Semafor: “The incredible shrinking podcast industry”

Apple has quietly tightened its reporting of how many people listen to podcasts, sending shock waves through an embattled audio industry still reeling from the end of the COVID-era production bubble.

The shift, Apple wrote in a blog post, was technical: The dominant podcasting platform had begun switching off automatic downloads for users who haven’t listened to five episodes of a show in the last two weeks.

But while few users noticed the shift, some of the biggest podcasts in the world saw their official listener numbers drop dramatically. Long-running shows that publish frequently were hit particularly hard. A user who listened to a show like The New York Times’ The Daily a few times, subscribed, but stopped listening would continue to count as a download indefinitely. Even better under the old rules: For people who listened to a show, dropped off for a while, but started listening again later, Apple would automatically download every show in between. The arrangement drove big download numbers, a crucial metric for ad sales and a sign of the vast reach of podcasts as a medium.

Max Tani

The title is somewhat misleading, as podcasting hasn’t suddenly shrunk overnight, but was instead revealed to have been smaller than previously reported. Not exactly a novel issue, as I have written before on this blog, but a reflection of the constant hyping and inflated expectations that is associated with basically every new trend in tech circles.

Vulture: “Podcasting is Just Radio Now”

It’s been almost eight years since Serial dropped. An entire industry has roared to life, drawing in Hollywood studios, corporations, celebrities, and billions of dollars. But the blockbuster podcast — a subgenre or prestige tier essential to the medium’s rise as an artistic force — is in a serious funk. Your phone is full of podcasts, I’m sure, and maybe you’ve convinced a friend to add one of your darlings to their queue. But when was the last time a single title was being dissected by everyone you know?

For some in the business, the medium’s diminishing ability to drive such moments poses an existential problem. What does it mean for podcasting as an art form if it rarely inspires widespread critical discussion? Let me put it this way: The Bear was a hit, said Fowlkes (now a podcast talent agent with the Gernert Company), referring to the summer’s breakout TV show. It was in the conversation. Nothing in podcasting right now feels like it ripples outside of the bounds of people who already listen to podcasts.

Nicholas Quah

I can’t quite grasp the reasons for this constant fretting around podcasting, and this article seems to constantly swing from concerns about podcasting as an art medium and the business side. It would seem to me that these goals are somewhat contradictory; art is not something that can be replicated with consistency by applying a set recipe, nor does it resonate with every listener the same way. Art is supposed to be special, inspiring, unique; if you set about generating art on a manufacturing line, churning out episodes for money, it loses these qualities making it distinct.

The Guardian: “‘It’s the way the industry is going’: how YouTube is transforming podcasting”

A study by market research firm Cumulus published in May found YouTube is already the most popular platform for podcasts. It won the market without really trying; now, it’s getting serious. The company has launched a dedicated beta podcast landing page, hired a podcast executive to lead its efforts in the medium and offered popular podcasters and podcast networks grants of up to $300,000 to create video versions of their shows, according to Bloomberg.

It’s a sign of growing competition in the space that’s bad news for Spotify, which has invested about $1bn in podcasting in recent years. Even Gen Z’s beloved short-form video platform TikTok is thinking about launching a music service that would cover podcasts.

Much like the tendency of distantly related crustaceans to keep evolving into crabs, sooner or later platforms have a tendency to start cannibalising each other’s core features. This time, a medium is caught in the crossfire – raising the question of what differentiates a video podcast from the vlogs that YouTube first popularised.

Laurie Clarke

A common issue with platforms adding additional features is that after a point it starts having diminishing returns in terms of user experience. In the specific case of video podcasts I would even argue that a video component can actively diminish the experience of listening to a podcast. I listen to podcasts mostly in the background, while I’m doing chores around the house or while roaming around the city; in other words, when my ears are free to follow the discussion, while my eyes are paying attention to other things. Having to follow a visual story along with the audio track would be highly distracting to downright impossible – for example when crossing the street – so I would rather stop listening to podcasts than switch to video. I’m sure this applies to many other people and situations as well – you probably don’t want to stare at a screen while driving, but you might easily listen to a podcast, just as you would an audiobook or music.

Supercast: “Joe Rogan Got Ripped Off”

I hope the reported numbers are low, because I don’t think even $100 million per year provides Rogan with enough upside to accommodate the trade offs:

1. Losing his relationship with his subscribers
2. Building someone else’s business and recurring revenue instead of his own
3. A smaller audience and less impact

He’s going to be just fine either way. I’m not shedding any tears for Joe, but as a business person I can’t help but shake my head at the lost potential.

The world’s largest podcasters are sitting on oil. There’s a reason Spotify is writing these seemingly insane checks: They’ve done the geological surveys. They're trying to cut deals with as many hapless farmers as they can before they all catch on. Spotify will spend hundreds of millions to reap billions.

Most people will look at Rogan and think he’s a genius living the dream.

I think he’s a farmer who just got taken by Daniel Ek.

Andrew Wilkinson

Interesting perspective on Joe Rogan’s exclusive deal with Spotify that surfaced in my Twitter feed after a new report estimated the value of the deal at over $200 million. It was somewhat amusing to see the renewed outrage without substance, which felt more like repressed envy than anything else. You can certainly make a case that he’s saying questionable things on his podcast, but Rogan’s remuneration depends on his negotiation with Spotify and how much the company estimates it can get in return, not on the perception of some small slice of the public. That other newspapers reported a smaller amount last year is rather a journalism problem of not properly vetting their information.

Protocol: “Blame cheap music for Joe Rogan being on Spotify”

Left unsaid during the leaked town hall was another aspect of this relationship: Spotify is in bed with Joe Rogan because streaming music is too damn cheap.

Music services have long struggled to pay those huge royalty checks their contracts with the music rights holders are calling for. Some have even argued that the deck is fundamentally stacked against the streaming media industry, and that music subscription services can never be profitable.

• Spotify has indeed lost billions of dollars over the years, a streak that continued in 2021: For the full year, the company booked net losses of $38.8 million on $11 billion in revenue, according to its latest earnings report released yesterday.

Janko Roettgers

I have been trying to abstain from commenting on this Joe Rogan dispute because people were throwing around the most ridiculous and biased arguments they could find. For the record, I don’t listen either to Joe Rogan’s podcast or to Neil Young’s music, but I am a Spotify premium subscriber, and have no intention to change that. This article discusses the business reasons for the situation; I would go a bit further and say that the underlying issue is the increasing lack of competition on this market.

Bloomberg: “Podcasting hasn’t produced A New Hit in Years”

None of the 10 most popular podcasts in the U.S. last year debuted in the last couple years, according to Edison Research. They are an average of more than 7 years old, and three of the top five are more than a decade old (“The Joe Rogan Experience”, “This American Life” and “Stuff You Should Know”). Only a few podcasts in the top 50 (“SmartLess”, “The Michelle Obama Podcast”, “Frenemies”) are less than two years old. And none of them are in the top 25.

This trend vexes executives and producers across the podcasting industry, who worry they are wasting a lot of money on new shows. Spotify, Amazon, SiriusXM, iHeartMedia and outside investors have plowed billions of dollars into production companies. Spotify has spent more than anyone, paying about $500 million for three studios. Where is all this money going if these companies aren’t producing new hits?

Pretty much everyone agrees on the reason. There are more podcasts than ever before. Spotify hosts more than 3 million podcasts, up from a few hundred thousand just a few years ago. While the vast majority of those new shows are either defunct or have minuscule audiences, there are still way more podcasts than there were just a few years ago.

The number of new podcasts has grown more quickly than the podcast audience, and so the number of listeners per show is going down. The list of shows competing to be that program you try on your weekend walk is longer than the backlog of TV shows you want to watch.

Lucas Shaw

It seems to me that this last paragraph mainly sums up the answer to this dilemma: podcasts were perceived by many as a new opportunity for content creators, a medium unencumbered by Big Tech platform dynamics such as poor and inconsistent revenue sharing, opaque rankings and rapidly changing moderation policies, and the reliance on algorithmic ads. This led to a large influx of new podcasts, but the audience hasn't followed suit, because people’s attention is more easily captured by short-form videos on TikTok. These figures show that podcasting isn’t immune to the underlying forces of digital content creation, where top performers capture an overwhelming share of the audience – and of revenues.

The Ezra Klein Show: “The Foreign Policy Conversation Washington doesn’t want to have”

ROBERT WRIGHT: Right. We helped train some of the people who became leaders of the Taliban to expel foreign occupying forces, and it turns out they did that twice. They just did it to us. Now, I don’t want to suggest that we are exactly comparable to the Soviet Union by any means, or that the nature of our occupation was, but we do tend to take it for granted that countries around the world see things the way we do.

Like most people, we assume that we’re good people. We see our intentions as good, and that’s not always the widely shared perception. We are not always perceived as liberators, and the people in the countries that come into play in our contests with great powers do not always share the aspirations that we attribute to them. And I think, if there’s one thing I would propose is a miracle cure for the ills of US foreign policy, it would be for Americans to get much better at trying to see the world from the perspective of other people around the world.

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EZRA KLEIN: And when you have this much bipartisan support for something, like, say, a Cold War with China or the war on terror, it becomes hard in a two-party system to find space for critique of it, to have people who see their political interests bound up in criticizing it, and they will try to make the American people aware of the failures in logic or the failures in execution. And I think, broadly speaking, in a bunch of these foreign policy debates, a problem is here that they are actually pretty bipartisan. And when things are too bipartisan, you actually get a suppression of contrary viewpoints, which I think has been true.

Ezra Klein

Interesting conversation, and very timely in this context. The remarks about how Americans should get better at recognizing and understanding the perspectives of other people (basically become more empathetic), apply perfectly to recent international events, from the Afghanistan withdrawal, when President Biden failed to acknowledge the Afghan soldiers who fought and died during these two decades, to the recent Indo-Pacific pact with Australia, who angered France. The reactions from the Anglo-American side were mostly dismissive of the French responses, ranging from entertaining and inconsequential to theatrical – not the best way to calm the situation if you ask me.