Just saw this on Reddit:
- Oops -
That’s good, I hope this trend isn’t over, and more musicians follow.
Eh, as much as I would like to attribute this to Neil Young’s stand, tech stocks in general have taken a bath over the last month or so (NASDAQ composite down ~20% since 1/3). Spotify is a little bit worse than the market as a whole, but they’re very much on-trend, except that they didn’t share in the NASDAQ composite rally on Friday (up about 2.2% for the day).
I’d have to see more counter-index movement to call it a trend, though it certainly feels satisfying to put this on Neil’s (and Joni Mitchell’s) shoulders.
And in a way, it doesn’t matter. If the stock price was up, Spotify might have been happy to handwave the whole episode.
With the stock price considerably down, it would give them pause for thought regarding their strategy. Even if they suspect that most of the fall is just the overall market drop.
Having said that, it’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Rogan is apparently the world’s biggest podcast, made only more famous by all this, so there’s no scenario in which Spotify voluntarily drop him. And Rogan could only lose by signing up to any kind of restriction on his speech.
I guess the first effect may be that Spotify will steer clear of controversial podcasters without Rogan’s following. And maybe they put some disclaimer before Rogan’s show.
Twitter just showed me that #ByeSpotify is trending. I’m skeptical it will be enough to do anything, but I found it interesting enough to post about.
The thing is, I’m about 99% sure that Rogan’s deal with Spotify is an exclusivity deal. That is, they bought the exclusive rights to his podcast. If #ByeSpotify succeeds and Spotify ends up dropping Rogan, he’ll presumably be free to go back to YouTube, Apple, Amazon, and everywhere else. If anything, it’ll probably increase his audience.
If Young’s protest does actually succeed in forcing Spotify to drop Rogan (Which I very much doubt will happen) that’s likely going to affect other platforms desire to pick him back up, though. Some will, certainly, but others might not want to invite the drama. Even the ones that do pick him up again might not push his podcast as aggressively as Spotify does when they tout their exclusivity deal with Rogan.
I think that Neil’s intention was to put Spotify on the hot seat while he made the statement “That guy spreads deadly misinformation, and I’m not going to share a stage with him.” I think he also was pretty certain how a “him or me” ultimatum usually works out.
I went and looked at old emails to see my Spotify history.
- Well before the US launch, I asked to be notified when it finally launched in the US.
- On the evening of 7/18/2011, I got that email.
- I signed up for Premium on 7/24/2011 at a price of $9.99 a month which was set to auto-renew indefinitely.
- On 1/28/2022 I cancelled Premium.
- On 2/26/2022, when my Premium cancellation switches to a free account, I’ll be deleting that.
While that’s only a bit more than $1,300 in lifetime revenue, I had no plans on ever cancelling the service so it would have grown, and while I realize this is barely a rounding error on their bottom line, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. This won’t get them to drop Rogan, but they’ll certainly notice it.
I’m guessing some of those platforms (YouTube in particular) have stricter rules about spreading dangerous misinformation than Spotify. So either they won’t carry him, or he’ll be forced to change the guests he hosts (and shut his mouth about some of his more gullible beliefs). Even if his audience grows, his show might be less of a problem.
Alex Jones got deplatformed, and as far as I know, it was actually really effective in reducing his audience. But you’d have to get all the major platforms to all agree that deplatforming is appropriate, and I don’t think that would happen. Joe Rogan is both more popular and less toxic than Alex Jones.
But yes, just getting him off spotify probably wouldn’t significantly reduce his reach - might even increase it. It would make companies think twice about offering paid contracts to assholes spreading disinformation though.
Of course the idea of podcast exclusivity seems really stupid and obnoxious to me, and the amount they paid him seems absurd. I’d like the whole concept of exclusive podcasts to die a quick death.
At least with all this controversy, some small percentage of the less informed might become more informed. Maybe not enough to make any difference, but every little bit helps.
I also canceled my Spotify. It sucks because I can’t find something that lets me stream from say, a laptop or tablet, but control it from my phone.
Oh well. You can’t have everything, right? Where would you put it.
I sympathize with this view, but is it any different from TV shows that are exclusive to one particular streaming service (e.g. Netflix or Disney+)?
Sure. One of the great things about podcasts is that the production costs are trivial. You don’t need a funding entity to create a podcast, whereas you need some sort of funding entity to create a TV show. This is part of what has allowed wild creativity and variety in the podcast market. The openness of it has definitely boosted adoption. So spotify paying Rogan is in no way necessary or at all related to the quality of the podcast, unlike any TV show, which certainly could not exist without someone funding it and needs a lot of money up front to produce.
It’s actually a lot more like what epic games is trying to do in the pc gaming market than the TV model - they want to take something that everyone has always had access to, and make it worse by paying for the creators to only put their product in one place, making things worse for consumers and forcing people to interact with a platform they don’t want to interact with to continue to use something they used to use however they wanted.
If podcasts started being exclusively available on one platform or app or another and the whole market became fragmented, it would be really annoying and would be worse for consumers and bad for podcasting as a whole.
Which means this is probably what is going to happen.
Apparently youtube has taken down at least some of Joe Rogan’s podcast clips about vaccines.
Yeah, it’s pretty obvious that the suits are coming for podcasting. I was really worried about spotify before any of this stuff happened.
Spotify to add content warning to COVID-related misinformation. May be a token gesture, but a small victory.
I’d respect them if they put in an actual, real warning, like basically “a lot of this is gonna be bullshit, consult people who know what they’re talking about”, but it’s probably just going to be a generic disclaimer like “spotify does not support or endorse everything that blah blah.”
I don’t get the point of exclusive podcasts. Why would I ever see your podcast if it’s not available in my podcast app? Sure, I might use Spotify, but then I’m only going to be looking for music there, and still never check out your podcast.
At least I might stumble on a podcast on YouTube, and there are services that will let me convert that to a podcast feed. But, otherwise? It just means a show I won’t listen to. It’s not like I can’t find other podcasts.
It seems it would only work if you’re already a fan of the person in question. That’s the only way I’ve found podcasts not in my app: I knew I liked a creator and they mentioned having a podcast.
Joe Rogan is a bit unusual in that his podcast is actually talked about outside his niche. But, in general, exclusive podcasts seem like a bad idea for getting new listeners.
The point is “this podcast is so important to me that I’ll install/use a platform/software that I normally wouldn’t just to keep listening” and then maybe they’ll start using other parts of that service once they’re there. Rogan’s podcast was already big before it went to spotify, so they were hoping to convert those existing listeners over to their platform. It’s true that it will hurt future discovery of the podcast, but they’re hoping it’s big enough and well known enough that it gets people on spotify to try it.
I hope it fails. Any sort of forced exclusivity that doesn’t somehow benefit the consumer is just rent seeking bullshit. It makes it inconvenient and adds nothing to the experience. It’s the worst sort of competition - the kind that only helps consumers and benefits the people who have a lot of money to throw around.