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> 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

> 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"
- simonh 4y ago
  Try Overcast.
  - suction 4y ago
    Used it for years but Pocket Casts beats it in all aspects.
  - cccybernetic 4y ago
    Overall I like Overcast, definitely better than Apple’s app. I don’t like UI though — the teal blue color, oversized controls, the “+ + + +” on the playback speed slider, strange layout choices, etc. (I know that these are relatively minor things to most people).
    - schnable 4y ago
      you can change the colors if you get the premium version.
      - lostlogin 4y ago
        The concept of smart speed impressed me so much I got it. I don’t use the feature a to alter speed a lot, but it’s such a clever way to speeding things up.
- cma 4y ago
  > Didn't Rogan get like 100MM? They fund early people to get momentum and lock others in at high rates once they build out an audience.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    Have you seen the recently published _Chokepoint Capitalism_ by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow yet? I think the book could have used a lot tighter editing, it gets kind of tiresome in many parts... but the basic fundamental observation seems right to me and helps give me the mental models to recognize and describe it. "it" being the way in the internet economy those who occupy that "middleman" position can become "chokepoints" who can hold both consumers and producers hostage. Or, as Doctorow wrote in a blog post covering some similar ground: > Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. — https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ I'm not sure if they all die, there are a LOT of platforms around which haven't died yet, but those first steps are very recognizable in chokepoint middlemen like Spotify is for music and is trying to become for podcasts. First you give both consumers and the "business customers" (whether podcast producers or product sellers on Amazon) a great deal; then, once you've locked the consumers in you make the deal for consumers a lot worse in order to keep your business customers on your side; then, once you've locked _them_ in too (perhaps because they need you to reach the consumers, who are all on your platform), you tighten things up for business customers too, trying to extract as much money as possible from consumers and share as little of it as possible with the producers, while both have a hard time leaving you due to network effects. So, yeah, it always starts great for your users. This is how you trap them, so you can then start tightening the screws.
skippyboxedhero 4y ago
The problem with this strategy is that most execs don't think through the higher levels (which is what went wrong here). They think: we will flood this space with money, drive out competition, and then jack up the price. They don't think: if we spend all this money, we will have to get a return...the product is free today, is there enough juice here? What will consumers pay? Charging money impacts the level of demand, spending money like this is literally putting a noose around your neck with investors. I remember when I first saw this happen...I literally couldn't believe it, these execs knew the business, they were so smart, well-incentivized...it had to work. It never does, it is horrible to read about because people get canned (less so in this case, this spending was clearly an extension of a prominent exec's social life) but you just see it every time with these "land grab" strategies. To be clear, the mistake wasn't the strategy, it wasn't being wrong, the mistake was choosing to flamboyantly set fire to billions of dollars for no reason.
- brokencode 4y ago
  They certainly do think about the reduction of demand due to increasing price. That’s economics 101, and I would not assume a major business executive doesn’t know that. They must have simply thought that the reduction in demand would be small compared to the increased revenue. They are in an existential battle against heavyweights like Apple, Amazon, and Google for music streaming. Adding exclusive podcasts to try to lock in users seems like a good idea to me from a business perspective. I absolutely hate the idea as a listener to podcasts though, and I am glad to see it fail.
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    > They must have simply thought No, they didn't. Paying $200m for Joe Rogan, $30m for Markle...these deals made no sense regardless of any economic model (as I allude to above, they also did strange deals where they tried to bring in someone from outside podcasting). And the reason I wrote the meta thing at the end: I have seen companies do this repeatedly and I have seen young equity analysts get caught up in it because they think the same way you are thinking. Yes, we live in a world where a business exec can waste billions of dollars on a totally unfounded hunch, they don't think it over, they don't look at the numbers, they are just like everyone else and will repeatedly do things that make no sense at all (it is actually far easier for someone who isn't in the industry and without business training to spot this...when people are in this situation and getting paid $10m/year for nothing, they tend to think they are geniuses and everyone else an idiot and end up making decisions like this).
EarlKing 4y ago
Cory Doctorow even wrote an entire book recently documenting this practice across half a dozen companies over the past two decades.
qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Large company driven of the field by open source, if the tech is good enough and a comunity establishes that does not yearn for closed source features, open source can permanently poison the well so to speak. In return, if a alternative falls behind (IRC to discord) companies may capture a free market yet, until the alternatives catch up (blender to autodesk). After that the walled garden dies and withers.

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"

simonh 4y ago
Try Overcast.
- suction 4y ago
  Used it for years but Pocket Casts beats it in all aspects.
- cccybernetic 4y ago
  Overall I like Overcast, definitely better than Apple’s app. I don’t like UI though — the teal blue color, oversized controls, the “+ + + +” on the playback speed slider, strange layout choices, etc. (I know that these are relatively minor things to most people).
  - schnable 4y ago
    you can change the colors if you get the premium version.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      The concept of smart speed impressed me so much I got it. I don’t use the feature a to alter speed a lot, but it’s such a clever way to speeding things up.
cma 4y ago
> Didn't Rogan get like 100MM? They fund early people to get momentum and lock others in at high rates once they build out an audience.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Have you seen the recently published _Chokepoint Capitalism_ by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow yet? I think the book could have used a lot tighter editing, it gets kind of tiresome in many parts... but the basic fundamental observation seems right to me and helps give me the mental models to recognize and describe it. "it" being the way in the internet economy those who occupy that "middleman" position can become "chokepoints" who can hold both consumers and producers hostage. Or, as Doctorow wrote in a blog post covering some similar ground: > Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. — https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/ I'm not sure if they all die, there are a LOT of platforms around which haven't died yet, but those first steps are very recognizable in chokepoint middlemen like Spotify is for music and is trying to become for podcasts. First you give both consumers and the "business customers" (whether podcast producers or product sellers on Amazon) a great deal; then, once you've locked the consumers in you make the deal for consumers a lot worse in order to keep your business customers on your side; then, once you've locked _them_ in too (perhaps because they need you to reach the consumers, who are all on your platform), you tighten things up for business customers too, trying to extract as much money as possible from consumers and share as little of it as possible with the producers, while both have a hard time leaving you due to network effects. So, yeah, it always starts great for your users. This is how you trap them, so you can then start tightening the screws.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago

The problem with this strategy is that most execs don't think through the higher levels (which is what went wrong here). They think: we will flood this space with money, drive out competition, and then jack up the price. They don't think: if we spend all this money, we will have to get a return...the product is free today, is there enough juice here? What will consumers pay? Charging money impacts the level of demand, spending money like this is literally putting a noose around your neck with investors. I remember when I first saw this happen...I literally couldn't believe it, these execs knew the business, they were so smart, well-incentivized...it had to work. It never does, it is horrible to read about because people get canned (less so in this case, this spending was clearly an extension of a prominent exec's social life) but you just see it every time with these "land grab" strategies. To be clear, the mistake wasn't the strategy, it wasn't being wrong, the mistake was choosing to flamboyantly set fire to billions of dollars for no reason.

brokencode 4y ago
They certainly do think about the reduction of demand due to increasing price. That’s economics 101, and I would not assume a major business executive doesn’t know that. They must have simply thought that the reduction in demand would be small compared to the increased revenue. They are in an existential battle against heavyweights like Apple, Amazon, and Google for music streaming. Adding exclusive podcasts to try to lock in users seems like a good idea to me from a business perspective. I absolutely hate the idea as a listener to podcasts though, and I am glad to see it fail.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  > They must have simply thought No, they didn't. Paying $200m for Joe Rogan, $30m for Markle...these deals made no sense regardless of any economic model (as I allude to above, they also did strange deals where they tried to bring in someone from outside podcasting). And the reason I wrote the meta thing at the end: I have seen companies do this repeatedly and I have seen young equity analysts get caught up in it because they think the same way you are thinking. Yes, we live in a world where a business exec can waste billions of dollars on a totally unfounded hunch, they don't think it over, they don't look at the numbers, they are just like everyone else and will repeatedly do things that make no sense at all (it is actually far easier for someone who isn't in the industry and without business training to spot this...when people are in this situation and getting paid $10m/year for nothing, they tend to think they are geniuses and everyone else an idiot and end up making decisions like this).

EarlKing 4y ago

Cory Doctorow even wrote an entire book recently documenting this practice across half a dozen companies over the past two decades.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

Large company driven of the field by open source, if the tech is good enough and a comunity establishes that does not yearn for closed source features, open source can permanently poison the well so to speak. In return, if a alternative falls behind (IRC to discord) companies may capture a free market yet, until the alternatives catch up (blender to autodesk). After that the walled garden dies and withers.