net.wars

This week it became plain that another bit of the Internet is moving toward the kind of commercialization and control the Internet was supposed to make difficult in the first place: podcasts. The announcement that one of the two most popular podcasts, the Joe Rogan Experience, will move both new episodes and its 11-year back catalogue to Spotify exclusively in a $100 million multiyear deal is clearly a step change. Spotify has also been buying up podcast networks, and at the Verge, Ashley Carman suggests the podcast world will bifurcate into twin ecosystems, Spotify versus Everyone Else.

Like a few hundred million other people, I am an occasional Rogan listener, my interest piqued by a web forum mention of his interview with Jeff Novitzky, the investigator in the BALCO doping scandal. Other worth-the-time interviews from his prolific output include Lawrence Lessig, epidemiologist Michael Osterholm (particularly valuable because of its early March timing), Andrew Yang, and Bernie Sanders. Parts of Twitter despise him; Rogan certainly likes to book people (usually, but not always, men - for example Roseanne Barr) who are being pilloried in the news and jointly chew over their situation. Even his highest-profile interviewees rarely find, anywhere else, the two to three hours Rogan spends letting them talk quietly about their thinking. He draws them out by not challenging them much, and his predilection for conspiracy theories and interest in unproven ideas about nutrition make it advisable to be selective and look for countervailing critiques.

It's about 20 years since I first read about Dave Winers early experiments in "audio blogging", renamed "podcast" after the 2001 release of the iPod eclipsed all previously existing MP3 players. The earliest podcasts tended to be the typical early-stage is-this-thing-on? that leads the unimaginative to dismiss the potential. But people with skills honed in radio were obviously going to do better, and within a few years (to take one niche example) the skeptical world was seeing weekly podcasts like Skepchick (beginning 2005) and The Pod Delusion (2009-2014). By 2014, podcast networks were forming, and an estimated 20% of Americans were listening to podcasts at least once a month.

That era's podcasts, although high-quality, were - and in some cases still are - produced by people seeking to educate or promote a cause, and were not generally money-making enterprises in their own right. The change seems to have begun around 2010, as the acclerating rise of smartphones made podcasts as accessible as radio for mobile listening. I didn't notice until late 2016, when the veteran screenwriter and former radio announcer and DJ Ken Levine announced on his daily 11-year-old blog that he was starting up Hollywood & Levine and I discovered the ongoing influx of professional comedians, actors, and journalists into podcasting. Notably, they all carried ads for the same companies - at the minimum, SquareSpace and Blue Apron. Like old-time radio, these minimal-production ads were read by the host, sometimes making the whole affair feel uncomfortably fake. Per the Wall Street Journal, US advertising revenue from podcasting was $678.7 million last year, up 42% over 2018.

No wonder advertisers like podcasts: users can block ads on a website or read blog postings via RSS, but no matter how you listen to a podcast the ads remain in place, and if you, like most people, listen to podcasts (like radio) when your hands are occupied, you can't easily skip past them. For professional communicators, podcasts therefore provide direct access to revenues that blogging had begun to offer before it was subsumed by social media and targeted advertising.

The Rogan deal seems a watershed moment that will take all this to a new level. The key element really isn't the money, as impressive as it sounds at first glance; it's the exclusive licensing. Rogan built his massive audience by publishing his podcast in both video and audio formats widely on multiple platforms, primarily his own websites and YouTube; go to any streaming site and you're likely to find it listed. Now, his audience is big enough that Spotify apparently thinks that paying for exclusivity will net the company new subscribers. If you prefer downloads to streaming, however, you'll need a premium subscription. Rogan himself apparently thinks he will lose no control over his show; he distrusts YouTube's censorship.

At his blog on corporate competition, Matt Stoller proclaims that the Rogan deal means the death of independent podcasting. While I agree that podcasts circa 2017-2020 are in a state similar to the web in the 2000s, I don't agree this means the death of all independent podcasting - but it will be much harder for their creators to find audiences and revenues as Spotify becomes the primary gatekeeper. This is what happened with blogs between 2008 and 2015 as social media took over.

Both Carman's and Stoller's predictions are grim: that podcasts will go the way of today's web and become a vector for data collection and targeted advertising. Carman, however, imagines some survival for a privacy-protecting, open ecosystem of podcasts. I want to believe this. But, like blogging now, that ecosystem will likely have to find a new business model.

Illustrations: 1930s vacuum tube radio (via Joe Haupte).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.