I woke up today, checked Hacker News and saw Joe Rogan setup an exclusive deal with Spotify or more specifically, Spotify setup an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan

I woke up today, checked Hacker News and saw Joe Rogan setup an exclusive deal with Spotify or more specifically, Spotify setup an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan. I was thinking about this thread all day. I've never listened to any of his podcasts because there's so many podcasts out there that I'm more interested in I just haven't gotten around to trying the Joe Rogan Experience. I like the idea of someone that just gets someone into a room and let's them speak from the heart or shoot from the hip about whatever their pet issue, policy, thing they are known for is, but I also have plenty of other discussion format podcasts I'm subscribed to and working through the backlog of. Luminary by the way is one of those "we're going to do podcasting but it's not really podcasting because we're going to lock things up behind our paywall." kinds of "podcasting" apps. Think of it as Spotify but without the music or (I believe) without the free tier. Mind I've never signed up, but I remember there were a big story last year, or maybe it was the year before? Either way, they aspire to be the Spotify of Podcasts and Spotify is also trying to be the Spotify of Podcasts. I think Spotify is probably winning that exchange. The strange thing is, a lot of these podcasts could probably get away with charging more directly if they wanted to. Joe Rogan has literally millions of fans, and charging for episodes isn't exactly incompatible with RSS. It just means you need to authenticate for access to the feed which is fine. I do that with TechMeme Ride Home subscribing to their ad-free feed. I think I'm paying $5 a month for that at the moment. I also pay for podcasts that don't have a premium feed per se and can be found in every podcast directory, but are products of news and political commentary organizations to which I pay a monthly or annual sum to support, primarily because I enjoy their podcasts (and newsletters) so much. I get access to their websites and dead tree print editions, but really it's the podcasts I find I like the most out of the deal and am happy to pay for just those. And Joe Rogan is bigger than almost all of those, so selling out to Spotify to try to be the next Howard Stern feels a bit like he's selling himself short. Welp, we live in a free society with free markets and he's free to do that if he wants to. I get that he's a controversial figure for some, but so are Howard Stern and PewDiePie and last I checked, they're doing fine.