Nieman Foundation at Harvard
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 191, published January 15, 2018.
Spotify and podcasts, circa 2019. CES, that fine mess formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, was held in Las Vegas last week, and I took in the proceedings the way I always have: from behind the comforting glow of my laptop, far away from dense crowds and parched #brands. As expected, the smart speaker was one of the more dominant storylines coming out of CES (CNBC: “Amazon and Google are going to be in every aspect of your life whether you want them to or not”), and to be frank, I headed into this news cycle planning to dedicate a whole column this week to the tech category du jour.
But interestingly enough, that didn’t end up capturing my attention this week. Instead, the more compelling topic turned out to be Spotify, which began pushing out a message around what appears to be its slowly emerging strategy around podcasts. We’re just going to have to revisit smart speakers some other time.
Last week, TechCrunch published a report on the Swedish music streaming giant’s plan to spend the next year allocating more of its focus on podcasts. We’ve heard this one before, but there’s enough meat in the writeup to suggest the actual shape of the gambit.
Here are the broad strokes from the TechCrunch report:
Having established itself as a top streaming service with now more than 200 million users, Spotify this year is preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts. The company plans bring its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better recommendations, update its app’s interface so people can access podcasts more easily and broker more exclusives with podcast creators. It’s also getting into the business of selling ads within podcasts as a means of generating revenue from this increasingly popular form of audio programming.
Two details in the report worth ingesting:
The second component strikes me as significantly more interesting than the first, which is probably table stakes for a big music streaming platform attempting to get involved in the podcast ecosystem at this point. On the face of it, Spotify appears to be pursuing a content-led differentiation strategy — i.e., as a podcast consumer, the reason you’d come to Spotify is the distinct flavor or brand of shows they’re assembling, and maybe you’d end up sticking around to use the platform as your default tool to explore the rest of the podcast universe. (Recall that Spotify no longer practices a strictly closed approach to podcast supply. The platform opened podcast listings to all in October.) More importantly, that differentiation will be also be wielded towards the goal of converting non-podcast-consuming Spotify users into podcast-consuming ones. Which is to say, the hope is to further grow the value of the platform for existing users in a bid to increase the cost of switching over to a competitor like Pandora, Apple Music, Tidal (I guess?), or Stingray (if you’re Canadian).
Spotify’s two-pronged podcast supply approach — directly curating unique show assets and opening up podcast submissions — should be recognized as a familiar one for the company. The move seems to be an inverted echo of an initiative that Spotify has been testing on the music side: first, quietly striking deals directly with independent artists (said to be relatively modest; “with advance payments of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to several people involved,” per The New York Times), and then, rolling out a new feature that allows independent artists to “upload songs and albums directly — without going through a single label company, distribution group or Spotify employee — and automatically receive royalty payments in their bank accounts,” as Rolling Stone described it. That latter feature, which is seen to be an upgrade to the listener-intelligence-oriented Spotify for Artists program, is in invite-only beta at the moment.
I reckon the shape of that initiative gives us a blueprint of what is likely to come with Spotify’s adventures in podcasting. The company will probably continue to sign more content deals meant to nudge more people to try out podcasts on the platform, and then it’s probably going to open up its podcast monetization tools to make the platform more appealing to publishers so that they don’t have to solely depend on their taste-making capacities in order to make the podcast side of the business work. (Hit-making is a hard, cruel business, after all.)
The devil, as always, will be in the details. And there are millions and millions of questions on that front:
…and so on, and so forth.
Spotify’s slow-emerging bid to become a meaningful podcast distributor comes at a time when rival Pandora is displaying similar ambitions. The latter has planted its flag on a significantly different approach to the market: the Podcast Genome Project, which is a commitment to a discovery-led differentiation strategy — i.e., as a podcast consumer, you come to Pandora for a more lean-back experience that does the ecosystem-scouring work for you, and you hopefully internalize Pandora as your default listening tool because the “radio, but better”-esque experience is just that good. (Side note: Pandora complicates its distinction against Spotify with the fact it is, also, experimenting with original content à la Questlove Supreme. Everybody loves making original content, huh?)
It’s interesting to put Spotify and Pandora’s podcasting gambits up against the obvious fact of Apple’s current centrality to podcast distribution. Apple Podcasts’ biggest strengths — a mix of default packaging through the iPhone software (in technology as in life, the power of the default is overwhelming), historical incumbency, and near-synonymous levels of brand affiliation (i.e. you can’t talk about podcasts without talking about Apple) — are fascinating and significant, and I think they’ve all held strong to this point even though the app’s actual user experience is widely, and increasingly, groaned about. Spotify and Pandora have access to none of those advantages; the question, of course, is whether that will matter.
An aside: This is just a feeling strongly held, but I suspect that nothing is going to change the fact that Apple Podcasts will be the default podcast listening platform for most people for a long time. This is strictly a testament to the fact that distribution, not user experience, tends to outweigh everything else: as long as you control the terms of the vessel — i.e. the iPhone — you control the priorities of the internal experience, and so as long as the iPhone is a thing, I won’t be dismissing the centrality of Apple Podcasts in the ecosystem. That’s probably why I’m never going to write off Google Podcasts; so long as Google is literally the company that facilitates the existence of Android phones and the Android operating software, the possibility of Google Podcasts echoing Apple’s historical arc is always there.
Which brings me to another aside: Between the resource-intensive efforts of existing streaming platforms like Pandora and Spotify, and the distributive-primacy of platforms like Apple and Google, what are the prospects for every other third-party podcast app in existence? What does a good, realistic future look like for podcast startups whose core experience is an app? More on that question at a future date. But for now, I’d say that the problem isn’t dissimilar from the problem of media companies more generally, which is also to say, a podcast app can, and perhaps should, be thought of as a media company.
Anyway, that’s all I got on the subject for now.
Three other things:
(1) Forgot to mention this last week, but it’s a pretty intriguing story: Before the new year, Sam Harris, the author and creator of the Waking Up podcast, moved his operations off Patreon after accusing platform for “political bias” following its decision to ban controversial fringe figures in early December.
Waking Up was one of the more prominent podcasts making money off Patreon, with nearly 9,000 paying supporters and a revenue line estimated to be in the tens of thousands per month.
I reckon this story is far from over. I’d counsel keeping a close eye on both parties.
(2) I appreciated reading Sinclair Target’s chunky feature on the rise and fall of the RSS feed over at Motherboard, in which everything feels universally recurring: “Regular people never felt comfortable using RSS; it hadn’t really been designed as a consumer-facing technology and involved too many hurdles; people jumped ship as soon as something better came along.”
(3) This is less a noteworthy story and more an observation of taste. So, I generally like this recent new wave of daily news podcasts, but I would appreciate more differentiation in aesthetics. As it stands, there’s a distinct sameness to the way a lot of these newer shows sound and feel — most explicitly expressed, perhaps in the music deployed when transitioning between scenes. It should be noted that the mushrooming of daily news podcasts already exacerbates the fundamental challenge of the genre — i.e., delivering the same headlining story without repeating what a competitor has done — and so the problem of aesthetic genericism strikes me as…an unfortunate unforced and unnecessary hurdle.
Audio fiction’s “next act” [by Caroline Crampton]. Right before we wrapped for the holidays, Ella Watts, a London-based podcast producer and consultant, shared the results of a research effort on the fiction podcast genre that she had undertaken off a commission by the BBC Sounds team. It’s an interesting piece of work, and I recommend taking the time to read it in full. The report provides an analysis of the main trends in audio fiction both in the U.K. and the U.S., examining size, audience, budget, funding method, and genre.
Watts argues that there are three distinct “phases” of fiction podcast production so far: from 2008 to 2014, with the emergence of shows like We’re Alive, Our Fair City, The Thrilling Adventure Hour, and Sayer; from 2014 to 2016, as Welcome to Night Vale and other indies found international popularity; and 2016 to 2018, as bigger networks started to invest in the genre. She says that “fiction podcasting is due for its next major phase,” which “looks likely to be its biggest yet in terms of reach, scale and international appeal” — even though the actual shape and structure of that phase “has not yet been defined.”
Watts’ analysis resonated with several hunches I’ve had about the genre. For instance, it turns out that science fiction, fantasy, and horror are, indeed, the most popular genres, or at least within the parameters of her analysis. In the U.K., nearly all shows in the fiction podcast genre are independently produced, and most are developed on very small budgets: “It’s informally considered a mark of success in the U.K. for a mid-level to major podcast drama to be able to pay travel expenses.” And while crowdfunding is a popular — and in some cases, successful — way of funding a fiction podcast, she also advises caution.
On her mind: The fact that PodCon, a relatively new podcast convention with a heavy emphasis on the fiction genre, has missed its crowdfunding target for two years in a row. (Worth noting: The second crowdfunding only barely missed its target by less than $500. That iteration, PodCon2, is slated to take place this weekend, by the way.)
Of course, the whole “fourth phase” idea is particularly intriguing. I would agree the ecosystem does seem to be moving towards a different kind of fiction podcast market, with the lure of TV deals bringing big networks firmly into the space and big hits like Night Vale continuing to get more listeners on board. In the U.K., we’ve already seen a handful of original fiction commissions for BBC Sounds, and I’m sure there will be more in 2019.
The part that I’m less certain about, and which lies beyond the scope of Watts’s report, is how these two areas of fiction podcasting — network-driven and independent — will interact with and impact each other as they grow. On the one hand, you have a cluster that’s increasingly fueled by bigger budgets and resources, and on the other hand, you have the pre-existing cluster of dedicated, passionate creators who are bringing in money via direct audience support, merchandise, and live shows. Is there a future in which the health of the two clusters are co-mingled, or are we headed to a strictly two-tiered future, in which it’s not really possible or fair to consider the fiction output of, say, Gimlet Media and the fiction output of independent creators as part of the same ecosystem?
Bigger networks acquiring either talent or IP from smaller audio drama shows straight-up feels like an obvious potential arc for this fourth phase, and I hope to see some of those larger budgets and resources making their way to the people who already know how to build an audience for a fiction podcast. To be honest, I’m a little surprised why this isn’t happening more already. Like, I’ve always found it baffling that one of the more successful independent U.K. fiction podcasts, Wooden Overcoats, hasn’t been picked up by the BBC in its current form for rebroadcast and more episodes. (Maybe there’s an obvious reason for that, but I can’t think of it.) Though I know that the Beef and Dairy Network podcast has been aired on BBC radio already, so there are inklings of this direction. Anyway, I’ll be keeping an eye on what happens here and will check back in later in the year.
Sounding off [by Caroline Crampton]. A small storm was kicked up among listeners of the BBC’s popular Fortunately… podcast last week, when digital and podcasts commissioning editor Rhian Roberts announced on Twitter that as of 2019 the show would be available exclusively on the BBC Sounds app.
As far as I’m aware, this is the first regularly publishing weekly podcast to move completely into the Sounds app. There have been limited-run seasons that have had windowing periods on the platform, but this seems to be the Sounds team testing out a strategy of pushing an existing podcast’s audience towards the app.
Part of the frustration expressed by listeners came from the fact that BBC Sounds is not currently available outside the U.K. Roberts later confirmed that international listeners can still listen to the show on the BBC website, but many still expressed frustration that they couldn’t now get it to download via RSS in their app of choice.
It’s worth noting, too, that the BBC has a deal with Acast to monetize podcast listens outside the U.K., so by walling off a popular podcast like this, they are in theory opting to leave some advertising revenue on the table. The Sounds app continues to attract mixed responses; for what it’s worth, it’s still getting a lot of one- and two-star reviews from users on the app stores, and I’ve spotted a fair amount of grumbling on social media about the loss of the sharing and sleep timer functions that used to exist in the old iPlayerRadio app. The public relations campaign is definitely still being waged on this one, and I’ll be interested to see if making popular podcasts like Fortunately… exclusives will help soften listener attitudes towards the app — or if those podcasts will just end up losing listeners as a result.
This time last year. I’m copping this new feature from my old friend (and former co-worker) Ali Griswold, who writes a damn good newsletter on the sharing economy called Oversharing, where we go over the headlines from this point last year.
