I wonder how much of this is led by the likes of paying $200 million to sign up Joe Rogan or $25 million for Harry and Megan. That's a big chunk of change. 9,000 employees too - 17% of the workforce out the door.
Spotify made a gamble that having some headline Podcasters would build the listener market. Podcasters release regularly and have a different potential for becoming viral compared to musicians so it's a valid commercial decision to make.
Seems like their headline gambles didn't work but googling suggests that the podcast listener market increased 10% in the last year so I think they'll probably try again.
Podcasting has also been called the slowest growing new medium in the history of new media. I can't imagine it's earning its keep, relative to those big initial payouts. Meanwhile, the shows that are brought into subscription-only world systematically fail to attract new listeners; it is hard to use podcast exclusives to grow market share. Especially the talking head variety, which exist in abundance outside the pay wall.
Apple and Google have 20% and 16% respectively. Considering the amazing platform boost that those two giants have I think 25% is very impressive.
But I agree that podcastings growth has been very slow. I think that there are a
lot of factors influencing that. The biggest in my opinion is that listening to a podcast is more intimate than any other media (including broadcast radio) and that factor both slows uptake and decreases churn. Not a marketer though so just making that up.
I both agree and disagree with you here. The expectation of the podcasting business to be full of great opportunities and monetary gain was (probably) misguided, but 25% market share in an established market in just a couple of years when there were big players holding a majority share is still a huge feat.
Will it pay off? Probably not. But is 25% a big share? Yes.
Apple Music (Jun 2015) and Google Play Music (Nov 2011) launched after Spotify (Jul 2011 in the US). I think the 4 year delay by Apple is what allowed Spotify to become so popular in the first place.
The problem for Spotify is that they need a far bigger share of the market to be able to have negotiating power against the 3 record labels that they have to buy the music from. Apple/Alphabet/Amazon do not care as much because re-selling the music at cost or even as a loss leader is not a big deal to them.
Anecdotally, most of the podcasts I listen to advertise as being on Spotify, especially the ones that skew towards a more mainstream audience. I think Spotify's podcast play has largely worked to gain the mindshare, it's really just them and Apple Podcasts.
I suspect this means that Spotify subscribers are listening to plenty of podcasts, but perhaps podcasts failed to bring new listeners into Spotify.
Spotify itself is not sustainable and going for the podcast crowed...
I still think it was not a smart move...
Its like that blue haired streamer going from twitch to what ever the msft clone of it was.
Yes Spotify is super popular but I hear more and more people moving away from it to for example apple music or other services.
They don't focus on the core anymore that much.
For example they are super late on the lossless audio train.
Yes you can hear a difference from spotify and apple music.
I tested it with all my colleagues in the office. You can clearly hear that apple music or tidal sounds better then the spotify versions.
I played the same song from random services. They did not see the service nor the laptop. YouTube/Spotify/Apple/Tidal (We did not had access to more). YT usually was the worse followed by Spotify and then depending on the Genre either Tidal or apple won. All of them were in the highest settings.
The xm4 use Bluetooth and thus compress audio during transmission. Everyone of your listeners thus listened to lossy audio.
Fwiw there is not a single scientific listening test ever where participants were able to tell the difference between high bitrate mp3 and wav. Not even in perfect studio conditions.
Just curious, I have no stake in this, but did you have the "high quality audio" settings turned on for Spotify? I know they've had them in the past, I don't know what the specific name is for it these days.
At least with my AirPods or my fancy Master&Dynamic over-ear headphones, there is a pretty big difference in Apple Music vs others, but I don’t think it's necessarily about bitrate. I think Apple just gets higher quality masters of some songs. Same thing as Tidal when I used that, but Apple seems even a step further at this point (which is unfortunate because I really don’t want to rely on a mega-corp for everything).
Especially the ones with the Dolby Atmos (Spatial Audio) mixes. Even if you don’t have super high-res headphones, the difference in dynamic range is pretty obvious, and it makes songs just feel more alive.
I don’t have any stats to back this up but it seems that Apple Music has at least managed to somewhat buck the trend of the “loudness wars” with the masters they use. I wonder if this is actually published or written about anywhere…
You won't get a representative answer here because tech folk can be specific about what and how they listen, so our answers will make it appear like a big deal.
I will venture that most people don't notice or care.
I have AirPods pro and the sony xm4. Even on bluetooth you can hear the difference. The sound stage is just bigger. The highs are more clear and the bass is more subtle.
I was once remaking some hiphop beats from there samples and you can hear the difference even more when you have a remade beat (its not 100% the same) you can hear what the compression has done to the sample.
Probably didn’t help that the app was so bad for months after Joe switched over that Joe was saying “sorry the app is so bad, they tell me they are working on it”.
How much audience did they fail to convert? How much harder did that make building momentum?
To put it into context 9000 workers on an average of $75000 is $675 mil a year on salaries alone, so Joe's 200 over 3 and a half years, harry and meg etc etc isn't a big a deal as it might sound. The elephant is the 9000 staff IMO.
