I have been asked to comment on the sale of Joe Rogan's podcast to Spotify for US $100 million and what I think about it. I find this a little bit baffling as I have never listened to 'The Joe Rogan Experience'; so I can not comment about the goodness or badness of the content.
Perhaps what is being asked is what I think of a monolithic organisation like Spotify buying up assets and placing them behind paywalls. Of that I do have prior opinions but I am not sure how they directly apply here.
For what it is worth, having never listened to The Joe Rogan Experience, I can't say that I am going to miss what I have never known. For me, that would be similar to something like Picard which I might be interested in, or whatever the Kardashians thing is which I am almost certainly probably not interested in.
The fact that there is a $100m superstar of podcasts seems to me to be about as inevitable as the existence of Taylor Swift, U2, The Beatles, Dame Nellie Melba, or Gaius Appuleius Diocles who was a 2nd century Roman chariot driver who was paid millions of sesterces. If Mr Rogan has managed to spin a shilling because of the popularity of his podcast, then well done to him. Just do not expect me to pay to see what's behind the paywall. Spotify have made their commercial decision to buy an asset based upon the future expected earnings of that asset; which seems to me to be completely unremarkable in the world of business.
I think that the mistake that people are making when it comes to podcasts is thinking that it is a new thing. Here we are in 2020 and I can tell you that the first podcast that I listened to was the Friday Night Comedy Podcast from BBC Radio 4 as far long ago as 2005; which is now fifteen years ago. Not terribly long after people realised that MP3 players could hold massive files, it was also realised that instead of music quality MP3s being sampled at 44kHz and 16-bit, radio quality and the spoken word could be perfectly serviceable at 22kHz and 8-bit encoding. Thus, a half hour radio program could fit into a file which was only about a quarter of the size of a full music album.
I can not tell you for sure what the first actual program that I would have heard on podcast would have been but shows like 'The News Quiz', 'The Now Show', and more serious programs like 'In Our Time' and 'Any Questions?', very quickly found their way onto the BBC Podcast list, other state radio networks like the ABC, NPR, DW and CBC soon followed.
If anything, what this sale of one particular podcast to a big media company shows is that they fundamentally understand how business works but not necessarily how podcasting works.
One of the things that the internet did generally, was democratise who controlled information. Twitter and Facebook very quickly realised that the thing for sale wasn't the product but people's attention; which is kind of why broadcast television and broadcast radio used to be the kings of media. Legacy broadcast media networks were horrified as advertising revenues began to drift away but the state media networks who are not beholden to the profit motive, moved quickly to adopting newer media.
Podcasting in particular which had no obvious platform, very much worked like early webpages, where people went wherever they liked and their pod machine of choice would pick up notifications via an RSS feed.
What I think that Spotify has tried to become is a hybrid of the platform format of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, but I do not know if they have thought through (or even can properly think through) the implications of what podcasting ultimately is.
Podcasting is closer in spirit to its bigger brother, radio; except that unlike radio it is timeshifted to whenever the listener gets around to playing it. Just like radio, podcasting lives and dies upon the strength/popularity of the hosts or continues to be made for very small audiences because people like to make stuff. The thing with radio is that although you probably can run a radio subscription service, due to the fact that it is not a tangible thing, the popularity of the thing is also partly determined by the availability of the thing. I can absolutely say that if The Joe Rogan Experience is tucked away behind a paywall then I will not have any opportunity to ever listen to it and by extension, I am certainly not going to pay for it.
One of the things that is slowly dawning upon sports organisations, is that they actually need exposure on free to air channels to make anyone care about what they have to sell. The Supercars in Australia is a classic example of this where the revenues available within the sport have massively collapsed and this is almost certainly due to the sport being tucked up behind a paywall. If the audience is never given an opportunity to care, they don't.
I suspect that Spotify will very quickly learn that as podcasts are less tangible than televised sport, that it will be even harder to make people care enough to want to pay to listen to a thing that they can not see. Unlike sport which has a sort of ready made audience and an ecosystem which allows reporters to report on it, podcasts are more akin to audiobooks. Granted that you can sort of get people excited enough to pay for them but the market for audiobooks is actually kind of niche.
I do not know if Spotify have made a good business decision to buy presumably the brightest start of podcasting for $100m but presumably they will have had boffins pore over past results to make predictions about the future. It's still not enough to make me sign up for Spotify but then again I might not be the target audience: I have no idea whatsoever. Maybe this is just another piece of culture that I don't have to care about and the fact that it will be tucked up behind a paywall means that I won't have to. That may or may not be a bad thing for Spotify.
No comments:
Post a Comment