4 ms·
This post is essentially a funding pitch for Spotify. I talks a lot about they are going to try and kill the open podcast ecosystem but no evidence that they ar
by intpx 5y ago
This post is essentially a funding pitch for Spotify. I talks a lot about they are going to try and kill the open podcast ecosystem but no evidence that they are making any progress. The podcast ecosystem is very different from other media markets-- it started open, it grew up open, and people are actually willing to directly pay content producers either for bonus content, to avoid ad reads, or just to keep the train chugging along.
I immediately unsub from any podcast where there is some jarring dynamic ad insertion. I've watch all of the once great Gimlet podcasts wither, and some die since their acquisition.
Yea there is a market for the low-est common denominator stuff like low-brow true crime stuff and the joe rogans, but I don't see those as competition, either for sponsors or ears to the healthy, robust, mature open podcast ecosystem.
- the_snooze 5y ago>to avoid ad reads Even without paying for podcasts, ad reads in podcasts are pretty much the most consumer-friendly form of advertising on the internet. There's no privacy invasion. The ads are pretty well targeted because podcast producers generally know and try to respect their audiences. And they can even be pretty funny and entertaining when hosts can stray a bit off-script.
- vlunkr 5y agoPlus you can always skip them with a couple of button presses.
- mertd 5y agoI can see a future where podcasts move to a walled garden (Spotify) and the fast forward button gets disabled during ads.
- hahajk 5y agohaha, yeah like dvds. i then imagine a world with pirate directories you subscribe to with the current podcast players
- lucb1e 5y agoThe Spotify® ads are not part of the episode, it launches a new file basically and you get a new seek bar that says 30 seconds total rather than it being part of the audio stream that you downloaded. I was frankly surprised it let me seek to the end, but yeah that's not gonna last long. Also, I'm a premium member and I got ads on a podcast (from one of the ones they own themselves no less!). Fuck that shit. Unsubscribed from that podcast and will also from any others when I hear they're now "exclusive". I don't need more ads for products that I already paid for in my life. I also keep considering reverting to the pirate bay and a €13 128GB sd card, since the player is rather buggy and I can see in my firewall that the app tries to report who-knows-what to Facebook and other advertisers (again, as a premium member...), but it's not Spotify that would hurt the most from that so I feel like there isn't really a point.
- karaterobot 5y ago> There's no privacy invasion Slight but worrying privacy invasion. Podcasts are increasingly inserting targeted ads based on download analytics. Just the other day, I was listening to a British podcast that advertised for a local company in Seattle, where my IP address tells them I'm from. The extent to which a podcast can target users has been somewhat limited until now. But if you use Spotify, they know what content you're listening to, and your exact listening behavior, as well as who you are. There's no doubt in my mind that they pay attention to that data internally, and very little doubt that they'll move to expose more and more of it to advertisers.
- toyg 5y agoHave you been listening to Harmontown or That Happens? The hosts literally do small improv bits for every ad.
- rurp 5y agoTo add to your point, the only time I've ever consciously bought something from an ad was through a podcast, and I've done it several times now.
- dantheman 5y agoIt's still good to call out they are a bad actor in the podcast ecosystem. They can't compete on software, so they try to buy content and make it exclusive. There is no benefit to the user to their activities.
- syshum 5y agoI stopped listening to Rogan when he fell off my preferred PodCast app, and I am a Paying Spotify Premium user but I do not use Spotify for PodCasts because I like to keep my PodCasts and Music Separate
- BostonEnginerd 5y agoI also resent being tracked especially when I am a paying customer.
- Covzire 5y agoThe strangest thing about Spotify for me is that I pay for Premium as well but that doesn't save me from Joe Rogan's own commercials he inserts into his spotify podcasts. They're skippable by simply moving the seek bar to the end but why if I'm paying for Premium are they even there? They're not baked into the podcast itself but rather the player pauses the playback of the podcast and cues up multiple 120(!) second ads. They're also a royal PITA to skip in my car because the spotify app on iPhone and PC are both awful but the mobile app is awful squared.
- apatters 5y agoWhat Spotify is trying to do is called a roll-up. This is a well tread business tactic favored by aspiring monopolists and the strategy is simple: acquire most of the distribution in the space, then jack up the price. (In the podcast world, "distribution" equates to "listeners" and price equates to "Spotify's subscription and ad revenue.") The harm caused to both consumers and producers by a roll-up is well-documented. The legality is questionable but US regulators have been asleep on the job for decades. Fortunately Americans are starting to wake up. Matt Stoller did a piece on this last year: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/will-spotify-ruin-podcasting https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/will-spotify-ruin-podcast...
- klelatti 5y agoThe key word here is "trying" - still open whether they will succeed. Agree that they should be stopped though, if it looks like they are succeeding.
- echelon 5y agoSo this is what Apple did with the app store. Applications used to be distributed everywhere, but Apple tightly controlled the platform and crippled the web browser. They even prevented Flash and other runtimes so they would be the only way to get native control on the device. They "rolled up" computing. What scummy behavior.
- dont__panic 5y agoThis is true, though I would argue that there is a difference between creating a new platform where you have full control and trying to hostile takeover an existing open platform. On one hand you can at least give Apple credit that they're trying to maintain some level of quality on the platform they created and expand their margins through software purchases (since the margins on hardware aren't that high or flexible), whereas Spotify isn't creating anything -- they're just trying to make a platform that already exists shittier.
- rchaud 5y agoNot exactly. Podcasts were openly available as downloadable, RSS-friendly MP3 files for a long time. Apple required iOS apps to be distributed through the app store. Before that, there were no iOS apps to speak of. Web pages are the iOS equivalent to open podcasts. iOS didn't stop those from working, although it did limit support for PWAs, which arrived years after the App Store. Even then, I can use apps like Uber without the App Store: m.uber.com. Not all companies will try to create a web experience that's 1:1 with the mobile app, but it's not something iOS prevents.
- Zelphyr 5y agoIf what they have done to the Joe Rogan Experience is any indication, they will fail at this endeavor. How they have handled it is so bad that it can only be explained by incompetence. Over six months after switching to Spotify, when I venture back in to try to listen to an episode, it'll randomly stop playing for no apparent reason. It'll jump to another episode for no apparent reason. It'll pause playing and then resume anywhere from 5-30 seconds later. And why they insist on displaying total playing time as "mm:ss" instead of "hh:mm:ss" is beyond me.