Why We Took Our Show Off Spotify And What Brought Us Back

We're explaining why we originally pulled the podcast from Spotify, what changed, and why Spotify’s role in video podcasting finally brought us back. 

We also discuss our lingering concerns about open podcasting, targeted advertising, and what we’ve learned from working directly with Spotify’s podcast team.

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Transcript

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Kevin 0:00

All right, this is my episode. Welcome back to Buzzcast. I'm excited because I don't usually lead episodes, but I get to lead this one. Uh, this is a quick cast, and we've teased it for a little while, but we're gonna dive into it today. And that is for the longest time, Buzzcast has not been available on Spotify, and that changed a few weeks ago. And we've said there's some reasons why, and we're gonna jump into those reasons today. Now, here's the thing I'm gonna try to stick to. Jordan is the editor, so I I can't promise that'll be exactly 10 minutes, but we try to keep QuickCast. The idea is one topic, 10 minutes. Yeah. And I don't think we've ever hit it. Maybe once or twice. It's fine. We always go long. I'm gonna do my best to lay the case out for why we were not on Spotify for the longest time, what changed, and sort of why we are on Spotify now. And I'm gonna try to keep it to 10 minutes. Jordan, can you help me in the edit? Keep us as close to 10 minutes as possible.

Alban 0:56

I'll try my best.

Kevin 0:58

So let me start off. Let me get let me start off with a little bit of history. And you guys chime in with your history, but keep an eye on me because if I start giving you the whirly finger, that means you got to move faster because I know how much we got to get through and we only have 10 minutes.

Alban 1:11

We got two minutes of you saying we're gonna make this a short episode. I feel like this is like a podcasting game show. Like, but when you see the whirly finger, that means time's up.

Kevin 1:20

Fingers whirling. All right, so let's let's let's back up a few years. When we launched Buzzcast, uh, I think originally we were in Spotify. And at some point we got frustrated with Spotify and we pulled the show out of there, and we hadn't been back for the longest time. So I don't want to relive all of the drama around it, but I have summarized some key points and for some of these reasons. Let me run through my side and then you guys chime in with any additions that you have. All right. So, first, like we've been clear about this, but we withheld our show, but we never asked anybody to withhold their show from Spotify. And we, of course, always provided all the tools that everybody could publish their show into Spotify if they chose to. The reasons we withheld our show was a principled stand, not necessarily a technical issue or a personal issue or any of that kind of stuff. There were some principles, though, that Spotify had been doing when they entered into podcasting that we we sort of disagreed with. We felt like it wasn't good for the for podcasting overall. Podcasting started out as a very open thing. Uh RSS is an open spec. To publish a podcast, you would do that openly on the internet. Everything would be available for download in any podcast playing app that anybody built. And Spotify seemed to enter into the market and say, we're going to do podcasting our way. And it was just uh a little bit different, a little bit off-putting to us. Originally, we were kind of like, eh, let's see. We had conversations with them and their teams. We wanted to see how things shook out. But uh it didn't move more open. They sort of moved like more closed, with the one exception of originally when Spotify first launched, they re-hosted all the audio files. And the one thing they did after a lot of pushback was they said, okay, if you want to host with a hosting company and us not re-host that stuff, what they would call pass-through. And I used to joke about it because pass-through was just like regular, but they put it in. Normal podcasting. Yeah, normal podcasting. Then they allowed you to do that.

Alban 3:17

Yeah. So the first one, first reason one is they were kind of antagonistic towards open podcasting. They didn't want to use RSS feeds the normal way. They were the first ones to say, we're not going to do it that way. We're going to re-host it. Right.

Kevin 3:32

And those things matter. Like open podcasting matters. Being able to host where you want and move between hosts, that stuff matters because at least on the internet, closed ecosystems have problems. When you have a platform that monetizes through advertising, then advertisers get some control over what the content is that lives on that platform. And podcasting was one of the last places on the internet that was like, if you don't want to do that, you don't have to do that. Like you can have uh your own server as a podcast host and put your own stuff there. And then if one app doesn't want to serve your content, that's fine because there's hundreds of other apps that exist for people to consume your content. It's sort of like web browsers. If if if this web one web browser is censoring this one website, you can get a different web browser to go to that website.

Alban 4:21

Yeah.

Kevin 4:22

And so that's was some of the concerns that we were having about one platform, a very big platform, a very powerful platform, a platform with a lot of money and a lot of influence starting to close down, or at least what we felt, closing down the open podcasting ecosystem.

Alban 4:38

Yeah. And to be clear, there are points where they specifically said this in like the late, I mean before 2020, maybe 2018. They said our goal is to basically be the YouTube of podcasting. We want to have pretty much people think podcasts, they go to Spotify, everything is just hosted directly with us. They bought Anchor, they bought megaphone. They're trying to consolidate the industry. They've got a bunch of exclusives. Right. And the whole idea was it's going to be a closed proprietary system. And we're looking at that going, uh, that's like the one of the awesome things about podcasting, it is not that way. We're going to help stop this by not putting our one show with a thousand listeners in there.

Kevin 5:18

Yeah.

Alban 5:18

Yeah.

Kevin 5:19

And they thought they could do podcasting better. And in some ways, in the closed ecosystem, you can do things a little bit better. Like they created polls and they had commenting, but they were just for Spotify. They wouldn't work in any other podcasting app, which was very different than the people who care about podcasting had been doing things for the longest time, which is we want to build things, but we have to build them in a way, which is harder for them to be able to work everywhere. Right. Okay. So enough of that. There's there's a second point, equally as big. At the end of the day, they're an advertising agency, an advertising advertising firm. They make the majority of their money through two things. One, selling uh premium content. And then for all of their free customers who don't want to pay for premium, you get ads. Okay. So in order to make the ads more effective, we know this from Facebook, we know this from all the social media sites, is the more information they know about you, the better they can target ads towards you. That makes the ad more effective. It also makes the ad experience more enjoyable so you're not as annoyed by the fact that they're trying to advertise stuff to you. And they can charge more for the ads, they get more advertisers, all that kind of stuff. But it's a pretty big invasion of privacy. And so we didn't really love that either. Like I didn't just want to continue to make the web more about data tracking and they know everything about you and they can serve you and they can uh in my mind sort of manipulate purchasing decisions, get people to go into more debt, like all of that stuff. I just hate all of it. And so I don't hate Spotify, but I don't love that stuff. I don't love like contributing. Like the fact that we're creating content, we're using our creative skills and talents and teaching stuff that we know, and then putting it in an environment where those same people who go to consume the stuff that we're creating, hopefully for their benefit, are then manipulated based on their purchasing decisions to maybe buy more stuff or buy different stuff or whatever. Like I don't love that idea. Um, again, nothing against Spotify personally, just us choosing as creators to say, hey, we get to put our content where we want. And this doesn't feel like a platform that we want to put our content at.

Alban 7:22

Yeah. So to the first point, I feel like that has gone away for me. The idea that Spotify is going to become the place for podcasting, uh, they've moved on from that. And I think that's not a real threat to the industry as a whole. Apple is launching a ton of new stuff. So Apple's obviously countering it. YouTube has gotten much more involved. Amazon since then has gotten involved. Now we have four tech giants and 30 great indie apps all competing in this space. The platform fear for me has gone away. Spotify themselves has said, we're really leaning more into the ad side. We're not going to try to have every show be on Spotify. So they've actually stopped investing too much in Anchor or now Spotify for creators. Um, they've invested much more in the ad tech side. Uh, they don't do the the big exclusives anymore. In fact, even their shows they create themselves are being distributed over RSS for the most part. Yeah. Oh, and open podcasting, they've adopted a few, though not all, and not maybe even many, but they've adopted a few podcasting 2.0 tags or open systems. So they, you know, will support chapters now using the podlove chapters or transcripts if you do it a certain way. Like they have certain things they will support. For me, that has gone well beyond the we need to not be in Spotify for that reason. But what about this ad tech piece? Um, this one I think still, if anything, might have gotten worse. How do we answer that? Totally agree with you.

Kevin 8:55

I think we are in a much better position in terms of Spotify being able to exhort control over podcasting in general. There's enough big players now that have uh a significant enough position in podcasting that Spotify is not going to be able to like own it, control it, squeeze everybody out. So I think great point. But what about the advertising side?

Alban 9:18

Yeah, I think this is the harder one because Spotify as a whole, the ads they've gotten way better at it. You look at their financials, and the financials are telling you, oh, we're getting pretty good at serving ads. We may be some of the very best in the industry at targeting podcasting ads. For me, that is still as uncomfortable as it always was. But I think I was a bit naive about uh the data brokers that were what they were doing with all this targeting stuff on the other side. So everybody else that was kind of in the wild west of ad targeting, outside of the big companies like Facebook and Google, you know, the big ones who have their own profile for you. Everybody else is going to these third parties that are like, hey, we'll sell you all the data. Like they're the ones actually selling you data. And there's actually a weird world that Spotify targeting the ads, at least it's only Spotify that has this profile on me, and it's not like every uh advertiser has it. So it's gross, it's just maybe slightly less so. And I think I've just, I don't know, come around a bit too. Facebook has it, Google has it, every social media app I use has it, every ad trekker on the internet has it. And at some point, all I'm saying is, I don't like that Spotify has it, but like if the podcast is on any other platform, they're all kind of new enabling the same behavior. So, you know, at one point it kind of made sense to single out Spotify for this, but now I'm looking at it going, they're not even the worst in podcasting anymore.

Kevin 10:59

In a lot of ways, in a lot of ways, open podcasting can be worse sometimes. Right. Because you don't know you're being tracked. So if again, I don't want to name names in the industry, but you could be just listening to a podcast that's not hosted on Spotify, that's hosted completely independently, and they're using programmatic or they're using an ad agency to sell to buy and sell ads on your show on your behalf, and they are either buying data to be able to match IP addresses to who's listening to the show and insert the right ad at the right time. But you don't know it, and you can't really opt out of it. At least in something like Spotify or YouTube, since they're bigger, there's more regulation, there's more scrutiny, there's terms of service that you agree to when you go into those platforms and when you install that software on your phone that you agree, you don't probably read it all, but it if you wanted to, it's there. And if you want to, and you don't want to be, you're still gonna be tracked, but if you don't want to listen to the ads, if you don't want them to use the data that they're gaining about you to actually target ads towards you, you can limit it to some degree, and you could also just buy premium, and then you're not gonna get the ads. Yeah. So, in a lot of ways, I think that uh society, the world in general, has just said we're it's all messed up, but they've also said, but we're fine with it. Like that's the way it's gonna work. That we would rather have the invisible price of free, meaning that these companies are gonna start to develop profiles on us and then target ads towards us, but we would rather have that. We'd rather trade some of our privacy and uh mind share and the ability to be potentially manipulated by ads. We'll trade that instead of whatever paying ten dollars a month for a premium account. And so if that's where the world went, like I don't know, you can only fight it for so long. And like I said, it it also exists on the open side as well. And you don't have as like many controls because there's less scrutiny because there's no one big platform to go after.

Alban 13:02

All right. And now I've got two reasons why I like Spotify's kind of come into my good graces in the past few years, or at least two arguments for why we should be in there. Um, the first is as a podcasting app, it's got a lot better. They've invested quite a bit in the podcast listening experience, and so some of the complaints that it was all driven by it was just a music player that happened to play podcasts, they also have done quite a bit in fleshing out the podcasting experience. And then them adding video, which I still do not love consuming video content, but I feel like if Buzz Sprout is going to offer video, which we do, and we're helping people get into video everywhere, then we need to be on the platforms that we are pushing video to because they're unique in the way that it's implemented. And so the way that Apple and the way that Amazon, the way YouTube, and the way Spotify implement video are all different. But the way that open podcasting has always worked has been the same. You put it in the RSS feed and it goes out in the same way to all the different apps. So if this is the world we live in, then we need to really, really like intimately understand how this works in Spotify so that if there are bugs, we feel it. If there are kind of interesting ways that they parse, I don't know, the chapters. We need to see that so that we can uh figure out what's the best way to implement this for everybody on Buzz Sprout. And we can't really do that unless we are actively creating a show that is publishing video into Spotify.

Kevin 14:41

All right, last point. Because I know we're probably coming up on time, Jordan, right?

Alban 14:45

Uh we're well past time. I don't think I can edit this down to 10 minutes.

Kevin 14:51

No way. We never hit 10 minutes, but it's still fun to say. Okay. Uh, last point is that we've been working closely with some of the Spotify podcasting team as we've been doing this video integration with them. And it's it's hard to hate the policies of a company or dislike a company and say, I'm not gonna put my content once you start to get to know the people, because the people on the team are really awesome. Yeah. And so everyone who we're working with on Spotify, they care about making the experience as as good as possible. They, of course, say, like, this is the way it works. Now, within this framework, within these guidelines, how can we make the experience as good as possible? There's always that. That always exists whenever you're working with a big company. But as much as any company that we've ever worked with, the Spotify team has been really great and they've shown a lot of care and a lot of concern. And they've listened to us when we've expressed concerns about if we do it this way, that's potentially problematic for podcasters. They care, they listen, they make changes. They come back a few weeks later and they said, I'm sorry that took so long, but here's the new way of doing things. The biggest thing, most recently, is they're working with us to give us a way of if you publish video content into uh Spotify, it would break your RSS feed, and there'd be no good way for you to be able to like back that out and get back on RSS if you decided I didn't want to do video anymore or you wanted to switch podcast hosts. That was a big concern. Yeah. They came back to us and they've said, like, we're building that, we're automating that. Initially, from the beginning, it was if you want to do that, you're gonna have to work with our support team. And we're like, that feels like uh a problem because it shouldn't, there shouldn't be that much friction if somebody wants to like reclaim their content or switch podcast hosts. And so they've said, okay, we'll take that concern, we'll run up the flagpole, we come back. And they did. They came back a couple weeks later and they said, Okay, we're gonna build an automated way to do that. And so, I don't know, I summarized it well in the opening. It's hard to dislike a platform when the people who are building on that platform and work for that are good people and they they generally, genuinely do want to create a really good experience for podcasters.

Alban 16:45

So see, all you had to do is just talk to them.

Kevin 16:47

Well, we did. We've already talked to them. I would say this there does seem to be a new level of care and concern, and like legitimately, um, they do seem as though they want to align. At the same time, like their priority is Spotify. Their priority is, and I've I've said this since the beginning, like you should probably be, I can't give investing advice, but like they make decisions that are smart for the company and for the shareholders and stuff like that. They've always made smart decisions there. So it's not investment advice, but I should buy some Spotify shares, is what I'm hearing. I don't have any Spotify shares, but I I I wouldn't say you're dumb if you if you have. All right, so that's kind of the whole story. I'm not sure. Is there any any questions?

Alban 17:30

Anything we left out? No, those are the main ones. I I still feel like I don't have a great answer for the ads one. I think it's just that over time, I think that concern is kind of drowned out by that same concern as everywhere else on the internet. And I don't see a good way to escape it. And now we have the offsetting. We like the team, we like the direction they're going. They've adopted open podcasting in more so than in the past. And in the end of the day, if we're going to have video stuff, we need to be really understand what is going into this platform and how it works. And so, all of that, we're on Spotify. We're hoping you listen to this on Spotify. We hope you can watch or listen to this show wherever you get your podcasts.

Kevin 18:17

So there you have it the whole story why we were not on Spotify, what changed, why we're on Spotify now in 10 minutes flat.

Alban 18:28

All right. Thanks for listening and keep podcasting.