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> 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 off

> 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
  - emodendroket 4y ago
    Then why did Twitter displace RSS readers for the Web?
    - metalliqaz 4y ago
      Twitter is a different thing.
      - emodendroket 4y ago
        A smart watch is a different thing from a quartz wrist watch but it would be foolish to act like the decline of the latter has nothing to do with the former.
        lotsofpulp 4y ago
        I feel like I stopped seeing quartz wrist watches before smart watches were a thing, because mobile phones were always available to tell time. At least from my cohort. Smartwatches (namely Apple Watch) then became a thing because it provided more than time, such as vibrating alerts, fitness tracking, etc.
        CamperBob2 4y ago
        Not only that, but the high end of the old-school watch industry has never been healthier than it is now. ( https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/luxury-watches-for-men-market/ https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/luxury-watches-for-men-... ) The conventional wisdom that smartwatches are killing traditional watches is just like the conventional wisdom that Starbucks and other corporate brands push out local coffeehouses: dead wrong. Instead, the new players validate the market and provide an anchor point for luxury goods.
BonitaPersona 4y ago
This did happen in the spanish-speaking "podcasphere" as it is usually called. Ivoox succesfully closed exclusivity contracts with a handful of succesful spanish podcasts, a few years ago. Of course, other companies are trying to do the same with more or less success (Podimo, Spotify and Amazon Audible Spain). One of the main advantages for the signed artists is that they can use licensed music (paying the canon to the official regulatory agency SGAE). The spanish-speaking podcast scene is, surprisingly, very different than the english-speaking one.
- frereubu 4y ago
  As I understand it, licensing music in Spain is very different in the UK - in Spain you need to license individual songs, whereas in the UK you pay the Performing Rights Society for a single licence to play any recorded music. Which is why, with all due respect to the Spanish side of my family, Spanish discos tend to be wall-to-wall chunda chunda, whereas UK discos generally play pretty decent music (depending on the individual taste of the DJ...)
- thenewwazoo 4y ago
  Offtopic (and feels weird to ask in English) but I'm looking for good general-interest Spanish-language podcasts. Do you have any recommendations for ways to discover new ones?
  - simlevesque 4y ago
    A really good one is called La Ruina. It's a live podcast and the audience tells their worst experience. > Tomàs Fuentes e Ignasi Taltavull comentan y juzgan la peor anécdota de la gente que viene de público al programa. La historia más miserable se lleva un premio. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@laruinashow https://www.youtube.com/@laruinashow RSS: https://www.ivoox.com/ruina_fg_f1661078_filtro_1.xml https://www.ivoox.com/ruina_fg_f1661078_filtro_1.xml
- simlevesque 4y ago
  Wow so this is why it's so hard finding RSS links for spanish podcasts... edit: nevermind, iVoox offer rss links.
masklinn 4y ago
> Anyone else see the irony there? Without middlemen? Spotify was trying to cement itself as the middleman in as much podcasting as possible, right? Or maybe it's not irony, it's exactly that, Spotify saw a space without middleman and thus an opportunity to lock itself in as the middleman. Yep, it's not irony, but is instead a common corporate play: if you see a space with a lot of value to extract, you move in and start extracting.
- saghm 4y ago
  As the meme goes, "it's free real estate!"
  - k12sosse 4y ago
    Jim Boonie isn't as interested as they thought.
  - jack_pp 4y ago
    If they fail, trying to occupy that real estate could cost them billions
    - saghm 4y ago
      Yeah, I'm not claiming that their logic was sound, just saying that their motivation isn't that surprising. I'm guessing that the real estate referred to in the origin of that meme (an infomercial, I think?) wasn't really free either.
- cccybernetic 4y ago
  Meh, you can call it value extraction if you want, but ultimately they're paying these people. Didn't Rogan get like 100MM? Didn't they fund a bunch of studios and new podcast creators? From the article: Its drastic cuts have triggered a podcast winter, as the small studios it helped support consolidate and lavish narrative productions wane Also, I've tried 4 different podcast players and found Spotify's player to best of the bunch. Controls work like you would expect, it's very snappy, search and sorting are also polished. I've pretty much stopped listening to Podcasts on Apple's native app because Spotify's superior experience. I do get what you're saying about RSS feeds though, but it's not quite as black and white as you make it. Edit - updated wording: + "found Spotify's player to best of the bunch" - "they're all terrible except for Spotify's"
shmatt 4y ago
It worked for SiriusXM, paying a handful of celebrities big money to stream exclusively on their platform. So replace live radio with radio recording, it should still work The fact it didn't for Spotify doesn't say anything about the potential of recorded radio making big $$$, it just means they didn't sign the right deals
- papito 4y ago
  Exactly. I never listen to a podcast because it has a name attached to it. It's incredibly stupid. "Obama!", "Harry and Meghan!". So? Do I learn anything from it? Is it good content? I think these executives seriously overestimate people's desire to listen to rich and successful people drone on about how to live your best life once You Have it All.
  - cjrp 4y ago
    I dunno, haven’t people like the Kardashians made plenty of money out of exactly that?
    - papito 4y ago
      I think the audience is different. I would wager that the intersection between people who consume mindless celebrity TV and listen to informative podcasts is almost non-existent.
- kiawe_fire 4y ago
  I feel like Spotify going after big celebrities like the Obamas is a bit tone deaf specifically with regards to the podcasting audience. At least anecdotally speaking, my experience is the podcasting audience largely seems to seek out fresh and lesser known voices rather than big, established celebrities. If SiriusXM is the audio equivalent of premium TV networks like HBO, which has an audience base interested in following big celebrities (or, at least, did so 5-10 years ago) then podcasts are the audio equivalent of YouTube. That said, it sounds like Spotify kind of threw a variety of deals at the wall to see what stuck. By now, they should have a better idea of what works and what doesn’t, so hopefully they aren’t reigning in all the spending equally, but instead are being smart about it. SiriusXM was either very smart or very lucky in the deals they went after at the time, but Spotify was not so much. So now’s their moment to show what they’ve learned. I still maintain that audio is unique amongst all entertainment avenues in that it does not ask for undivided attention, can be listened to everywhere (work, car, at night in bed while sleeping) and therefore is not subject to as much competition of human needs as video or gaming is. At the same time, the cost of entering the space is so low, I don’t think you can ever really “out own” your competition.
deleted 4y ago
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dantheman 4y ago
They can't compete on quality of their player so they have to try and by exclusive content - it's pretty sad.
crazygringo 4y ago
All of this is pretty easy to understand. Podcasts had been free. But Spotify (and Apple too) saw an opportunity to make them paid, by funneling some money to creators. And since these creators wanted to make $$$ they said sign me up please, that sounds great! The rise of paywalled podcasts was inevitable, and you can blame podcast creators just as much for wanting a piece of the $$$. But of course that makes as much sense as blaming actors for wanting to be paid for doing a movie, or blaming software developers for wanting to be paid to write software. It's just capitalism doing what capitalism does. And I don't see a problem with rewarding popular podcast creators monetarily for their success, which Spotify (and Apple) created a new avenue for. But remember, nobody's forcing individual podcasts to go from free to paid exclusive. The podcast creators are making that choice.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  I did not even know one could pay Apple for podcasts until your post. https://podcasters.apple.com/ https://podcasters.apple.com/
- vlunkr 4y ago
  Agreed, it seems like a natural progression. The barrier for creating a podcast is incredibly low, which is why initially there wasn't this type of middleman. But monetizing a podcast, especially to the point that you can quit your day job is much harder.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  There’s already plenty of paid podcasts, what Apple and Spotify offer is frictionless payments. And for all the people complaining about Apples 30% cut on the App Store, there’s plenty of podcasters willing to give them exactly the same cut, as an alternate option to their own payment system.
notahacker 4y ago
> Anyone else see the irony there? Without middlemen? Spotify was trying to cement itself as the middleman in as much podcasting as possible, right? Or maybe it's not irony, it's exactly that, Spotify saw a space without middleman and thus an opportunity to lock itself in as the middleman. We're talking different levels of middlemen. Spotify is a middleman in music too, but upstream there are rights agencies and record labels with a lot of experience generating lots of revenue from lots of established distribution channels (and taking cuts of the cash for doing it). Not only do they want their cut of the revenue, but in general they simply won't do exclusivity deals. With podcasts, Spotify potentially deal direct with the team making the podcast, who might see a big chunk of cash for exclusivity straight into their pockets as very attractive compared with doing extra work to distribute on lots of platforms of unknown future value.
dzhiurgis 4y ago
Is there any value add in being middleman? I.e. can they deliver same or new podcasts better, possibly by curation or AI?
drexlspivey 4y ago
> Anyone else see the irony there? Without middlemen? Spotify was trying to cement itself as the middleman in as much podcasting as possible, right? Or maybe it's not irony, it's exactly that, Spotify saw a space without middleman and thus an opportunity to lock itself in as the middleman. wasn’t Spotify co-founded by the creator of Napster too?
- adamhowell 4y ago
  No. Daniel Elk was a CTO and then freelance developer and Martin Lorentzon was co-founder of a digital marketing company (and the initial money)
  - drexlspivey 4y ago
    I was referring to Sean Parker, apparently he joined a bit later as an early investor (bought 5% in 2010)
Fr0styMatt88 4y ago
Yep. I didn’t even associate Spotify with podcasts. Then they went and bought Joe Rogan, a show I enjoyed listening to on YouTube. That just made me think ‘screw them’.
- thathndude 4y ago
  This was my reaction as well. I enjoyed watching Rogan on YouTube. Spotify has made it more difficult for me to access his content. All that move did for me was create ill will. I went from having Rogan (and others) in my normal podcast app to those feeds just going dead.
listless 4y ago
> By 2021, Spotify had paid to sign some of the biggest names in podcasting. They also signed exclusive deals with some absolute no-names in podcasting. Michelle Obama and Megan Markel come to mind. Both of these are huge flops. They took some serious gambles there on name recognition with no proven podcasting chops.
tootie 4y ago
Spotify was/is more than a middleman. They acquired multiple publishing tools (Megaphone and Anchor), analytics (Chartable, Podsight) entire studios like Gimlet and had a huge network for both advertisers and paid subscribers. They were trying to acquire their way into becoming YouTube for podcasting. I think the biggest hindrance is that podcasting still isn't social the way video is.
voisin 4y ago
> Spotify saw a space without middleman and thus an opportunity to lock itself in as the middleman. They misjudged commitment to the podcaster, the way XM radio did. Howard Stern and Joe Rohan are now pale echoes of the cultural forces they were before they let for pay middlemen in between them and their listeners.
anonymousDan 4y ago
Reminds me of an ad I saw on the tube for an online furniture company (Made.com?) claiming to 'cut out the middleman' - wtf are you if not a middleman! Always made me chuckle.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
m000 4y ago
> was ready to stop many of these creators and companies from sharing podcasts on Apple and Amazon, and keep the content exclusively on Spotify Then should we bash Spotify for this, the specific creators, or just stop behaving like entitled babies? I doubt that Spotify threatened to de-platform any creator on the basis of exclusivity. They just offered money for exclusivity and the creators took it. This happens for everything related to entertainment. Why we're not e.g. blaming Steam/Sony/Nintendo for paying for platform exclusives?
aww_dang 4y ago
The sad part is how hard they fail at the basics, like playing audio through a web page. Before you can establish yourself as a gatekeeper you need to at least provide a functional walled garden. There's a famous podcaster they paid millions to sign with them. When I open up the page of episodes, the content isn't up to date. The video never plays at all. Even worse, they constantly suggest I install an application I can only assume is horribly bloated. The advertisements are often in the wrong language. Even if they could get me to stick around and listen to their ads, there's no way to monetize! Recommendations are another area where they fail, but at least that is somewhat subjective.
the_third_wave 4y ago
> I have noticed Spotify trying to funnel a decentralized podcasting ecosystem based on RSS into their own walled garden So did I and I did something about it: https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast Spodcast is a caching Spotify podcast to RSS proxy. Using Spodcast you can follow Spotify-hosted netcasts/podcasts using any player which supports RSS, thus enabling the use of older hardware which is not compatible with the Spotify (web) app. Spodcast consists of the main Spodcast application - a Python 3 command line tool - and a PHP-based RSS feed generator. It uses the librespot-python library to access the Spotift API. To use Spodcast you need a (free) Spotify account. Spodcast only supports the Spotify podcast service, it does not interface with the music streaming service.

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
- emodendroket 4y ago
  Then why did Twitter displace RSS readers for the Web?
  - metalliqaz 4y ago
    Twitter is a different thing.
    - emodendroket 4y ago
      A smart watch is a different thing from a quartz wrist watch but it would be foolish to act like the decline of the latter has nothing to do with the former.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        I feel like I stopped seeing quartz wrist watches before smart watches were a thing, because mobile phones were always available to tell time. At least from my cohort. Smartwatches (namely Apple Watch) then became a thing because it provided more than time, such as vibrating alerts, fitness tracking, etc.
        CamperBob2 4y ago
        Not only that, but the high end of the old-school watch industry has never been healthier than it is now. ( https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/luxury-watches-for-men-market/ https://www.intotheminds.com/blog/en/luxury-watches-for-men-... ) The conventional wisdom that smartwatches are killing traditional watches is just like the conventional wisdom that Starbucks and other corporate brands push out local coffeehouses: dead wrong. Instead, the new players validate the market and provide an anchor point for luxury goods.

BonitaPersona 4y ago

This did happen in the spanish-speaking "podcasphere" as it is usually called. Ivoox succesfully closed exclusivity contracts with a handful of succesful spanish podcasts, a few years ago. Of course, other companies are trying to do the same with more or less success (Podimo, Spotify and Amazon Audible Spain). One of the main advantages for the signed artists is that they can use licensed music (paying the canon to the official regulatory agency SGAE). The spanish-speaking podcast scene is, surprisingly, very different than the english-speaking one.

frereubu 4y ago
As I understand it, licensing music in Spain is very different in the UK - in Spain you need to license individual songs, whereas in the UK you pay the Performing Rights Society for a single licence to play any recorded music. Which is why, with all due respect to the Spanish side of my family, Spanish discos tend to be wall-to-wall chunda chunda, whereas UK discos generally play pretty decent music (depending on the individual taste of the DJ...)
thenewwazoo 4y ago
Offtopic (and feels weird to ask in English) but I'm looking for good general-interest Spanish-language podcasts. Do you have any recommendations for ways to discover new ones?
- simlevesque 4y ago
  A really good one is called La Ruina. It's a live podcast and the audience tells their worst experience. > Tomàs Fuentes e Ignasi Taltavull comentan y juzgan la peor anécdota de la gente que viene de público al programa. La historia más miserable se lleva un premio. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@laruinashow https://www.youtube.com/@laruinashow RSS: https://www.ivoox.com/ruina_fg_f1661078_filtro_1.xml https://www.ivoox.com/ruina_fg_f1661078_filtro_1.xml
simlevesque 4y ago
Wow so this is why it's so hard finding RSS links for spanish podcasts... edit: nevermind, iVoox offer rss links.

masklinn 4y ago

saghm 4y ago
As the meme goes, "it's free real estate!"
- k12sosse 4y ago
  Jim Boonie isn't as interested as they thought.
- jack_pp 4y ago
  If they fail, trying to occupy that real estate could cost them billions
  - saghm 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm not claiming that their logic was sound, just saying that their motivation isn't that surprising. I'm guessing that the real estate referred to in the origin of that meme (an infomercial, I think?) wasn't really free either.
cccybernetic 4y ago
Meh, you can call it value extraction if you want, but ultimately they're paying these people. Didn't Rogan get like 100MM? Didn't they fund a bunch of studios and new podcast creators? From the article: Its drastic cuts have triggered a podcast winter, as the small studios it helped support consolidate and lavish narrative productions wane Also, I've tried 4 different podcast players and found Spotify's player to best of the bunch. Controls work like you would expect, it's very snappy, search and sorting are also polished. I've pretty much stopped listening to Podcasts on Apple's native app because Spotify's superior experience. I do get what you're saying about RSS feeds though, but it's not quite as black and white as you make it. Edit - updated wording: + "found Spotify's player to best of the bunch" - "they're all terrible except for Spotify's"

shmatt 4y ago

It worked for SiriusXM, paying a handful of celebrities big money to stream exclusively on their platform. So replace live radio with radio recording, it should still work The fact it didn't for Spotify doesn't say anything about the potential of recorded radio making big $$$, it just means they didn't sign the right deals

papito 4y ago
Exactly. I never listen to a podcast because it has a name attached to it. It's incredibly stupid. "Obama!", "Harry and Meghan!". So? Do I learn anything from it? Is it good content? I think these executives seriously overestimate people's desire to listen to rich and successful people drone on about how to live your best life once You Have it All.
- cjrp 4y ago
  I dunno, haven’t people like the Kardashians made plenty of money out of exactly that?
  - papito 4y ago
    I think the audience is different. I would wager that the intersection between people who consume mindless celebrity TV and listen to informative podcasts is almost non-existent.
kiawe_fire 4y ago
I feel like Spotify going after big celebrities like the Obamas is a bit tone deaf specifically with regards to the podcasting audience. At least anecdotally speaking, my experience is the podcasting audience largely seems to seek out fresh and lesser known voices rather than big, established celebrities. If SiriusXM is the audio equivalent of premium TV networks like HBO, which has an audience base interested in following big celebrities (or, at least, did so 5-10 years ago) then podcasts are the audio equivalent of YouTube. That said, it sounds like Spotify kind of threw a variety of deals at the wall to see what stuck. By now, they should have a better idea of what works and what doesn’t, so hopefully they aren’t reigning in all the spending equally, but instead are being smart about it. SiriusXM was either very smart or very lucky in the deals they went after at the time, but Spotify was not so much. So now’s their moment to show what they’ve learned. I still maintain that audio is unique amongst all entertainment avenues in that it does not ask for undivided attention, can be listened to everywhere (work, car, at night in bed while sleeping) and therefore is not subject to as much competition of human needs as video or gaming is. At the same time, the cost of entering the space is so low, I don’t think you can ever really “out own” your competition.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

dantheman 4y ago

They can't compete on quality of their player so they have to try and by exclusive content - it's pretty sad.

crazygringo 4y ago

All of this is pretty easy to understand. Podcasts had been free. But Spotify (and Apple too) saw an opportunity to make them paid, by funneling some money to creators. And since these creators wanted to make $$$ they said sign me up please, that sounds great! The rise of paywalled podcasts was inevitable, and you can blame podcast creators just as much for wanting a piece of the $$$. But of course that makes as much sense as blaming actors for wanting to be paid for doing a movie, or blaming software developers for wanting to be paid to write software. It's just capitalism doing what capitalism does. And I don't see a problem with rewarding popular podcast creators monetarily for their success, which Spotify (and Apple) created a new avenue for. But remember, nobody's forcing individual podcasts to go from free to paid exclusive. The podcast creators are making that choice.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
I did not even know one could pay Apple for podcasts until your post. https://podcasters.apple.com/ https://podcasters.apple.com/
vlunkr 4y ago
Agreed, it seems like a natural progression. The barrier for creating a podcast is incredibly low, which is why initially there wasn't this type of middleman. But monetizing a podcast, especially to the point that you can quit your day job is much harder.
tinus_hn 4y ago
There’s already plenty of paid podcasts, what Apple and Spotify offer is frictionless payments. And for all the people complaining about Apples 30% cut on the App Store, there’s plenty of podcasters willing to give them exactly the same cut, as an alternate option to their own payment system.

notahacker 4y ago

> Anyone else see the irony there? Without middlemen? Spotify was trying to cement itself as the middleman in as much podcasting as possible, right? Or maybe it's not irony, it's exactly that, Spotify saw a space without middleman and thus an opportunity to lock itself in as the middleman. We're talking different levels of middlemen. Spotify is a middleman in music too, but upstream there are rights agencies and record labels with a lot of experience generating lots of revenue from lots of established distribution channels (and taking cuts of the cash for doing it). Not only do they want their cut of the revenue, but in general they simply won't do exclusivity deals. With podcasts, Spotify potentially deal direct with the team making the podcast, who might see a big chunk of cash for exclusivity straight into their pockets as very attractive compared with doing extra work to distribute on lots of platforms of unknown future value.

dzhiurgis 4y ago

Is there any value add in being middleman? I.e. can they deliver same or new podcasts better, possibly by curation or AI?

drexlspivey 4y ago

adamhowell 4y ago
No. Daniel Elk was a CTO and then freelance developer and Martin Lorentzon was co-founder of a digital marketing company (and the initial money)
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  I was referring to Sean Parker, apparently he joined a bit later as an early investor (bought 5% in 2010)

Fr0styMatt88 4y ago

Yep. I didn’t even associate Spotify with podcasts. Then they went and bought Joe Rogan, a show I enjoyed listening to on YouTube. That just made me think ‘screw them’.

thathndude 4y ago
This was my reaction as well. I enjoyed watching Rogan on YouTube. Spotify has made it more difficult for me to access his content. All that move did for me was create ill will. I went from having Rogan (and others) in my normal podcast app to those feeds just going dead.

listless 4y ago

> By 2021, Spotify had paid to sign some of the biggest names in podcasting. They also signed exclusive deals with some absolute no-names in podcasting. Michelle Obama and Megan Markel come to mind. Both of these are huge flops. They took some serious gambles there on name recognition with no proven podcasting chops.

tootie 4y ago

Spotify was/is more than a middleman. They acquired multiple publishing tools (Megaphone and Anchor), analytics (Chartable, Podsight) entire studios like Gimlet and had a huge network for both advertisers and paid subscribers. They were trying to acquire their way into becoming YouTube for podcasting. I think the biggest hindrance is that podcasting still isn't social the way video is.

voisin 4y ago

> Spotify saw a space without middleman and thus an opportunity to lock itself in as the middleman. They misjudged commitment to the podcaster, the way XM radio did. Howard Stern and Joe Rohan are now pale echoes of the cultural forces they were before they let for pay middlemen in between them and their listeners.

anonymousDan 4y ago

Reminds me of an ad I saw on the tube for an online furniture company (Made.com?) claiming to 'cut out the middleman' - wtf are you if not a middleman! Always made me chuckle.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

m000 4y ago

> was ready to stop many of these creators and companies from sharing podcasts on Apple and Amazon, and keep the content exclusively on Spotify Then should we bash Spotify for this, the specific creators, or just stop behaving like entitled babies? I doubt that Spotify threatened to de-platform any creator on the basis of exclusivity. They just offered money for exclusivity and the creators took it. This happens for everything related to entertainment. Why we're not e.g. blaming Steam/Sony/Nintendo for paying for platform exclusives?

aww_dang 4y ago

The sad part is how hard they fail at the basics, like playing audio through a web page. Before you can establish yourself as a gatekeeper you need to at least provide a functional walled garden. There's a famous podcaster they paid millions to sign with them. When I open up the page of episodes, the content isn't up to date. The video never plays at all. Even worse, they constantly suggest I install an application I can only assume is horribly bloated. The advertisements are often in the wrong language. Even if they could get me to stick around and listen to their ads, there's no way to monetize! Recommendations are another area where they fail, but at least that is somewhat subjective.

the_third_wave 4y ago

> I have noticed Spotify trying to funnel a decentralized podcasting ecosystem based on RSS into their own walled garden So did I and I did something about it: https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast Spodcast is a caching Spotify podcast to RSS proxy. Using Spodcast you can follow Spotify-hosted netcasts/podcasts using any player which supports RSS, thus enabling the use of older hardware which is not compatible with the Spotify (web) app. Spodcast consists of the main Spodcast application - a Python 3 command line tool - and a PHP-based RSS feed generator. It uses the librespot-python library to access the Spotift API. To use Spodcast you need a (free) Spotify account. Spodcast only supports the Spotify podcast service, it does not interface with the music streaming service.