
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Is there any value add in being middleman? I.e. can they
| deliver same or new podcasts better, possibly by curation or
| AI?
| ragebol wrote:
| Podcasting works fine with open standards like RSS. I refuse to
| listen to the same podcasts through Spotify and let them create a
| walled garden or some other lock-in.
| soliton4 wrote:
| maybe it would help if their users could actually listen to the
| end of a podcast without it just cutting off after 40ish minutes
| willio58 wrote:
| I think they should have built a separate app. Music is different
| than Podcasts in multiple ways, and shoving them into the same
| app just negatively affects both experiences.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| So true. I actively rage against Spotify sometimes when I see
| all the podcast spam, that I can't turn off. I feel so insulted
| and used.
| ntlk wrote:
| That was the main reason I switched to Apple Music.
| oauea wrote:
| * * *
| super256 wrote:
| I was like this too until last year when I finally found a
| podcast which told me something _new_. Most podcasts just
| recycle the same rubbish, and I think that is a real problem.
|
| Anyway, I now think it's fine to have the podcasts in the
| same app; I honestly wouldn't want to switch to another app
| on my phone to switch to real music after listening to a
| podcast. Should be toggable though for people like you.
| mh- wrote:
| I'll never know, because I'm afraid to click on a podcast
| in Spotify for fear it will shove _more_ of them in my
| face.
|
| Using Spotify in CarPlay, for several months it used up
| most of the screen real estate to promote podcasts. When I
| open Spotify it's for music discovery, and the number of
| podcasts I'm interested in listening to at that moment is
| zero.
|
| edit: in case it's relevant, I pay for Spotify Premium.
| This isn't a complaint about ads in an ad-supported
| product.
| jmuguy wrote:
| Oh it will 100% show you even more podcast spam if you
| accidentally interact with any of it.
| bhahn wrote:
| Totally agree. I used to listen to music and podcasts on
| Spotify, but now use Apple Podcasts to listen to podcasts and
| Spotify to listen to music.
| acheron wrote:
| I don't use Spotify and never will, but the Amazon Music app
| did that too and it's incredibly annoying.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| absolutely. But then they'd have to build the user base from
| the ground up
| joejoesvk wrote:
| this would be incredibly bad move
| criddell wrote:
| For whom?
| jmuguy wrote:
| Assuming that app didn't suck, I'd actually use it. Instead of
| actively avoiding anything related to podcasts in the music app
| because as soon as you accidentally interact with any of the
| podcast content that triggers it to start shoving it in your
| face even more.
| nwsm wrote:
| I sort of agree but there are many product reasons not to do
| that. They could also have segregated the content in their
| existing app(s) more strictly. I, like you, am hardly ever
| interested in seeing both music and podcasts. Keep the "home"
| pages music-only and let me navigate to podcasts when that's
| what I'm interested in.
| huevosabio wrote:
| I disagree, I love using the Spotify app for podcasts. I have
| podcast addict and never use it because frankly I already go to
| Spotify for all-things-audio.
|
| Now they allow paid podcasts as well, so my playlist is
| complete.
|
| When I started using Spotify back in 2011, I was excited to not
| have to use N apps for music. I want to stick to not having to
| use more than 1 app for audio.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Specifically with JRE, the AndroidTV app for Spotify was
| horrible and I cancelled when I dropped PayPal, and didn't
| bother looking to resubscribe another way. As far as I know
| it's still pretty bad.
| isk517 wrote:
| I don't think two apps is the answer, they should just build a
| better distinction between music and podcasts into the existing
| app. A toggle at the top of the app that let you switch between
| music and podcasts would work, and that way you could still
| include the option to slot in a few songs between podcasts if
| that is how you enjoy your listen experience.
| esel2k wrote:
| Maybe another example where one app does two things: AirBnB.
|
| I am a host (holiday house) but regularly also travel and
| become a traveler. The experience and need is very different.
| In one "mode" I need offline availability and help in
| navigating the checkin time and the location and in the other
| one the calendar, bookings and money is my main concern. You
| can easily click on "switch to hosting" in the same app.
| irsagent wrote:
| Agree. Podcast should have there own experience. Being able to
| access music and podcast in the same ui is a strange
| experience.
| hotcoffeebear wrote:
| Yeah, podcast would be better with audio books than music.
| hardtke wrote:
| I somewhat disagree. The key to profitability in the audio
| space is moving listeners from pay-per-stream content (music)
| to owned content (podcasts, shows, etc.). For that latter costs
| are fixed even as listenership grows. The only profitable
| subscription audio service is SiriusXM, and they do this
| through exclusive licensed content (Howard Stern being the most
| notable example). Getting people to switch back and forth
| between apps makes it hard to get people to substitute the
| profitable content for the unprofitable.
| TylerE wrote:
| Even Sirius isn't THAT profitable...they have several
| satelites that will need to be replaced in the next few
| years, each of which will eat about 9 months of profit.
| treis wrote:
| This is a big reason why I left Spotify. Seemed like they
| kept pushing me to lower cost content like covers and live
| performances instead.
|
| The other is that unfortunately things are ecosystems these
| days. Spotify just didn't seem to work as well on Google Home
| and Android Auto. Probably not their fault as Google can
| barely keep their shit working.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| That's the move that would've been better for users, but it
| doesn't allow Spotify to use their already-popular product to
| bolster their nascent one, which is probably why they didn't do
| that.
|
| It's far from new behavior for Spotify, though. They've been
| constantly twiddling with UI, algorithms, etc trying to
| optimize for profit margins over user happiness for years at
| this point. Last I knew their entire engineering structure is
| optimized for that, with the desktop client for example being
| carved up into wholly separate iframe "islands" (complete with
| dependencies in duplicate, triplicate, etc) managed by
| different teams to allow A/B testing of each pane without
| communicating with the teams responsible for other panes.
| jkukul wrote:
| > but it doesn't allow Spotify to use their already-popular
| product to bolster their nascent one, which is probably why
| they didn't do that.
|
| I think a good counter-example is Uber, with a separate app
| for ordering rides (Uber) and for ordering food (Uber Eats).
| Both apps are still bolstering each other by the brand
| recognition.
|
| Additionally, the apps could still cross-reference each other
| in a subtle way. E.g. maybe when you type a podcast name in
| the regular Spotify it could redirect you to the Spotify
| Podcast app. Just like the Uber app sometimes nudges you to
| also order food.
|
| EDIT: as one of the comments points out, you can actually
| order food from the Uber app, my bad, that's not how I
| remembered it!
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Uber also is famous for having a GIANT app binary for "what
| should be a simple app", which they've gone on record as
| defending as necessary for international use. Maybe they
| didn't want to or couldn't continue to bloat the app.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| In the case of Uber, I think it's more likely that someone
| who's used their ride service may be interested in ordering
| food than it would be for someone who's used Spotify for
| music to be interested in podcasts.
|
| I do think you're right that more subtle nudges are
| probably fine. Some might begrudge them but such promotions
| are a lot more tolerable than directly pulling an entirely
| separate app into your existing app and then placing the
| newly imported bits in the spotlight.
| kritiko wrote:
| You can order food in the Uber app - there's a big tab at
| the top in iOS.
|
| I think there's huge pressure to "everything app" very
| disparate services. I've also noticed that Amazon now lets
| you pull up your Whole Foods code or pull up the Whole
| Foods storefront from the Amazon app.
| jkukul wrote:
| You're right. I must have remembered wrong.. or maybe it
| has changed for worse recently?
|
| My initial claim only works for Uber Eats. It can only be
| used for ordering food. There's a button to order a ride
| but it redirects to the Uber app.
| Fogest wrote:
| Uber Eats seemed to be it's own thing, but now they seem
| to be tying them a bit more together. I've even seen the
| Uber app offering me the option to have food delivery
| setup while on my ride. Basically trying to give you the
| option to have food delivery arranged to show up to your
| destination around the same time you arrive.
|
| But I believe you're right that initially they were more
| separate entities, but now it's kinda merged.
| izacus wrote:
| Except it's not quite the same as Spotify - when you try
| to order a ride, Uber doesn't dilute and replace found
| rides with food offerings which you don't need or want at
| that time. That's what Spotify did - they actually
| undermined their main feature to push podcasts and
| hurt/cannibalized their main value proposition to try to
| push another product that we didn't want when we opened
| the app.
|
| Honestly, I think this could go much better if they just
| organized their damn software better and not damage their
| music offering with forced podcasts. Many of us would
| probably stay loyal and use it for podcasts as well if
| they made the experience great instead of forced.
| FractalHQ wrote:
| It's funny because I listen to music quietly in the background
| while my podcasts play, so I can't use Spotify for podcasts
| _because_ they're in the same app.
| tompetry wrote:
| What if they did a better job of segregating music vs. podcasts
| in the same app? So you can search and "save your place"
| separately between podcast and music? That's my biggest gripe -
| I can't just pickup separately between the two, I have to
| search again, find my spot etc. It makes it tempting to just
| use a different app for podcasts.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| I genuinely can't understand how they haven't fixed this
| already. If you listen to a podcast and then half way through
| switch over to music, there is no easy way to resume that
| podcast you were on, and good luck finding that one episode
| among the list of hundreds of episodes. It makes me think
| Spotify employees don't even use the app themselves.
| thefreeman wrote:
| I hate their interface, and there are a number of annoying
| podcast specific bugs. But for this use case you actually
| can find and resume your most recent few podcasts. You go
| to Library >> New Episodes, and at the top under Continue
| Listening there are your 3 most recent podcast episodes
| listed which you can click to resume.
| scarface74 wrote:
| They didn't build a separate app precisely because they want
| people listening to less music where they have to pay the music
| industry for each play and move to content that just had a fix
| cost
| vongomben wrote:
| Interesting comment
| jklinger410 wrote:
| The UX for the podcasting part of their app is god awful. I
| always thought it was so funny to watch them invest in Rogan.
|
| The disconnect between Sales/Management and the Dev/UX team is
| plain as day.
| rrradical wrote:
| Yes. I used Spotify for podcasts for a long time (because it
| was convenient and I had a music subscription), and then gave
| up. The only user visible changes I ever saw were ads for
| podcasts I didn't care about pushed into my face. I would
| search online for some problem I had and see that it had been
| reported years ago by other users and no improvement ever
| came.
|
| Their service has always been very reliable, I'll give them
| that. But the app just doesn't improve over the course of
| years. What on earth are they actually working on at this
| point? And what kind of podcasting strategy doesn't include
| making the app good for podcasts?
| jklinger410 wrote:
| On the desktop app you can't even see what the newest
| episodes of the podcasts you are following are. Truly
| insane.
| krashidov wrote:
| It's a tough call but I disagree. It's so much harder to grow
| from 0 than to go grow from an already high install count.
| dotBen wrote:
| The play here was to get a higher %age of listening time in the
| app spent on free content (ie the long tail of podcasts). Use a
| few paid big names to create exclusivity and then funnel
| listeners to the freebies they don't have to pay for while
| collecting your monthly subscription.
| jasmer wrote:
| They just need to fix their donkey ass app and it would be
| fine.
|
| My god man so many big companies have such crazy shit show
| experiences, it really makes me wonder.
|
| I think once you have people addicted or 'needing' something,
| then great experience goes down the toilet.
|
| The funny thing is, I'll bet there are very good economics
| behind good design ... aka good design will payoff, and usually
| it's measurable. It's odd.
| lopatin wrote:
| How does having the option to listen to podcasts on Spotify
| negatively impact my music listening experience?
| kzrdude wrote:
| When you're looking for music there's a podcast section
| positioned centrally in the app you can't remove in options
| daqhris wrote:
| Kind of unfair to include at the end the only one important
| sentence for a publicly traded company.
|
| "Spotify touted major user growth to finish out the year, and
| after announcing that it had best revenue expectations, the
| company's stock price jumped."
|
| Then, why would this author choose as title this: "Spotify's
| podcast bet went wrong"?
|
| Not as professional as I would expect. Just another publisher
| seeking controversy and clickbait.
|
| There are always deals gone wrong and bad management decisions in
| a company with the size and notoriety of Spotify. But, its not
| cool to post a piece that doesn't balance out all valuable info.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 5 years after a huge bull market, it is still below IPO price.
| The tiny stock price jump is not enough to counter that basic
| fact.
| ninly wrote:
| Article authors don't typically write the headlines that appear
| above their pieces.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| That's not an acceptable excuse.
| freejazz wrote:
| For the author? Totally seems like it would be...
| scarface74 wrote:
| Revenue while losing money is not exactly a win.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| " and Joe Rogan, whose rambling, hours-long podcasts had somewhat
| confoundingly become the biggest hit in podcasting since Serial."
|
| WTF is "Serial"? And how can Rogan be the biggest thing since
| something I have never heard of? And how can it even be since
| "Serial" when he has been doing this for over a decade, before
| podcasting was a legit thing?
| MattDemers wrote:
| Serial was probably the first "killer app" of podcasting, with
| an episodic look at a crime that they (arguably) had a hand in
| reversing the decision for. Every bit of True Crime podcasting
| owes something to Serial, and it was a normie-friendly product
| that wasn't being published anywhere else, in any other
| formats. Journalists also bigged it up, which meant it got a
| lot of hype, as well.
| cschmidt wrote:
| https://serialpodcast.org/ from the This American Life (NPR)
| people
| latexr wrote:
| There's also S-Town1, from Serial (and This American Life).
| If you're on the fence regarding its runtime2, I recommend
| listening to the first two chapters in full and reevaluate
| then. So far, everyone I gave that recommendation to gladly
| stuck with it.
|
| 1 https://stownpodcast.org/
|
| 2 About seven hours, one per episode.
| owlbynight wrote:
| Their app sucks for podcasts. That's where they went wrong. I
| stopped listening to several podcasts that went Spotify-only
| because their desktop app is so bad that it does not have an
| option to notify you of new episodes. That's ridiculous.
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| I like Joe Rogan, but I don't like the UX that Spotify offers,
| which is why I've never managed to move over to Spotify for music
| or for podcasts. Joe Rogan's nice just resulted in me watching
| him MUCH less, I think I watched two maybe three podcasts since
| he moved there. I think that YouTube is just that much better for
| video and obviously that more familiar to me. As for music, I
| mostly listen to it either locally or on YouTube Music (which can
| lead to me taking music, that I like, locally).
|
| Don't get me wrong I tried to switch to Spotify many times but it
| never stick. I still remember trying for multiple hours to open
| my friends most played of the year playlist without success, I
| still don't know what I was doing wrong, I even tried creating a
| new account, but it didn't work, while other friends could listen
| to that playlist without problems, to me it didn't even show.
|
| As for video the controls felt a bit of and selecting the size of
| the video was a bit strange too.
|
| Thus I remain on YouTube. I do, from time to time go and check if
| Joe Rogan had any interesting guests, but the bat for me to watch
| it is much higher then it was on YouTube, where I watched a lot
| of Joe Rogan, I'd say at least one episode per week!
|
| But hey, we still get clips on YouTube, so that's something ^^
| Humbly8967 wrote:
| I have also only seen a couple JRE episodes since the Spotify
| takeover, but the UI is not my problem. My problem is Spotify
| trying to seize control of an open ecosystem.
| permo-w wrote:
| I believe they said UX. to me, Spotify has always been an
| example of good UI, but not so for its UX
|
| Spotify used to have this great thing where if you long-
| pressed a song, it'd play ~15s from the main hook. it was
| amazing for quickly getting the sense of a playlist or
| recognising a song, but they removed it because not enough
| people used it.
|
| and there's the big one everyone talks about: Radio. Spotify
| radio used to be fantastic. in goes a song and out comes
| exciting new songs, with a few you know sprinkled in. for a
| lot of people I know, this was why they chose spotify over
| anything else
|
| then at some point the metrics will have shown that - shock!
| - people prefer songs they already know??? so now radio crams
| in as many songs you know as the genre will allow
|
| of course the numbers show that people like what they're
| already familiar with! but that's not the point of a fucking
| radio
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| Same here. There was a Spotify dev on twitter who was saying
| that Spotify only hires the best and that's why they are so
| successful. Very arrogant.
|
| But like okay, if you are so great why can I only watch at 1x
| playback speed for video?
|
| I'm just not willing to watch at that rate. The other thing was
| clips of Rogan on YouTube showed me if I wanted to watch the
| full thing. Spotify doesn't really offer that in the same way
| at least.
|
| It's a big downgrade from YT over some UX and features that
| aren't that hard to create
| whbrown wrote:
| > But like okay, if you are so great why can I only watch at
| 1x playback speed for video?
|
| Maybe they updated this recently since you last tried, but
| you can most certainly change the playback speed for podcast
| videos (0.5x-3.5x). I just did it. Of course, the UX could
| definitely be improved in other ways, such as providing a
| more organized & easily filterable feed rather than a
| somewhat random assortment of 'Your shows' and 'Episodes for
| you'.
| saurik wrote:
| Maybe you are on mobile and the parent commenter is not?
|
| https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Mac/Adjust-video-
| sp...
| davisoneee wrote:
| That is a 2-3 year old link. It's not valid.
|
| Speed adjustment is available for video podcasts on
| spotify desktop. I just tried it directly on a rogan
| podcast, and can use it on both linux and windows
| desktop.
| DoesntMatter22 wrote:
| They must have updated it recently because the Convo I had
| with him was a few months back. He just went on and on
| about how no one wants the feature etc.
|
| Glad they have it now.
| Zetice wrote:
| Ack, YouTube Music did this thing where it was playing random
| YouTube videos from people who uploaded the song, rather than
| an "official" release, and I fled wildly. I want _nothing_ to
| do with YouTube when I load in YouTube Music; I want as close
| to the "official" source as I can get, and anything else
| bothers me. Spotify at least delivers that for me.
|
| Did they stop doing that? I might ponder moving back to YouTube
| Music if so...
| majormajor wrote:
| I see a really common pattern of "thing people like if they don't
| pay for it" being confused with "thing that we can use to print
| money if we make them pay for it instead."
|
| I'm very curious to see if Twitter tries to push further down
| that road. It hasn't worked well for others. Quibi is probably
| the highest-profile example so far, misreading the market for
| short-form downtime video.
|
| It's the cable TV model, in many ways, except missing the bit
| where cable quickly started to give you new exclusive channels
| that people couldn't get anything like anywhere else (HBO, ESPN)
| instead of just repackaging your locals.
| aliqot wrote:
| to be a fly on the wall at rogan's right now.. yeah he made the
| money, but I wonder sometimes if it tanked his show. Almost
| nobody talks about him or his guest's antics anymore when just
| 2yrs ago he was approaching howard stern status.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Surely his pandemic opinions also had an effect.
| RandomTisk wrote:
| I find Spotify in general to be greatly inferior to Youtube and
| I listen to JRE a lot less since his move there. I'll catch all
| his high profile guests but I find I never listen to random
| podcasts because the Joe Rogan "Experience" downright sucks on
| Spotify.
|
| - The constant ads in the US, they're skippable but they're
| obnoxiously long and frequent and annoy the crap out of me. -
| Spotify app performs poorly, seeking is slow, random
| freezes/hangs, sometimes I have to close the app completely to
| get an updated list of shows for a podcaster for some reason. -
| The interface for viewing shows is inferior. Thumbnails for
| shows are tiny while they have a ton of wasted space on a
| typical 1440p monitor.
|
| I also think he's greatly bought into the mob's demands and
| engages political topics a lot less frequently since at least
| COVID, despite being lied about repeatedly and basically being
| correct in almost everything he ever said or questioned.
| hiraki9 wrote:
| I mean, the same thing happened to Howard Stern when he signed
| with Sirius XM, right?
| [deleted]
| TylerE wrote:
| He's also, kinda sorta semi-retired. He only broadcasts like
| 2 days a week now.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| We can't know for sure because sirius doesn't publish ratings
| like terrestrial radio. We do know sirius had put incentives
| in his contract where if they reached X more subscribers
| after Stern announced he was moving, he'd get a bonus. He met
| these almost instantly.
|
| More than his radio show, Stern also lost TV around the same
| time he switched to sirius.
| hotcoffeebear wrote:
| Better like this.
| Alupis wrote:
| I, as one data point, refused to make a Spotify account just to
| continue listening to Rogan.
|
| I already have a paid Pandora account, that's more than a
| decade old and I really like. I have all the same "features" a
| paid Spotify account has (offline listening, playlists, choose
| any song, etc) and what I feel is a vastly superior "radio"
| aka. suggested listening.
|
| I have no reason to use Spotify, except Rogan - and that wasn't
| enough.
|
| So, Rogan lost me as a regular listener, and Spotify's plan was
| thwarted (in a single case at least). Although... I'm probably
| not alone here.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Rogan already got paid, so I'm sure he won't be too bothered.
| He's also kept the YouTube channel alive with occasional clips
| and fight companions, and would presumably switch back should
| things turn sour with Spotify.
|
| I'm really curious what kinds of numbers he's been getting
| since switching to Spotify. My perception has been that his
| cultural importance has waned significantly since the switch,
| but I don't have any hard numbers to back this up, it's just
| vibes.
| soneca wrote:
| Maybe his influence would fade away anyway and he sold it at
| its peak. Just like "Draw Something".
| Y_Y wrote:
| I'd definitely choose the money there
| alexashka wrote:
| Rogan would love nothing more than being _less_ popular.
|
| What do you imagine the benefit of being _more_ famous to be?
| It is all downside once you get past being able to ask anyone
| to be on your show or go for dinner and most of them say yes.
|
| I wish famous people would openly talk about what a pain in the
| ass and actual security risk it is to be even remotely famous.
| cschep wrote:
| I think your insight isn't a bad one but -- The famous people
| I've interacted with would be pretty quick to agree with the
| downsides (they are painful and huge) .. but also very
| generous about admitting the upsides. Depending on the level
| of fame they can be enormous. The special access of famous
| people's lives is.. hard to understand if you don't have it
| (I don't have it, but I've witnessed and experienced the
| tiniest bits of it and _holy shit_ ). I don't think a single
| one of them would trade it / go back.
| [deleted]
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Would they really not give up the fame but keep the money
| if they could? I feel like the advantage of getting free
| shit doesn't really matter when you have a 9 figure net
| worth like Rogan.
| jstx1 wrote:
| You can't single out moving to Spotify as the cause because
| there are two other confounding factors - moving to Texas and
| his reaction to everything around Covid.
|
| And even if it was because of Spotify... well, that's what the
| money is for - they paid him enough to be okay with it.
| [deleted]
| LarryMullins wrote:
| I think it was his move to spotify that was the inflection
| point. I used to watch a handful of his podcasts on youtube
| each year, whenever I saw that he had interesting guests on
| (and not just his unfunny comedian friends or MMA
| fighters...) But since he moved to spotify I haven't seen a
| single one of his interviews. I'm not installing some dumb
| app to watch a dump ape a few times a year.
| runevault wrote:
| The covid thing is interesting because there are people who
| will flock TO someone for being so against it. In the
| basketball world saw the same thing with Kyrie Irving. Is it
| enough to offset all the people who see that and nope out? No
| clue but there is at least a vocal minority who are so
| incredibly anti-vaccine now.
| TylerE wrote:
| and also moving from sorta chaotic neutral to definitively
| right wing.
| cheeze wrote:
| I don't think him moving to Texas had anything to do with it.
|
| I do think he became deeply unpopular in many circles because
| of the anti COVID takes though. He went from a bro-y, kinda
| douchey guy who seemed harmless to a spokesperson for
| antivaxers. Lots of folks in the middle who didn't have much
| of an opinion, or care too much about him, that ended up
| writing him off completely.
| freejazz wrote:
| TBH his podcast just got boring before then. I had pretty
| much stopped listening because I got bored with Joe
| interrupting the guest to talk about apes or something like
| that. He didn't really seem to make an effort to understand
| his guests a lot, especially when it was something he might
| be politically against. It just became uninteresting. I
| forgot who it was that he had on, but they were talking
| about how in another world where team sports were gender-
| mixed instead of what they are now, we'd value different
| things in teams (like the different qualities brought by
| the different types of players, or their ability to work
| together to succeed, not just worship at individual
| superstar athletes as is common now) and Joe was just like
| "but guys are the best, I don't understand". Like, it
| wasn't really a hard concept to grasp, even if you don't
| think sports teams _should_ be gender-mixed.
| aflag wrote:
| I've tried using Spotify for podcasts, but the UI is abysmal.
| Simple features like the ability to play a single podcast without
| autoplaying the next are not available.
| [deleted]
| Zetice wrote:
| Seeing a lot of hate for Spotify's implementation of podcasts;
| does anyone here regularly use the app for Podcast listening?
|
| I do, and it's _fine_. It doesn 't blow me away, and I expect
| they're trying to, but it's not like... unusable or anything. My
| one complaint is that it plays episodes in the opposite order;
| like, if I discover a new podcast, I want to start from the
| beginning, but it only wants to let me play backwards (older and
| older episodes). It lets you sort in reverse order, but I don't
| think it _plays_ them in that sort order (or it didn 't last time
| I looked anyway).
|
| But yeah, a lot of "Spotify generally sucks" or "what Spotify is
| trying to do sucks" but not a lot of "I use Spotify for podcasts
| and I don't love it".
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I think it's important to understand why people use spotify for
| podcasts. They use spotify because they already have spotify
| for music. No one is buying spotify for the podcasts. So the
| player has to be.... fine. It needs to be just good enough not
| to actively force people away from it. Spotify podcasts fits
| the corporate software quality model. And podcast players have
| been around for about 15 years anyway by now, so it's not
| rocket science. Anyone who doesn't like it... there are dozens
| of other podcast apps out there that are great.
| myaccount80 wrote:
| I used to listen podcasts on the Apple Podcast app but then I
| tried to listen to the same podcasts in Spotify and the audio
| quality was so much better. Anyone else felt the same? I mainly
| listen to Lex Fridman
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"So we are shifting to focus on tightening our spend and
| becoming more efficient."
|
| Ah yes the pivot to "efficiency"! This has practically become a
| meme at this point. It's like the rallying cry of CEOs presiding
| over money furnaces everywhere.
| panick21_ wrote:
| No shit, it was always clear that's what's gone happen.
|
| Any podcast that goes exclusive on Spotify is simply a podcast
| I'm not gone listen to anymore. Luckily some of the podcast that
| were bought by Spotify are still available normally.
| abledon wrote:
| I think one of the reasons Lex Friedman and Andrew Huberman's
| respective podcasts increased in popularity was the hole left on
| youtube platform by Rogan leaving to spotify.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Am I the only one that finds the prose very difficult to read?
| Was it edited at all?
| soneca wrote:
| > _"Spotify was a one-company podcast bubble. Its drastic cuts
| have triggered a podcast winter"_
|
| I don't Spotify was responsible for the podcast bubble. I am also
| not sure there is a podcast "bubble" at all. I sure don't think
| we are in a "podcast winter".
|
| I agree Spotify's bet on podcast might have gone wrong. But
| podcast industry seems to be going fine.
| valeg wrote:
| They should bring back radio plays. Grifty podcasts with
| uninformed hosts are annoying. They are too easy to produce and
| just a noise.
| dharmab wrote:
| They never left. There are many fiction podcasts and series.
| corobo wrote:
| Oh good!
|
| I wish they'd bring Gimlet's old shows back to the internet.
| Really been fancying a StartUp relisten recently.
| [deleted]
| samstave wrote:
| Screw this article's narrative.
|
| Spotify's problem is its abhorrent UX/UI!
|
| And this sentence is just lame AF:
|
| > _" Joe Rogan, whose rambling, hours-long podcasts had somewhat
| confoundingly become the biggest hit in podcasting"_
|
| Rogan has some of the best guests on his show, they are
| informative and entertaining.
|
| Also, does the author of this post even know how to skip whole
| episodes if he doesnt like the guest, or does he know how to
| 'scrub' (FF or RW)
|
| -
|
| You dont listen to the Rogan podcast for Rogan (typically) you
| listen to it for the guests.
|
| The other best Podcast is Lex Fridman. Although I have to listen
| to that sped up ~1.25 usually, because lex talks too slowly for
| my taste - and the other frustrating fact is that Lex oft
| forgets/omits some of the obvious questions one would have for a
| guest -- or he hasnt informed himself well enough with the
| subject matter, he doesnt know to ask what others would find
| obvious.
|
| But yeah - spotify's UX is so bad, I still just use YT JRE clips
| to get what I need from Rogan's episodes.
| nervousvarun wrote:
| Honestly this is just a microcosm of the internet these
| days..."it's not part of my political bubble so if it's popular
| it's confounding".
|
| Honestly "confoundingly" is probably fair compared to what you
| typically see...which is closer to "everyone who doesn't think
| the same as me is evil/wrong".
| [deleted]
| deanCommie wrote:
| > After one particularly charged Rogan blowup in 2021 (he said of
| Caitlyn Jenner that "maybe if you live with crazy bitches long
| enough, they fucking turn you into one,") Reply All co-host Alex
| Goldman wrote in an open Spotify Slack channel that he had been
| contacted by a Vice journalist who was looking to speak
| anonymously with Spotify staff about how they felt about Rogan's
| comments and previous episodes about trans issues. Staff
| immediately flagged the Slacks to company higher ups, who
| reprimanded Goldman, and forced him and several other employees
| to post apologies written by the company in Slack.
|
| I don't know what's more frustrating - that Alex Goldman - an
| ostensibly technical person - would be stupid enough to put a
| callout to journalists seeking to speak employees anonymously in
| a company Slack, or that the company would think it smarter to
| force him to apologize _publicly_ rather than deleting the
| message and reprimanding him privately.
|
| Just bad judgement all around.
| jcdavis wrote:
| Good. The podcast landscape is one of the few bastions of
| openness on the internet, walled gardens of exclusives suck.
|
| Plus, as other folks have mentioned, their podcast support itself
| is so much worse than dedicated podcast apps.
| yreg wrote:
| Podcasts should be available via RSS feed.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| My guess? They made a big bet on Joe Rogan and failed
| spectacularly. I know a huge number of people left Spotify
| because they more or less stood by him.
|
| He's a fairly toxic human being and I have no idea why people
| love him.
|
| Edit: I'm guessing folks at HN love him? (-^l)
| INeedMoreRam wrote:
| [dead]
| meowkit wrote:
| > He's a fairly toxic human being and I have no idea why people
| love him.
|
| You've answered your own question.
|
| Give it an honest good faith attempt to understand why people
| might like someone, and you'll probably find some sort of
| virtue. If you're cemented in your reality bubble and starting
| off with "he's a fairly toxic human" than you're not going to
| go anywhere.
|
| I think your guess would be wrong too. Hacker news is still
| insulated enough that overly simplistic comments will down
| voted regardless of ideologically alignment.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| > Hacker news is still insulated enough that overly
| simplistic comments will down voted regardless of
| ideologically alignment.
|
| I think there is always some bias, regardless of perceived
| insulation from external influence. I'm guessing HN attracts
| entrepreneurial types and Joe Rogan is well-liked by male
| entrepreneurs.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Whichever way you are voted, there's some diversity of
| people on this forum. For example, you and me are here and
| we don't like Joe Rogan.
| mr90210 wrote:
| You were downvoted as if you had attacked a deity.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| You seem to think he has the biggest show in the world
| but yet nobody actually watches him? Of course it got
| downvoted vehemently because he has a huge audience and
| his audience likes him. Not to mention all the
| misinformation that is constantly being spread about him
| leads people to want to defend him. Not rocket science.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| There are plenty of people here who dislike Rogan's show
| but also don't want to support someone being called a toxic
| human being.
| mr90210 wrote:
| I suppose we lost the ability of asking a person to
| explain why they are calling another person "toxic human
| being".
|
| Maybe the author knows something no one knows
| deafpolygon wrote:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=joe+rogan+n+word
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=joe+rogan+misogyny
|
| His latest bit is trying to spin "toxic masculinity" as
| something else. Something about "weak men == toxic
| masculinity" and "women need strong men".
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| And you are trying to spin masculinity in general as
| toxic. There is no such thing as toxic masculinity or
| toxic femininity. Some people are just jerks.
| xvello wrote:
| Agreed! I switched from Spotify to Deezer one year ago.
|
| The UX getting more and more clunky due to the podcast push
| really soured me, but the fact that part of my monthly
| subscription went to fund that person was what got me to click
| on the cancel button.
|
| The switch to Deezer was really positive: the Flow auto-
| generated playlist is a lot more relevant to me than the
| Spotify weekly mixes.
| sudden_dystopia wrote:
| How exactly did the Rogan experiment fail? He still has the
| biggest show _in the world_. It was all of their other bets
| that failed.
|
| I'm not even going to touch your other comment, no sense
| arguing about your fairly toxic opinion.
| skilled wrote:
| You must be the resident Saint by the looks of it. Now, having
| said that, you do realize that bringing people down is actually
| far more toxic than having an opinion that's different from
| another person, right?
| pc_edwin wrote:
| It is possible that the resources were allocated towards
| initiatives that the decision-makers believed to be valuable and
| aligned with their own goals. Permit me to offer a few examples
| in a respectful manner: 1. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex 2.
| Michelle Obama 3. Kim Kardashian 4. Brene Brown
|
| With all due respect, it appears that these particular selections
| exhibit a marked bias and detachment from the preferences of the
| average podcast listener.
|
| Such choices may be seen as lacking a true appreciation and
| understanding of the diverse range of tastes and interests within
| the broader podcast community.
| threeseed wrote:
| There is no average podcast listener.
|
| And if they were then based on Apple Charts they would be
| apolitical and not interested in your diverse range of tastes
| and interests. Which I assume means not left-wing based on the
| not so subtle examples you listed.
| dvt wrote:
| I do think that podcasting is ripe for disruption and a great
| candidate for a "super app" that can end up being people's go-to
| to listen to podcasts and be exposed to new ones.
|
| Spotify did literally _nothing_ to actually support podcasting as
| another vertical--which it 100% is. Podcasting isn 't just
| "music" and it's a profound misunderstanding to believe that it
| is. It's honestly embarrassing that their biz dev people were
| like: "just buy out Joe Rogan, that should do the trick." To this
| day, I mostly listen to podcasts on YouTube. Spotify doesn't have
| transcripts, scrubbing, chapters, discoverability, "shorts,"
| etc., etc. I run an open source Spotify player[1] and their API
| doesn't even have a podcast type/category (lol, they are actually
| "music videos" in the JSON payload). It's like podcasts don't
| even exist.
|
| [1] https://github.com/dvx/lofi/
| Spivak wrote:
| You mean Apple Podcasts? The app that every podcast feels
| compelled to publish on and is by far the biggest review and
| discovery platform.
| dvt wrote:
| Apple Podcasts is atrocious from a usability standpoint and
| unless you know exactly what you're looking for,
| discoverability is extremely opaque. No "trending," no "new
| podcasts," no "shorts." Compare the Apple Podcast experience
| to something like TikTok or even the YouTube algorithm.
| Spivak wrote:
| Am I missing something? Apple Podcasts is nothing but
| discovery -- It's 3/4 of the main tabs. On "Listen Now" you
| get popular and personalized suggestions, on "Browse" you
| get new, trending, top shows, top episodes, top channels,
| and a bunch of categories. If that's not enough if you go
| to "Search" and pick a genre you get top, new, and
| subgenres.
| yunwal wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but Apple Podcasts only shows me NPR
| and NYT podcasts on listen now, and Browse is pretty much
| the same but with some republican outlets thrown in. I've
| never discovered a great podcast on there.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Compare the Apple Podcast experience to something like
| TikTok or even the YouTube algorithm.
|
| I've compared these and Apple Podcast, as bad as it is, is
| miles better. YouTube shorts is a waste of screen real
| estate and TikTok is a waste of time altogether. I want a
| tool for finding things, not a funnel for delivering ads.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| _> I do think that podcasting is ripe for disruption and a
| great candidate for a "super app" that can end up being
| people's go-to to listen to podcasts and be exposed to new
| ones._
|
| What would a disruptive new "super app" bring to the table
| compared to every other podcast app that already does this?
|
| I'm partial to Pocket Casts personally.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Same here. I don't use Spotify for podcasts, even though I
| pay for premium, because I have _Pocket Casts_.
|
| I listen to podcasts at 2.7x. Not the 2.5x or 3.0x speeds
| Spotify insists I have to choose among.
|
| I have podcast-specific settings. Podcasts like Lex Fridman
| start at exactly 7 minutes in, so that I avoid predictable ad
| segments.
|
| The player cuts out silence and skips pauses automatically.
| It's nice that it tells me how many hundreds of hours I saved
| last year just by skipping silence.
|
| _Pocket Casts_ doesn 't put up one banner after another
| warning me to learn more about Covid, just in case people in
| the episode say something that the official narrative won't
| catch up to for 6~18 more months.
|
| Also _Pocket Casts_ doesn 't put banners on its home page
| reminding me to tamp down my assumed racism and avoid beating
| up Asian people.
|
| If Spotify made a podcast player better than _Pocket Casts_
| and stuck to letting me listen to podcasts without US-centric
| political banners, then I 'd be using Spotify.
|
| But I don't see how they ever can do that.
| paradox460 wrote:
| Has pocketcasts added the ability to replace all silences
| with a fixed length one? While I like the silence skipping
| feature, I've found that sometimes its a bit TOO effective,
| and you lose a little bit of speaking cadence. I'd love to
| replace all silences longer than 1s with just a 1s silence
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| No idea, but that's really clever! I hope someone from
| PocketCasts is reading this.
| gruffin wrote:
| > I listen to podcasts at 2.7x
|
| Jesus lord. And here I go at 1.25x and sometimes 1.5x and
| think that's fast as fuck.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| If you're a native speaker listening to native speakers,
| you can probably easily do 2x after a few hours of
| getting used to it.
|
| If you're listening to someone with an accent you might
| have to slow it down a lot.
|
| Likewise if your audio quality isn't very good or if
| you're concentrating too much on another task.
|
| E.g. when I'm walking in familiar neighborhoods 2.7x is
| easy but when the area is even somewhat unfamiliar I
| either slow it down to 1.x or turn it off, because I find
| it hard to focus.
|
| I first started speeding up my podcasts when I heard that
| blind people can listen above 4x ~ 6x speed without
| missing a beat.
|
| I'm still trying to break the 3x barrier.
| misterprime wrote:
| Podcasting 2.0 and PodcastIndex.org are helping a lot. I use
| the Fountain.FM app and get lots of new features through it
| that Apple Podcasts doesn't have.
|
| https://podcastindex.org/
|
| https://www.fountain.fm/
|
| Chapters, chapter art, support producers directly through
| streaming sats and tipping extra through "boosts". It's great!
| I don't make much use of it, but there are cross-app comments,
| live stream notifications, and more.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Just learned about this:
|
| https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/podcasting20/
| helmholtz wrote:
| By contrast, Spotify's Episode Search is the best in the
| business, bar none. At least on Android. All the other options
| are so fucking bad, it makes me mad. Let's say I want to search
| not for a podcast, but all podcasts featuring "Alex Honnold".
| Well, when I type that in to Spotify, it gives me loads of
| podcasts he's appeared on, with the option to start playing the
| episode immediately.
|
| All the other apps that I've tried, AntennaPod, PocketCasts,
| Podcast Addict, are in stone age. How do these other apps
| expect me to discover podcasts? They are just glorified RSS
| feeds, these other apps.
|
| Having said that, I don't want to pollute my music with my
| podcasts, so I don't use Spotify for podcasts anyway :)
| wmfrov wrote:
| The Google Podcasts app has search like that on Android as
| well. I agree that it's amazing that there is such a dearth
| of usable podcast apps out there, especially on Android.
| helmholtz wrote:
| The problem there is you need to install the Google app in
| addition to the podcast app, something I refuse to do. I
| just don't get why podcast search is so appalling, and why
| it's not a bigger deal. It drives me bananas.
| irowe wrote:
| Pocket Casts has a whole "Discover" tab with both algorithmic
| and human-curated recommendations, as well as browsing by
| category. I'm not sure what more you could ask for except for
| maybe user-generated shareable playlists.
|
| Pocket Casts even has this excellent feature where you can
| share a link to the current time stamp in an episode and
| share it. The recipient of the link doesn't even need to
| download the app; the shared snippet is playable right in the
| browser.
| helmholtz wrote:
| Read my lips: "Episodes". I want to search through bloody
| episodes! I want it to go through it's entire index of ALL
| episode titles, show-notes and transcripts and find me
| relevant podcast episodes where the phrase I searched is
| relevant.
|
| I don't want discovery, I don't want AI, and I certainly
| don't care for any sharing things. I want to be able to
| _find_ content. And I don 't want to go join a series on
| Episode 592 and go backwards. I'm interested in a topic:
| Jennifer Aniston, Alex Honnold, Dieter Rams, GUI libraries
| in Rust, C++ game development, Financial Independence. I
| just want it to show me individual episodes!
|
| It'd be like searching google for "GUI library in Rust" and
| it showing me the Rust website and saying "good luck out
| there!" It should just search the bloody websites and show
| me the relevant webpage.
| dotty- wrote:
| I never understood how companies worth billions can fumble having
| the most basic features across all of their platforms. For
| example, Spotify's desktop UI for podcasts: on mobile, I'm able
| to look at my liked podcasts and have a chronological list of the
| newest episodes across all of them. On the desktop app, that
| entire feature is missing. I have to check each individual
| podcast on the desktop app to find new episodes. It's such a
| frustrating experience and it's been like this for years.
|
| Also, my understanding is that you cannot purchase podcast
| subscriptions on Spotify. One of my favorite podcasts "Serious
| Trouble" (previously All the Presidents' Lawyers) moved to a
| subscription model to unlock longer episodes, and it seems crazy
| to me that I cannot just pay to subscribe through Spotify.
| Instead, they publish those podcasts through Substack, which
| seems like such a missed opportunity for Spotify.
|
| Separate from podcasts but another Spotify annoyance: Spotify
| (recently?) added 'enhanced playlists' that auto-adds songs to
| your Liked Songs. I actually like this feature. But those auto-
| added songs do not appear on the Desktop app, so I can only use
| this feature if I exclusively use my phone to stream music. I
| can't imagine what the internal justification for not
| prioritizing having the same features across platforms.
| ghusto wrote:
| Heh, yeah this description in the article made me giggle:
|
| > a user-friendly interface
|
| It is the worst interface I have the misfortune of having to
| use (don't ask).
| praisewhitey wrote:
| if Substack is like Patreon you can listen to the paid feed on
| any podcast app via RSS feed, except Spotify which doesn't
| allow users to manually add RSS feeds.
| emodendroket wrote:
| A combination of churning the app constantly and focusing on
| analytics, I think. "Well, not many of our users use the
| desktop app, and only 15% of the users make use of the
| feature." In a vacuum that looks great, but many long-lived
| products are successful precisely because they cater to every
| possible need you could have.
| threeseed wrote:
| Often it's because they have one Product Manager for Web, one
| for iOS, one for Android etc.
|
| And because they have different demographics they may request
| features in different order and so you end up with this
| incomplete experience.
| INTPenis wrote:
| As a European consumer of mostly American podcasts I find it very
| limiting when I hear them say some weird platform I never heard
| of. I'm mostly on youtube, and if it's not on youtube I do very
| little effort to try and find where it is.
|
| But regardless if it's youtube or iTunes, people generally don't
| feel like signing up for a bunch of different services.
|
| A lot of podcast owners are very clever these days, the days of
| 360 deals and naive young artists being exploited by big media
| are in the past.
|
| That's why Spotify only got a licensing deal with Rogan, as an
| example. Freedom is more and more important for experienced
| content creators.
|
| I want to see content creators use all available platforms. Just
| like they post to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at the same
| time.
| paradox460 wrote:
| I've never listened to a Podcast on Spotify. I never intend to. I
| wish I could turn off the podcast spam that clutters the homepage
| of the app, and just focus on music.
|
| I miss Google Play Music (before it too got cluttered with
| Podcrap) and Grooveshark
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Well, their streaming business also went wrong a long time ago.
| When you stop thinking about your customers, you'll start
| worrying about shareholders.
| ophizi wrote:
| One of the most egregious aspects of Spotify's podcast is when it
| triggers an ad when you click the 15 second rewind. I've paid for
| Spotify for nearly 10-years.
|
| I'd pay more to not have any ads. Making ads trigger on rewinding
| is so offensive to me that I'm tempted to pirate JRE in the
| future.
|
| Every product and service in America gets progressively more
| exploitative over time. It's an endless inspiration of cynicism.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Podcasts take way too much time when you have so many other forms
| of medium competing for attention
| fragmede wrote:
| I think that depends on your lifestyle. Specifically, for how
| much of your day/week are podcasts the _only_ viable form of
| media? While driving a car, there 's a very limited amount of
| Reddit that can be read or TikToks that can be watched. If your
| lifestyle doesn't include long stretches of drive time, or the
| radio's sufficiently interesting for you, then you've never
| _needed_ podcasts as a source of entertainment.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| I'll be one person to say I like podcasts in spotify. It gives a
| unified experience across my phone, laptop, and car. Starting a
| podcast on my laptop, then getting in the car, it remembers where
| I was. I like that.
| ojagodzinski wrote:
| > It gives a unified experience across my phone, laptop, and
| car
|
| unified? find "new episodes" tab on desktop
| nradov wrote:
| The Spotify Android app is _terrible_ for podcasts. There has
| been a long standing bug where it will suddenly stop in the
| middle of an episode and jump ahead to the beginning of the next
| episode. Multiple reviewers have complained about this on the
| Google Play store. Why are the Spotify developers so lazy and
| incompetent that they can 't make such basic functionality work
| reliably?
| gschier wrote:
| I feel like podcasts and music can't live within the same app.
| The use-cases are totally different.
| karaterobot wrote:
| For me, the main reason not to use Spotify for podcasts is that
| their goal is transparently to turn a (still somewhat) open
| ecosystem into a walled garden under their control. If this had
| succeeded, and they'd taken the market from Apple, anybody could
| predict there would have been a heel turn where Spotify locked
| down podcast distribution and charged more money for it. As a
| start.
|
| It felt from the beginning like they were saying "well, we're
| enough of a force in the music industry that artists, labels, and
| fans have to just accept the new terms we've set. I'm betting
| we're big enough to do that to podcasting, too. Let's find out!"
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| As a user, I'm pretty irritated by Spotify's "Let's shove
| podcasts down your throat, whether you like it or not" approach.
| I can't turn them off. I just want music. It is actively harmful
| to spam podcasts to those with AD(H)D-like tendencies.
| mr90210 wrote:
| > Let's shove podcasts down your throat
|
| The podcast: Joe Rogan Experience
| nickthegreek wrote:
| What is the reason for not jumping ship to one of their
| competitors?
| juliand wrote:
| Playlists. I can migrate them to Apple Music but the order in
| which I added each of these songs is important to me and the
| last time I tried to export them, such an order was lost.
|
| I know I might be the minority but that's what happened to me
| the last time I wanted to try something different from
| Spotify.
| dirtybird04 wrote:
| Look up SongShift app, might be of some use. I was able to
| successfully migrate my playlists out of Spotify and into
| AppleMusic seamlessly.
| criddell wrote:
| If it's only the order that matters, I wonder if you could
| write a script to add the playlists to Apple Music one song
| at a time?
| yunwal wrote:
| Apple requires you to sign up for their developer program
| ($99/yr) to use the Apple Music API, so you'd either have
| to pony up some money or do something fancy.
| criddell wrote:
| If you can get your data out of Spotify and into a CSV
| file, I think you could use Shortcuts to create the
| playlists and populate them.
| jmuguy wrote:
| Podcasts in the Spotify app drove me to try Apple Music.
| Apple Music has even more UX problems. In particular around
| their music podcasts/shows. Like Elton John has one called
| Rocket Hour. This may have changed but there was no way to
| bookmark or favorite Rocket Hour or keep track of which
| episode you listened to last or even to get back to it
| without searching for it. Other users literally suggest
| keeping a notes doc with the link
| (https://music.apple.com/us/curator/rocket-hour/993269779)
| and then just tapping that.
|
| I dunno if the space needs more competition or what but UI/UX
| does not seem to be a priority for the main players.
| dirtybird04 wrote:
| Lookup Marvis app. It's an Apple Music replacement UI meant
| for heavy album listeners, really improved my everyday
| music listening experience
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > "Let's shove podcasts down your throat, whether you like it
| or not" approach
|
| Unless I have incorrect data, they have to pay like 70% of
| their revenue to record labels because they hold the rights.
|
| Knowing that, it feels like podcasts was their "big bet" to
| "own" some content of their own and be able to receive a bigger
| share? Just an educated guess really on my end.
| criddell wrote:
| It's a similar to Apple's app store model. 70% gets passed on
| to whomever owns the rights and it is often a record company,
| but not always. As I understand it, some artists (like Paul
| Simon) own the rights to their music.
|
| Sony Music owns 2.5% of Spotify and Universal Music owns
| 3.5%. I sometimes wonder if those publishers have made more
| money on the stock or on royalty payments? It also creates a
| bit of a conflict of interest for the companies in that they
| benefit in more than one way when by getting their artists on
| Spotify.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I do not think anyone has earned much money on Spotify
| stock except the earliest investors:
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-
| techn...
| criddell wrote:
| The record companies _were_ early investors. As I
| understand it, Spotify gave the big record companies pre-
| IPO stock in exchange for putting their catalogs on the
| service.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That makes sense. I can see record companies wanting
| Spotify to exist just to have an additional customer to
| help negotiate with Apple/Amazon/Google.
| yreg wrote:
| Not that I want to give them ideas, but what's so
| fundamentally different about music?
|
| How come services can produce exclusive games, podcasts, tv
| shows and even movies, but not music or books?
| aeturnum wrote:
| I totally get why they wanted to do it - but I also found
| their integration into the UI off-putting. The patterns of
| listening to podcasts and songs are just so different and
| they offered little support on mixing the two (no separate
| queues, etc). It felt very half-baked from a UI / UX
| perspective.
| geodel wrote:
| I think it is same with Amazon Music. All I want to do is play
| some songs while driving without these fucking podcast shows in
| my face every single time. It somehow tries to block me
| discovering/ searching any music and keep nudging me to
| podcasts.
| kesslern wrote:
| I worked around this by using uBlock Origin to hide the
| podcasts section.
| achairapart wrote:
| At least on desktop you can tweak the Spotify electron-based
| app with Spicetify[1].
|
| There is already an extension to completely hide podcasts[2].
|
| [1]: https://spicetify.app/
|
| [2]: https://github.com/theRealPadster/spicetify-hide-podcasts
| nraf wrote:
| I had the same issue with Shorts on YouTube. I'd spend hours
| mindlessly scrolling through shorts because they shove it in
| your face and can't be turned on. In the end I've resorted to a
| modified binary called uYou+ on ios to turn it off (turns out
| it has some other nice features such as ad blocking, sponsor
| skip and 3x speed support).
| mberning wrote:
| I pay for spotify yet have to endure endless ads during podcasts.
| It's a huge turnoff.
| ojagodzinski wrote:
| YouTube + SponsorBlock plugin is better in that regard. Sad
| that some browser plugin is more user friendly than premium
| account on Spotify.
| cheriot wrote:
| Spotify is in a tight spot (ba-dum-tsh). Valued at a lofty 7.7x
| gross profit because they pay out most revenue to record labels.
| First they try to improve profitability by buying Rogan and other
| podcasters, but that didn't drive enough listening. So now they
| tell investors they'll be the YouTube of audio. Which means the
| product changes away from music will keep coming. Can they keep
| users happy while pushing them to listen to user uploaded audio?
|
| Surprising to me that investors are buying it.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| > First they try to improve profitability by buying Rogan and
| other podcasters, but that didn't drive enough listening.
|
| Spotify is reportedly _very_ happy with Rogan listeners. It is,
| reportedly, like a new Taylor Swift album dropping every single
| episode. Investors are very happy with Spotify 's commercial
| success in the podcast space.
| cheriot wrote:
| > "In hindsight, I probably got a little carried away and
| overinvested relative to the uncertainty we saw shaping up in
| the market," Ek said on an earnings call in January
|
| Then why is management abandoning that strategy? That's what
| the entire article is about...
| mardifoufs wrote:
| It might be that they are happy with some podcasts, but
| only some. Meaning that it was a bad idea to capitalize
| this much on podcasts when only a few actually turned out
| to be performing well.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| JRE has been a huge success story
| Zetice wrote:
| The entire article is about how it's not.
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