An option to hide all podcasts would significantly improve spotify's recommendations. I don't listen to podcasts (though I have accidentally clicked on one, when a podcast interviewed a musician I like... blech). Why is my screen filled with podcasts multiple times per day? I like the music recommendations, "so and so artist radio," etc., but they make me hunt for them.
Also, while I like a broad variety of genres, I only like listening to one at a time. I don't want a rap mix to be invaded by a Bach sonata. And yet...
Why Spotify plasters your home page with Podcasts:
Short answer is $$$$.
Longer answer is:
Spotify must pay royalties for each song played. Imagine if there was a completely free (for Spotify) form of content that filled users ears for hours, thus removing the need for Spotify to pay royalties. Ahem podcasts. Now imagine if Spotify started injecting ads into said media form to grow their revenue beyond subscriptions. Again, podcasts. So now, you have a very long-form content that both saves you royalty $ and drives new revenue. QED. Podcasts will continue to be plastered all over your recommendations, be top search results, etc, until the above stops being true.
I think the more likely answer is that podcasts can be produced with exclusivity deals while songs can not.
Spotify is large because they were first and because apple/google music suck. But eventually apple and google will stop sucking and users will drain from Spotify rapidly unless Spotify can create content to keep users in.
Spotify is in the position of Firefox 15 years ago right now. Eventually the built in apps will take over.
Selling a burger is inhernelty profitable for McD, they sell it for more than they spend on manufacturing and shipping and serving it. Each new burger sold adds more profit.
Serving music is unprofitable for Spotify. They collect your monthly subscription fee, then every additional song play makes Spotify lose money. They don't want to have zero song plays since then nobody would subscribe, but their goal is sell the profitable thing (subscriptions) while minimizing the unprofitable thing (song plays).
Just to add to this restaurant based allegory, Spotify is like an all you can eat buffet that tries to serve out lots of sodas so you get bloated and don’t eat the expensive stuff they have
> their goal is [...] minimizing the unprofitable thing (song plays).
If that's the case, how do you explain those two features :
- the repeat button
- the "automatically play similar songs" option
In the first case, since I don't know how it works, maybe they have to pay only one time for a song per user listening to it during a period (say a month). But I doubt it.
In the second case, it's Spotify explicitly saying : "here are songs you don't intended to play but that we picked automatically and are playing to you".
If you look at Netflix, sure they have the feature that automatically launch the next episode. Or they try weird stuff like live or play anything... But they also have the "Are you still watching ?" feature, to make sure that they don't display content to an empty room.
Spotify doesn't have that, it can just play songs indefinitely without any human interaction.
Well...yes, not necessarily fundamental, but it's the same class of problem cinemas and restaurants have (to pick two). What do cinemas mainly make money from? What do restaurants mainly make money from?
Yes, that seems to be true (and is that % you've guessed maybe too low? Maybe far too low?). Even with that though, it's extraordinarily fine margins -- w/r/t the businesses that I mentioned, the majority of the income comes from those value-adds, if they weren't there it would generally be difficult for the businesses to survive financially. That's where I was coming from.
To me, Spotify seems to be using podcasts in a similar way. I assume it's because the central business model is unsustainable when combined with investor pressure; they can't just focus on core product because they're burning too much of other people's money in an attempt to outcompete everyone else
I'm sure it boils down to money ultimately, but it can't be the way you suggest here.
The thing is that Spotify does not pay per play! The royalties lobby love to give the impression that they do, because it makes it look like Spotify is fleecing them.
Spotify pays percentages of what it itself collects in subscription fees. If a record company owned 10% of everything that was listened to on Spotify this month, they would make _the same_, regardless of how many absolute seconds their stuff was listened to.
So, more listening to podcasts does not mean Spotify has to pay out less. How much they have to pay out in total is fixed as a share of their subscription (and ad) revenue anyway, in multi-year, industry wide contracts with copyright owners.
There are ways Spotify could circumvent this, such as promoting content they covertly owned themselves, or content whose owners gave them kickbacks of some sort. There's some indication they do such shady things. But podcasts don't change this equation much.
I think Spotify's promotion of podcasts is simply good old fashioned loss-leading monopoly building. They're hoping that Spotify will become where listeners go for podcasts since that's where all the podcasts are, and also the place podcasters go because that's where all the listeners are.
That is a great point about loss-leading a future monopoly and of course a factor.
This isn't a hill I will die on by any means, but if you read Spotify's write up on royalties[0], they pay out based on stream share of the overall platform, on a monthly basis. E.g. If Columbia Records gets 10% of streams for a month, they get 10% of the pool of $ Spotify distributes. Now, like you said they likely have some shady practices - I would imagine Spotify has an incentive to create music like study and sleep beats themselves as those playlists get hit for 8 hrs at a time and it doesn't really matter who created the beat as long as it helps you study or sleep.
They do not indicate in [0] that podcasts are excluded from stream share. Even if they aren't included in stream share now, I'd imagine long term they very much intend for podcasts and music to be lumped into the same stream share model to drive payouts down.
You aren't wrong, but you would think they would then create an excellent podcast player, yet they can't even get simple things like the order of the episodes correctly, and I still haven't figured out how to setup a next queue.
Not to mention that I might listen to podcasts at home and one the way to work, but at work I won't want to listen to anything spoken, but half the time I end up accidentally starting the podcast anyway. That now means I am not using Spotify for podcasts.
You’re probably right. But then again: who cares about Spotify making money? I want to listen to music and not optimize the bottom line of the Company.
Spotify dynamically injects ads into podcasts. I was listening to an episode of the Conan O'Brien podcast from 2018 and got an advertisement to be safe from Covid by enjoying an ice cold Miller Lite at home.
It was extremely unsettling until I realized what they were doing.
They replace the ad breaks that would normally be in a podcast. (Like when the hosts say "we're going to take a quick break to talk about our sponsors for this episode"). It's not an unskippable ad like you get when listening to music using the free tier. It's inserted directly into the audio stream.
Edit: I guess it's possible the Conan podcast is doing that somehow and not Spotify, but I've never had something like that happen when using the Apple podcast app.
Are you certain it was Spotify that did that? Unless you downloaded the episode in 2018, it could have easily been the Conan podcast. Podcast episodes aren't immutable, they're just a url. I've seen podcasts that update the ads in their back catalogue to whoever is paying them at the time the episode is downloaded.
I've also noticed some location specific ads, which isn't that surprising if you think about. There's nothing stopping them from serving you a different mp3 file depending on your IP geolocation.
When I listen through the apple podcast app I get ads that are clearly from 2018 though. Like for events that are long gone and over. Ads that don't match the year of the episode have only ever happened to me in spotify.
> Spotify Podcast Ads are powered by Streaming Ad Insertion (SAI), which leverages streaming to deliver Spotify’s full digital suite of planning, reporting, and measurement capabilities. Spotify Podcast Ads offer the intimacy and quality of traditional podcast ads with the precision and transparency of modern-day digital marketing.
Seriously. I listen to podcasts, but I'm not going to do it through Spotify, who's working to build a walled garden around a traditionally open media. I'm also not interested in Joe Rogan, which they _constantly_ plaster my front page with.
I did try a Spotify podcast once. It was on my recommended list and was called daily dad jokes or something. Figured it was worth a quick laugh. Well it turned out to be a bot podcast. They set up a bot to rip jokes from Reddit, push them through TTS, and dump it into a Spotify podcast.
No thanks.
Meanwhile, Apple Podcasts, my go to, works great, doesn't spam me, and even added a feature where you can pay for a no-ads version of a podcast. Worked seemlessly.
I rarely listen to podcasts but was going to try and listen to a specific one Joe Rogan did recently. After listening for a few minutes, an ad came on. I pay for spotify, why am I listening to an ad?
Anyway, I waited like 90 seconds and he came back on. Withing about 15 minutes, I had two more ads come on and they were 90 & 120 seconds each. After the second ad played, the podcast didn't start. Fiddling with it caused the podcast to start over from the beginning. When I tried to seek to the last place I was, it played an ad immediately. Seriously unbelievable.
I gave up and will never attempt to listen to an ad supported podcast on Spotify again.
Because Spotify doesn’t pay anything to the podcast producers. So podcasts run their own ads. (Well, some do. Others live off donations or offer a way to pay them)
I don't usually overreact too strongly to big tech making dumb decisions like these, but Spotify's podcast pushing actually did drive me away from the platform.
I beg Spotify to think Logically about it. There is a limited amount of screen real estate available on any display, but especially phones. Q.e.d: pushing podcast-related content actually hurts the music listening experience. Conversely, pushing music content hurts the podcast listening experience. This is (mostly) inarguable; any pixel dedicated to an interface element related to podcast content is a pixel which cannot display music content; its a zero sum game.
I say "mostly" because; there are people who I'm sure love Spotify Podcasts, and having both avenues within one app is a net win. I'd be willing to accept a toggle in settings which could "focus" the app Between Music <> Music + Podcasts <> Podcasts. I don't think that's unreasonable, and I also don't feel it would be unreasonable for it to default to Music + Podcasts.
Though it brings up an interesting point: Imagine the experience of someone who does primarily come to Spotify for podcasts. Its among the worst podcast apps in the history of podcast apps! Its littered with music! That's a horrible experience!
The ironic part is, Spotify is probably happy to lose me as a customer. I'm a "Music power user" if there were such a thing. They may end up paying more in royalties for the music I listen to than I pay them, and I can't say I've listened to more than a half-dozen podcasts. "Show me the incentives, and I'll show you the outcomes": Spotify is not incentivized to build an app that benefits people who listen to a lot of music. Their bread and butter is people who listen to a bit of music and podcasts; just enough to keep them paying each month. So, I don't lose too much sleep over their slow decent into mediocrity; I'm far more concerned about the unfortunate reality that there are no longer any great options in this space, for people like me.
You’re probably right but I have yet to meet anyone who loves podcasts in Spotify. The two groups I have encountered who use it are those who never listened to podcasts at all before so don’t know any other way, and people who begrudgingly use it because some podcast they like went exclusive there. Which I guess are both good for Spotify but it puts them in a weaker position than if people actually did truly like the experience.
It has been years since I've tried Pandora: Back when I tried it, they only let you skip a number of songs in a short time and often played things I didn't care for. Lots of slightly obscure songs weren't available. It might be better for more popular music or have improved in the last decade, I don't know. I started using Spotify.
And still now as then: It is only available in the US. I no longer live in the US.
> they only let you skip a number of songs in a short time and often played things I didn't care for.
If you aren't in the US, then it won't work, but I create multiple stations and can switch station if the music isn't good. I can't remember it ever not being good though. I use the like button to train it.
> Lots of slightly obscure songs weren't available.
If I'm looking for a specific song, I usually go to YouTube. Most of what I listen to is pretty obscure, but it might depend on the genres.
I have never listened to a podcast on Spotify and I still have them on my home screen, so I think that it's hardcoded, not a generated recommendation.
The probably autogenerated daily mixes have been surprisingly non-bad for me. Nothing like rap mix invaded by Bach, but the "classic rock" mix sometimes has Ghost that doesn't really sound that out of place.
My guess is that they don't have to pay rights for the podcasts, so for them it's a win/win if you spend your attention on their app listening to free content.
I was using Spotify for podcasts because they were there, but then my home feed got dominated by them, and they occasionally get queued up and giving me a mix of podcasts and music, which I don’t want.
I started migrating to Apple Podcasts so I can context switch more easily.
I'm really disappointed how Spotify is buying several big podcasts and moving to their platform exclusively.
I tried to listen to a Science Vs episode the other day, and now my Spotify is almost completely filled with podcasts recommendation. Plus, the experience is still far from specialized podcast apps.
The result: I'll probably stop following Science Vs (and any other podcast that moves exclusively to Spotify).
They could, at least, have a separate Spotify Podcast app so things wouldn't be mixed (kind of like Wealthsimple has separate apps for Investing and Trading).
I'm still sad Spotify bought Gimlet and apparently will do (if not already) this to all their podcasts.
I listened to one episode of "Call Her Daddy" because I saw it ranked as one of the most-listened podcasts out there and Spotify will not let go putting it front and center on my home screen every day.
Also, while I like a broad variety of genres, I only like listening to one at a time. I don't want a rap mix to be invaded by a Bach sonata. And yet...