It was and still is a stupid decision to buy Joe Rogan.
I don't get why people listen to him...
He is not funny nor smart.
It sometimes feels you get better value when watching morning tv shows...
Are “it was a stupid decision to buy him” and “I don't get why people listen to him” supposed to be related statements? The business decision isn’t about your personal feelings, it’s about his objectively measurably enormous audience
> But looking back at those days where all platform embraced a strategy to "own ALL content",
I don’t understand how that could have ever been a strategy without buying the businesses that own most of the popular music, such as Warner, Universal, and Sony.
Would you say that about any other type of media/culture/art you dislike?
"I don't get why people like the Mona Lisa, the painting is neither original nor particularly well done"
Is just as much a subjective statement. JRE is, by most released figures the top interview podcast on the planet, his interviews regularly move Charts of third party media like Book Bestseller Lists and Music Charts.
There obviously is a huge audience and value there and I can only assume their agreement over 200M was based on some pretty solid math.
> I can only assume their agreement over 200M was based on some pretty solid math.
Working at Microsoft during the Ballmer era and seeing the number of multi-billion-dollar acquisitions written-down to nothing, I would never assume corporations spend large amounts wisely.
You certainly have a point there, but I also remember being absolutely wrong about the Minecraft aquisition which has now paid for itself multiple times.
Your math doesn't have to work out, even if it's solid.
Sometimes it's the case that you do 10 investments, each $1b where one makes you $100b. But in hindsight the 9 looked stupid, but at the time you were using the same strategy to do all the 10 investments.
Not sure if it's case with Joe Rogan, but just how sometimes there's a lot of failure, while the strategy itself is solid.
The Mona Lisa is art, and it is a "you can like it or not" situation. A podcast that allows for spreading misinformation about vaccines can be responsible for the deaths of many
It’s light entertainment and he tends to cover topics I am interested in like BJJ/Muay Thai. If he goes on about Covid etc I just half listen, it’s rarely that long.
It's simple, different people have different opinions in life and his show is still the most popular podcast on spotify. was it worth $200 million, I have my doubts on that one.
Unless Spotify releases numbers none of us have a clue. Considering his youtube numbers before the move, that number was actually him selling himself short.
that wasnt the purpose of buying him. the purpose was to buy a gigantic audience of listeners that would hopefully now use spotify as their main podcast app
He's really gone downhill lately. Looking really rough. And stoned on top of that. I wonder if he can even comprehend half of what his guests are saying.
That's precisely what people like about it. Anyone can come on his show. No matter how batshit crazy. Many people don't want to be coddled and protected from viewpoints other people have decided are fake news or stupid. They can make up the balance themselves.
I love it when people parrot what they heard - what misinformation? Do you mean the Robert Kennedy stuff? I can have my own strong views that the vaccines were useful and still enjoy content - if you just consume what you hear and relay it of course you shouldn't be around "fake news and stupid theories". Saying that 99% of Rogans podcasts are not like this.
>It was and still is a stupid decision to buy Joe Rogan.
>I don't get why people listen to him...
I think you just contradicted yourself here. Whether or not it was a stupid decision to buy the rights to his podcast is orthogonal to whether or not he's funny or smart or if his content gives "value" to listeners.
I feel neither positively nor negatively about Rogan himself (I've never listened to him) but it was plainly a very stupid investment on Spotify's part. Anyone could have predicted (and most of us did) that only a fraction of his audience would follow him behind the paywall and removing him from mainstream free outlets would instantly diminish his cultural relevance.
‘Diminishing his cultural relevance’ may have been the goal.
Reducing his audience, censoring his most controversial past episodes and preventing certain conversations from happening in front of his large audience in future?
Spotify paid $200 million… to tie a podcaster to their sinking-ship podcast platform (and this plan only works if they know and intend for their platform to sink)… just to get him from a big spotlight to a small spotlight?
It wasn't a "sinking-ship podcast platform", it was Spotify's strategy to own content and thus reduce cost for per-play licensing.
They went for the Netflix strategy for growth. We now know the podcast-idea didn't translate into as many paid subscribers as they expected, but with ~25% of all Spotify subscribers listening to podcasts [1] it's not a "sinking-ship podcast platform"
FWIW, there is rationale for platform to own content vs licensing deal that forces platform's hand to 'make unavailable' items their customers already purchased[1].
I think you may have missed the context for this thread :) You’re talking about reality - I’m talking about the hypothesis that Spotify chained Joe Rogan to their platform because they wanted him to drown, which implies not only that the platform is sinking, but that it’s doing so deliberately.
it would have made more sense to create their own record label than to try to turn a free and open platform like podcasts into a closed platform like they tried with podcasts
That would be Spotify's Direct Distribution Contract, something they also established in 2018, shortly before (or in parallel with) their podcast acquisition strategy.
In the last few months, several podcasts that were only available on Spotify, have become available via traditional podcast means. For example, Heavyweight. Others did so earlier, though for specific reasons (Science Vs had a spat with Rogan over "dis/misinformation", where I largely agree with them factually, but disagree with them on the use of those terms, etc.).
I think it's fair to say there's a reasonable indication that Spotify exclusivity has been a bad bet for a decent amount of their podcast portfolio. Maybe it works still for Rogan-sized podcasts, but even that's unknown.
I wouldn't be dismissive of a label of "sinking ship", even though it's stronger than how I would put it -- it's plausible enough.
And when they paid an additional several hundred million buying up tens of random science and tech news and D&D podcasts - was that to intentionally kill those podcasts too? Or were they just a necessary sacrifice in order to create a more believable “we want our product to succeed” fascade, so that Joe didn’t realise he was getting tricked?