If you listen to enough podcasts, a "Your top podcasts" carousel appears. The "Good " tiles seem to show you things that you've recently played more frequently, while the "recently played" UI just shows a basic playback history. The Spotify Home UI is a confusing smorgasbord of algorithmic suggestions. How easy do you think it is to get to your podcasts in the app? Well, it depends. Spotify's notifications are as nebulous in their function as they are apparently useless-I've never even received one. It wants carte blanche to tell you about any and everything it thinks might make you tap on a notification. The notification is incredibly nebulous by design: Spotify could just as easily create a notification channel specific to podcasts (or even for individual shows and artists, a la Pocket Casts), but I strongly suspect it won't. It wants permission to advertise to you, and get you back in the Spotify app. And, by the way, they'll also use it to promote "artists you might like." This immediately gets back to the issues I expressed above-Spotify's ulterior motive for notifying you of new content is the hope that you will also want to listen to other new content that you didn't actually ask for. Rather, Spotify has a single notification control for all artists (meaning music and podcasts) you follow. You see, "following" a podcast on Spotify doesn't subscribe you to notifications about new episodes of that show, oh no. This seems almost fundamental to the podcast app experience. Take, for example, simply getting notified if there's a new episode of your favorite show. Here is the complete list of options available in Spotify once you follow a podcast. Spotify is promoting these shows more and more aggressively inside the app, because it wants to gain subscribers to increase the value of those ads and the number of people who hear them. That's a business it wants to greatly expand, and a critical piece of that strategy is its Spotify exclusive podcasts, which contain ads from Spotify-even if you're a premium subscriber. Spotify makes most of its money from its Premium subscribers, but it also makes a tremendous and growing amount on ads. To understand why Spotify Podcasts are bad (and yes, I know: they aren't podcasts anymore by definition), you first have to understand what makes Spotify, as a business, tick. The something was Spotify, and its genuinely terrible podcast experience. It's curious, because when I consumed LPOTL using Pocket Casts, I almost always listened to the latest episode within 24 hours. Sure, I still get through every episode, but sometimes I let them sit for a few days, or get halfway through, forget I started listening, and then come back a week later to see I have another episode to finish before starting the latest one. One day a few weeks ago, I began to notice something strange: I was listening to LPOTL less often. But it was that first time I heard an unfamiliar voice talking to me about Squarespace that I had a feeling things were changing. Reading ads sucks! I speak as someone who has read ads. While I find it a bit sad that most of the ad reads are often no longer done by the hosts themselves and are instead programmatic Spotify ads, I understand that this is a business, and the hosts have limited time to devote to this sort of thing. This almost certainly gets LPN a lot more money and affords it access to much bigger spenders, all while increasing the brand value of the show itself. I've already seen the obvious effects-the show has moved up from online direct-to-consumer products like Quip toothbrushes to virtual advertising juggernauts like the Epic Games Store (and, uh, Trolli gummy worms. On various streams, the hosts of LPOTL have said that Spotify is allowing them to move away from their current ad network partner, which is winding down, to Spotify's lineup of advertisers, which almost certainly means more money. Sure, I couldn't listen in Pocket Casts anymore, but I was prepared to give that up knowing that LPN's staff and creators were getting paid more and taken care of better.īroadly speaking, I'm still supportive of that move today. They'd have been silly to say no, and netted big perks like health insurance for all of their employees and complete creative control over their product. I am a Spotify Premium subscriber, I use Spotify fairly regularly, and while I have my issues with the app, I also have perspective: independent content publishing is a hugely challenging business, and an opportunity like this was a massive win for LPN. I was right there with them, and supported the move. This news upset more than a few of the show's fans-this was inevitable-but in general I think Marcus, Ben, and Henry (the flagship show's three hosts and LPN's co-founders) did a great job getting fans on board with the transition.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |