22 ms·

How Spotify's podcast bet went wrong

268 points by lxm 4y ago

deafpolygon 4y ago
[flagged]
- INeedMoreRam 4y ago
  [dead]
- skilled 4y ago
  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?
- meowkit 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    > 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.
    - CSMastermind 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        [flagged]
        sudden_dystopia 4y ago
        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.
        deafpolygon 4y ago
        [flagged]
        mr90210 4y ago
        I am familiar with those, and he apologized, nevertheless here is my take (from an ex-avid listener of his podcast): It is nearly impossible for a human being to talk about open topics for more than 10 years without saying upsetting things. Peace!
    - mr90210 4y ago
      You were downvoted as if you had attacked a deity.
      - 4y ago
- xvello 4y ago
  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 4y ago
  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.
jrochkind1 4y ago
> 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
- unethical_ban 4y ago
  I don't think it's ironic; it's the entire point. They saw a market opportunity.
- vanilla_nut 4y ago
  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.
  - metalliqaz 4y ago
    rss Same reason plain web browsers beat AOL and Compuserv
willio58 4y ago
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.
- lopatin 4y ago
  How does having the option to listen to podcasts on Spotify negatively impact my music listening experience?
  - kzrdude 4y ago
    When you're looking for music there's a podcast section positioned centrally in the app you can't remove in options
- scarface74 4y ago
  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
- metalliqaz 4y ago
  absolutely. But then they'd have to build the user base from the ground up
- irsagent 4y ago
  Agree. Podcast should have there own experience. Being able to access music and podcast in the same ui is a strange experience.
- hotcoffeebear 4y ago
  Yeah, podcast would be better with audio books than music.
- hardtke 4y ago
  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.
aliqot 4y ago
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.
- hiraki9 4y ago
  I mean, the same thing happened to Howard Stern when he signed with Sirius XM, right?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - TylerE 4y ago
    He's also, kinda sorta semi-retired. He only broadcasts like 2 days a week now.
  - dfxm12 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  Better like this.
- Alupis 4y ago
  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.
abledon 4y ago
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 4y ago
Am I the only one that finds the prose very difficult to read? Was it edited at all?
samstave 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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".
jcdavis 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Podcasts should be available via RSS feed.
dvt 4y ago
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/ https://github.com/dvx/lofi/
- helmholtz 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
dotty- 4y ago
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.
- threeseed 4y ago
  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.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    > Often it's because they have one Product Manager for Web, one for iOS, one for Android etc. Not sure what it's like now, but several years ago, this wasn't the case. Squads usually had people for Android, iOS, and desktop, and the product owner oversaw all of the platforms.
- emodendroket 4y ago
  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.
cschep 4y ago
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!
- kderbyma 4y ago
  same. I hadn't cancelled until it was all podcasts (and clearly money was their only focus so I decided to take mine back)
ElijahLynn 4y ago
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.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > "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.
  - yreg 4y ago
    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?
    - lmm 4y ago
      It may just be culture. Tidal tried to be a music app with exclusives, and got a couple of big names, but people are used to being able to listen to everything on their preferred platform and get annoyed at artists who go for an exclusive. I think games have the same thing to some extent. I would note that there have been some "artists" showing up on Spotify's recommended playlists who haven't been heard of anywhere else, which are suspected of being their "store brand" (where Spotify have presumably paid some session musicians to record the song but keep all the rights).
    - hutattedonmyarm 4y ago
      There are plenty of books which are released exclusively on Amazon and/or Audible. For music: Well they tried. Apple Music and Spotify had a little exclusives war in the beginning, but I think neither managed to grab enough that it mattered
daqhris 4y ago
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.
- ninly 4y ago
  Article authors don't typically write the headlines that appear above their pieces.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    That's not an acceptable excuse.
    - freejazz 4y ago
      For the author? Totally seems like it would be...
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  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.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Revenue while losing money is not exactly a win.
LoveMortuus 4y ago
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 ^^
- DoesntMatter22 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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'.
ophizi 4y ago
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.
thepasswordis 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > It gives a unified experience across my phone, laptop, and car unified? find "new episodes" tab on desktop
nradov 4y ago
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?
mberning 4y ago
I pay for spotify yet have to endure endless ads during podcasts. It’s a huge turnoff.
- ojagodzinski 4y ago
  YouTube + SponsorBlock plugin is better in that regard. Sad that some browser plugin is more user friendly than premium account on Spotify.
DeathFindsAWay 4y ago
[dead]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
valeg 4y ago
They should bring back radio plays. Grifty podcasts with uninformed hosts are annoying. They are too easy to produce and just a noise.
- dharmab 4y ago
  They never left. There are many fiction podcasts and series.
corobo 4y ago
Oh good! I wish they'd bring Gimlet's old shows back to the internet. Really been fancying a StartUp relisten recently.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deanCommie 4y ago
> 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.
m3kw9 4y ago
Podcasts take way too much time when you have so many other forms of medium competing for attention
- fragmede 4y ago
  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.
  - m3kw9 4y ago
    Driving is the only time I’d do that but the interfaces make it hard to start a podcast I want quickly. Same problem with music
owlbynight 4y ago
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.
aflag 4y ago
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.
myaccount80 4y ago
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
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gschier 4y ago
I feel like podcasts and music can't live within the same app. The use-cases are totally different.
karaterobot 4y ago
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!"
ragebol 4y ago
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.
panick21_ 4y ago
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.
INTPenis 4y ago
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.
jbverschoor 4y ago
Well, their streaming business also went wrong a long time ago. When you stop thinking about your customers, you'll start worrying about shareholders.
cheriot 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    > “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 4y ago
      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.
      - cheriot 4y ago
        The core strategy was spending a lot of money on podcasts exclusive to Spotify. I'm not doubting that some were a success, but they no long want to spend money on exclusive content. That's a huge shift.
- 4y ago
soliton4 4y ago
maybe it would help if their users could actually listen to the end of a podcast without it just cutting off after 40ish minutes
sudden_dystopia 4y ago
“ 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?
- cschmidt 4y ago
  https://serialpodcast.org/ https://serialpodcast.org/ from the This American Life (NPR) people
  - latexr 4y ago
    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/ https://stownpodcast.org/ ² About seven hours, one per episode.
- MattDemers 4y ago
  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.
  - parpfish 4y ago
    For those who weren’t around when it came out, Serial was a genuine media phenomenon. I’d say it was on par with a big Netflix series (like squid game or Wednesday) in the sense that you would see it parodied in popular culture and could have “water cooler chats” with coworkers about it. I think it’s hard to understate how much this show did to introduce podcasts to the general population.
soneca 4y ago
> ”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.
bogomipz 4y ago
>"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.
Zetice 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - trts 4y ago
    I buy Spotify for podcasts (as a listener of Heavyweight which is now exclusive to Spotify). It sucks, and about 40% of the time an ad comes on, it crashes or loses my place in the episode completely when I try to skip (or I'm unable to skip). It's literally the worst podcast player I've ever used. I don't know what other exclusives they've gotten with a captive audience, but it's at least a reasonably logical play. Reply All would have kept me on the platform too had it not ended. But I stay because that's where my playlists and recs are, and those serve me well enough too.
- niek_pas 4y ago
  Last I used Spotify for podcasts, it didn't have chapter support, didn't have shownotes support, didn't have smart speed (skipping silinces), don't think it had any concept of playlists or queues, and so on. Some of that may have changed but those are pretty basic features for a podcast player.
pc_edwin 4y ago
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. Brené 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 4y ago
  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.
  - nomel 4y ago
    > There is no average podcast listener. Yet, there are definitely outliers!
  - pc_edwin 4y ago
    It is worth noting that, with the exception of Joe Rogan, the examples I have enumerated are among the most significant podcast investments made by Spotify. Speaking of subtlety, it bears repeating that the decision-making process of the team appears to be subject to a considerable degree of bias that is not particularly subtle. Source: https://www.quillpodcasting.com/blog-posts/spotify-podcasts https://www.quillpodcasting.com/blog-posts/spotify-podcasts
paradox460 4y ago
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
majormajor 4y ago
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.
babypuncher 4y ago
I never hopped on the Spotify bandwagon. I wrote music streaming off because their players are consistently inferior to foobar2000, and I don't usually spend more than $10-$15 a month on new music anyways. I'm glad their play at capturing the podcast market seems to be failing. As much as people like the unlimited cheap music, I think Spotify has been a net negative for the industry and their plans for podcasts are nothing but bad news for everyone other than their shareholders.
brainzap 4y ago
stop the squeeze, you just play music
Reason077 4y ago
I like Spotify. I like podcasts. What I didn't need was podcasts popping up when I wanted to listen to music. Or vice-versa. Trying to mix together the two in a single app always seemed pretty awkward to me.
- nomel 4y ago
  I've never had this happen. If I'm listening to podcasts, the stream is purely podcasts. If I listen to music, the stream is purely music. I don't recall anything "popping up". My front page can have mix, but they're all podcasts I listen to, with a couple of recommendations thrown in. But, I suppose, for those that don't listen to podcasts, being able to turn them off completely would be pretty desirable.
gsich 4y ago
Podcasts without RSS feeds are not podcasts.
rubyist5eva 4y ago
Podcast experience on desktop is absolutely miserable. I just want a list of the most recent unplayed episodes in chronological order, is that too much to ask? Like jeez, it sounds like the most basic feature imaginable that should be part of an MvP for crying out loud. Only reason I still use it is because it's easier to cast to my google nest minis than Apple Podcasts.
nojvek 4y ago
There’s this eternal cycle in every space. 1. There’s a big behemoth corporation. Loaded with money, 100K+ employees, bazillion features, complex, slow clunky product that a lot of users hate. They can’t grow by adding more value so they resort to money extraction tactics by making user experience worse. 2. New startup realizes they can build 80% of product in a few months with a small team. They build a sleek, swift, sweet product that takes off. 3. The tech behemoth first ignores it, then tries to trample it and then gets angry, but too late. Someone stole their lunch. 4. The new startup is hiring like crazy. Their growth is slowing, their investors are asking for new avenues. PMs are resorting to shady growth tactics. Ads in users faces, app is becoming complex, clunky and dog shit slow. Who cares though? Growth at any cost, gotta increase market cap. 5. The startup is the behemoth. A large chunk of their users hate it and want something better.
swyx 4y ago
good riddance. Spotify tried to erect a walled garden around RSS and failed. it's also a fairly crappy podcast player (way, way too willing to skip to the next podcast on the slightest mistake because its such a basic port of the music player). denying RSS and MP3 downloads on the episodes pages. you deserved to fail.
Accacin 4y ago
So I've always been pretty against listening to Podcasts via Spotify, so much so that I completely stopped listening to Last Podcast on the Left when they announced they were moving to Spotify. I was driving recently though and tried to use Spotify to listen to a podcast. I just wanted to queue the whole season from episode 1 to episode N. The listing seemed to mix both seasons, and episodes were in some random order. I had to manually add the episodes to my queue which seemed.. odd.
rsolva 4y ago
A podcast without an RSS feed is not a podcast. But what should we call these bastardized radio-on-demand thingies without a feed?

268 points by lxm 4y ago

deafpolygon 4y ago

[flagged]

INeedMoreRam 4y ago
[dead]
skilled 4y ago
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?
meowkit 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  > 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.
  - CSMastermind 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        [flagged]
        sudden_dystopia 4y ago
        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.
        deafpolygon 4y ago
        [flagged]
        mr90210 4y ago
        I am familiar with those, and he apologized, nevertheless here is my take (from an ex-avid listener of his podcast): It is nearly impossible for a human being to talk about open topics for more than 10 years without saying upsetting things. Peace!
  - mr90210 4y ago
    You were downvoted as if you had attacked a deity.
    - 4y ago
xvello 4y ago
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 4y ago
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.

jrochkind1 4y ago

> 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

unethical_ban 4y ago
I don't think it's ironic; it's the entire point. They saw a market opportunity.
vanilla_nut 4y ago
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.
- metalliqaz 4y ago
  rss Same reason plain web browsers beat AOL and Compuserv

willio58 4y ago

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.

lopatin 4y ago
How does having the option to listen to podcasts on Spotify negatively impact my music listening experience?
- kzrdude 4y ago
  When you're looking for music there's a podcast section positioned centrally in the app you can't remove in options
scarface74 4y ago
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
metalliqaz 4y ago
absolutely. But then they'd have to build the user base from the ground up
irsagent 4y ago
Agree. Podcast should have there own experience. Being able to access music and podcast in the same ui is a strange experience.
hotcoffeebear 4y ago
Yeah, podcast would be better with audio books than music.
hardtke 4y ago
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.

aliqot 4y ago

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.

hiraki9 4y ago
I mean, the same thing happened to Howard Stern when he signed with Sirius XM, right?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- TylerE 4y ago
  He's also, kinda sorta semi-retired. He only broadcasts like 2 days a week now.
- dfxm12 4y ago
  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 4y ago
Better like this.
Alupis 4y ago
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.

abledon 4y ago

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 4y ago

Am I the only one that finds the prose very difficult to read? Was it edited at all?

samstave 4y ago

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 4y ago
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".

jcdavis 4y ago

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 4y ago
Podcasts should be available via RSS feed.

dvt 4y ago

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/ https://github.com/dvx/lofi/

helmholtz 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.

dotty- 4y ago

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.

threeseed 4y ago
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.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  > Often it's because they have one Product Manager for Web, one for iOS, one for Android etc. Not sure what it's like now, but several years ago, this wasn't the case. Squads usually had people for Android, iOS, and desktop, and the product owner oversaw all of the platforms.
emodendroket 4y ago
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.

cschep 4y ago

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!

kderbyma 4y ago
same. I hadn't cancelled until it was all podcasts (and clearly money was their only focus so I decided to take mine back)

ElijahLynn 4y ago

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.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> "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.
- yreg 4y ago
  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?
  - lmm 4y ago
    It may just be culture. Tidal tried to be a music app with exclusives, and got a couple of big names, but people are used to being able to listen to everything on their preferred platform and get annoyed at artists who go for an exclusive. I think games have the same thing to some extent. I would note that there have been some "artists" showing up on Spotify's recommended playlists who haven't been heard of anywhere else, which are suspected of being their "store brand" (where Spotify have presumably paid some session musicians to record the song but keep all the rights).
  - hutattedonmyarm 4y ago
    There are plenty of books which are released exclusively on Amazon and/or Audible. For music: Well they tried. Apple Music and Spotify had a little exclusives war in the beginning, but I think neither managed to grab enough that it mattered

daqhris 4y ago

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.

ninly 4y ago
Article authors don't typically write the headlines that appear above their pieces.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  That's not an acceptable excuse.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    For the author? Totally seems like it would be...
lotsofpulp 4y ago
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.
scarface74 4y ago
Revenue while losing money is not exactly a win.

LoveMortuus 4y ago

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 ^^

DoesntMatter22 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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'.

ophizi 4y ago

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.

thepasswordis 4y ago

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 4y ago
> It gives a unified experience across my phone, laptop, and car unified? find "new episodes" tab on desktop

nradov 4y ago

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?

mberning 4y ago

I pay for spotify yet have to endure endless ads during podcasts. It’s a huge turnoff.

ojagodzinski 4y ago
YouTube + SponsorBlock plugin is better in that regard. Sad that some browser plugin is more user friendly than premium account on Spotify.

DeathFindsAWay 4y ago

[dead]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

valeg 4y ago

They should bring back radio plays. Grifty podcasts with uninformed hosts are annoying. They are too easy to produce and just a noise.

dharmab 4y ago
They never left. There are many fiction podcasts and series.

corobo 4y ago

Oh good! I wish they'd bring Gimlet's old shows back to the internet. Really been fancying a StartUp relisten recently.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deanCommie 4y ago

> 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.

m3kw9 4y ago

Podcasts take way too much time when you have so many other forms of medium competing for attention

fragmede 4y ago
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.
- m3kw9 4y ago
  Driving is the only time I’d do that but the interfaces make it hard to start a podcast I want quickly. Same problem with music

owlbynight 4y ago

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.

aflag 4y ago

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.

myaccount80 4y ago

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

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gschier 4y ago

I feel like podcasts and music can't live within the same app. The use-cases are totally different.

karaterobot 4y ago

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!"

ragebol 4y ago

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.

panick21_ 4y ago

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.

INTPenis 4y ago

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.

jbverschoor 4y ago

Well, their streaming business also went wrong a long time ago. When you stop thinking about your customers, you'll start worrying about shareholders.

cheriot 4y ago

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 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  > “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 4y ago
    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.
    - cheriot 4y ago
      The core strategy was spending a lot of money on podcasts exclusive to Spotify. I'm not doubting that some were a success, but they no long want to spend money on exclusive content. That's a huge shift.
4y ago

soliton4 4y ago

maybe it would help if their users could actually listen to the end of a podcast without it just cutting off after 40ish minutes

sudden_dystopia 4y ago

“ 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?

cschmidt 4y ago
https://serialpodcast.org/ https://serialpodcast.org/ from the This American Life (NPR) people
- latexr 4y ago
  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/ https://stownpodcast.org/ ² About seven hours, one per episode.
MattDemers 4y ago
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.
- parpfish 4y ago
  For those who weren’t around when it came out, Serial was a genuine media phenomenon. I’d say it was on par with a big Netflix series (like squid game or Wednesday) in the sense that you would see it parodied in popular culture and could have “water cooler chats” with coworkers about it. I think it’s hard to understate how much this show did to introduce podcasts to the general population.

soneca 4y ago

> ”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.

bogomipz 4y ago

>"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.

Zetice 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.
- trts 4y ago
  I buy Spotify for podcasts (as a listener of Heavyweight which is now exclusive to Spotify). It sucks, and about 40% of the time an ad comes on, it crashes or loses my place in the episode completely when I try to skip (or I'm unable to skip). It's literally the worst podcast player I've ever used. I don't know what other exclusives they've gotten with a captive audience, but it's at least a reasonably logical play. Reply All would have kept me on the platform too had it not ended. But I stay because that's where my playlists and recs are, and those serve me well enough too.
niek_pas 4y ago
Last I used Spotify for podcasts, it didn't have chapter support, didn't have shownotes support, didn't have smart speed (skipping silinces), don't think it had any concept of playlists or queues, and so on. Some of that may have changed but those are pretty basic features for a podcast player.

pc_edwin 4y ago

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. Brené 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 4y ago
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.
- nomel 4y ago
  > There is no average podcast listener. Yet, there are definitely outliers!
- pc_edwin 4y ago
  It is worth noting that, with the exception of Joe Rogan, the examples I have enumerated are among the most significant podcast investments made by Spotify. Speaking of subtlety, it bears repeating that the decision-making process of the team appears to be subject to a considerable degree of bias that is not particularly subtle. Source: https://www.quillpodcasting.com/blog-posts/spotify-podcasts https://www.quillpodcasting.com/blog-posts/spotify-podcasts

paradox460 4y ago

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

majormajor 4y ago

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.

babypuncher 4y ago

I never hopped on the Spotify bandwagon. I wrote music streaming off because their players are consistently inferior to foobar2000, and I don't usually spend more than $10-$15 a month on new music anyways. I'm glad their play at capturing the podcast market seems to be failing. As much as people like the unlimited cheap music, I think Spotify has been a net negative for the industry and their plans for podcasts are nothing but bad news for everyone other than their shareholders.

brainzap 4y ago

stop the squeeze, you just play music

Reason077 4y ago

I like Spotify. I like podcasts. What I didn't need was podcasts popping up when I wanted to listen to music. Or vice-versa. Trying to mix together the two in a single app always seemed pretty awkward to me.

nomel 4y ago
I've never had this happen. If I'm listening to podcasts, the stream is purely podcasts. If I listen to music, the stream is purely music. I don't recall anything "popping up". My front page can have mix, but they're all podcasts I listen to, with a couple of recommendations thrown in. But, I suppose, for those that don't listen to podcasts, being able to turn them off completely would be pretty desirable.

gsich 4y ago

Podcasts without RSS feeds are not podcasts.

rubyist5eva 4y ago

Podcast experience on desktop is absolutely miserable. I just want a list of the most recent unplayed episodes in chronological order, is that too much to ask? Like jeez, it sounds like the most basic feature imaginable that should be part of an MvP for crying out loud. Only reason I still use it is because it's easier to cast to my google nest minis than Apple Podcasts.

nojvek 4y ago

There’s this eternal cycle in every space. 1. There’s a big behemoth corporation. Loaded with money, 100K+ employees, bazillion features, complex, slow clunky product that a lot of users hate. They can’t grow by adding more value so they resort to money extraction tactics by making user experience worse. 2. New startup realizes they can build 80% of product in a few months with a small team. They build a sleek, swift, sweet product that takes off. 3. The tech behemoth first ignores it, then tries to trample it and then gets angry, but too late. Someone stole their lunch. 4. The new startup is hiring like crazy. Their growth is slowing, their investors are asking for new avenues. PMs are resorting to shady growth tactics. Ads in users faces, app is becoming complex, clunky and dog shit slow. Who cares though? Growth at any cost, gotta increase market cap. 5. The startup is the behemoth. A large chunk of their users hate it and want something better.

swyx 4y ago

good riddance. Spotify tried to erect a walled garden around RSS and failed. it's also a fairly crappy podcast player (way, way too willing to skip to the next podcast on the slightest mistake because its such a basic port of the music player). denying RSS and MP3 downloads on the episodes pages. you deserved to fail.

Accacin 4y ago

So I've always been pretty against listening to Podcasts via Spotify, so much so that I completely stopped listening to Last Podcast on the Left when they announced they were moving to Spotify. I was driving recently though and tried to use Spotify to listen to a podcast. I just wanted to queue the whole season from episode 1 to episode N. The listing seemed to mix both seasons, and episodes were in some random order. I had to manually add the episodes to my queue which seemed.. odd.

rsolva 4y ago

A podcast without an RSS feed is not a podcast. But what should we call these bastardized radio-on-demand thingies without a feed?