Spotify launches Paid Subscriptions for podcasts

• Spotify has announced their Paid Subscriptions service, which is hosted on Anchor. NPR is a launch partner, as we reported last week. Unlike Apple, who will take 30% of your subscription revenue, Spotify “won’t charge” until 2023 (after which it’s 5%). There are plenty of other things to know, though (indeed, there will be a charge) - see our analysis, below.

  • Supporting Cast has compared Patreon, Apple, Spotify and their own podcast subscription tool.
  • As Spotify put some prices up in the US and UK, Deezer’s COO, Laurence Miall-d’Aout, released a short statement saying (in part) “We just wanted to let you know that Deezer isn’t going to raise prices in the middle of the pandemic. Music, podcasts and radio help people cope and we don’t feel this is the time to make things harder for them.” Ooof.

• Edison Research revealed The Infinite Dial 2021 Australia. It showed a significant growth for podcast consumption in the country. 37% of Australians (12+) listen to podcasts every month: a significant increase from 25% just a year ago.

• First look: Podcast hosting company Sounder has launched Sounder Plus, a tool to enable creators to reach bigger audiences. It gives you automatic distribution to YouTube, adds Videobites (transcription-powered video clips) for social media, analyses episodes for keywords and tagging,

• Alitu, the podcast maker, has added a call recorder to help interview guests. Recordings are popped directly into the episode builder for you to start editing.

• C13Originals, the documentary studio division of Audacy’s Cadence13, has expanded its partnership with Jon Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and New York Times bestselling author.

• Instreamatic, an interactive voice ads company, has raised $6.1m in funding.

• People:

  • Nic McClure has been appointed as Senior Executive Producer - LiSTNR Original Podcasts.
  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 3 2023
  • Lina Kim (formerly MD, Havas Media Group, Canada) has been appointed as President of The Podcast Exchange. Jean-Marie Heimrath, the CEO, is retiring.
  • Whitney Jones has joined NYMag’s audio team. Formerly a Producer at APM, she’s also worked freelance for people like 99pi, CBC and NPR.
  
  This link is no longer available, as at Sep 3 2023

• Apple Podcasts Clustergeddon: Transistor has updated their big list of bugs and problems with the recently-launched upgrade; episodes are missing, many people, like Paul Colligan, have no access to their podcast accounts after seven days. Some podcast publishers who we’ve spoken to are unable to launch any new podcasts. Apple have yet to give any statement, or even acknowledge the problem, which is unacceptable, says Andrew Clews - “this is people’s livelihoods”, he says. And Radio INK’s Ed Ryan says “When a radio transmitter goes down an engineer will do everything possible to fix it. When Apple’s transmitter goes down they just don’t care.”

  • Related - emails from Podnews to people who use iCloud, Mac or Me email addresses bounced on Monday. That Apple service had broken too. We have restored your subscriptions. Hello again!

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Day 24

• Are podcast transcripts worth it? Danielle Desir suggests they’re good for accessibility, but are also a great way of repurposing content for other things.

• What is AppleCoreMedia, and is it just Apple Podcasts in disguise?

Podcast News

Spotify’s drunk, stoned, transphobic conspiracy theorist Joe Rogan has told “healthy 21 year-olds” to not bother with getting a coronavirus vaccine. So, we’ll link to the story of Cody Lyster, a healthy college student and baseball player at Colorado Mesa University, who died on April 8th last year after catching the virus. He was 21.

Slow Burn launched a new season last week, looking at the Iraq war in 2003. Hosted by Noreen Malone, episode two releases today, focusing on the climate of fear after 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks.

In The Podcast Accelerator, Mark Asquith highlights what he calls “The Problem with Apple Podcasts Subscriptions”.

Analysis

Our Editor, James Cridland, looks at the Spotify Paid Subscriptions product alongside Apple’s recent announcements.

Spotify’s Paid Subscriptions tool sounds nice when compared with Apple - who can argue with free, after all. But it isn’t quite as straightforward as that. Or, even, free.

• It’s not actually free. Standard payment processing fees still apply. Stripe charge 2.9% +30¢, and I’d expect Spotify’s pricing to be similar. Apple’s fees include payment processing.
• It’s US-only for now, as all Anchor monetisation has been. The company is hoping to expand “in the coming months”. Apple Podcasts Subscriptions are available in 170 countries and regions.
• It’s not even available to all creators in the US. There’s only a waitlist that you can join, and the service uses that phrase “the coming months” again.
• Listeners can’t buy a paid subscription to your podcast in the Spotify app. (If they did, Apple and Google would want up to 30% of the money, something the EU Commission is currently investigating). Instead, they’ll get taken to an Anchor web-page, and listeners will be asked to enter their credit card details. For Apple listeners, paying for a subscription is as simple as buying an app.
• It’s not limited to the Spotify app, though. Just link to that Anchor web-page. Like Patreon and similar services, listeners who subscribe will be given a private RSS feed that works in any podcast app (except, ironically, Spotify). Apple Podcast Subscriptions only works in the Apple app (and, by extension, only on Apple hardware).
• You’ll have to use Anchor to host these. You could, of course, duplicate your feed into Anchor (it’s got the tools to do that), but you need to use Anchor as a host for Spotify Paid Subscriptions. For Apple, you similarly have to upload your shows to their system.
• It’s not either or. Apple does not have an exclusivity clause, and just wants parity of pricing with other platforms. The terms and conditions of Spotify’s service aren’t public, but I’d expect them to have the same stipulation.
• Spotify are building an Open Access Platform - which potentially could allow sites like Patreon/SupportingCast/Supercast, or your own website, handle the billing and login. Apple haven’t announced this (and it’s very unlikely they’d do it).
• There are 345m monthly listeners on Spotify. However, only 25% of them listen to podcasts. Apple Podcasts doesn’t release any overall figures, though.