Are Indie Podcasters Trapped Under the Spotify Partnership?

It would be hard to deny the surface level appeal of your indie podcast being associated with Spotify, right?

You’re right there with the likes of Joe Rogan and Call Her Daddy. Your show stands alongside these goliaths on the same platform that beat Apple at its own game.

Seems like a pretty sweet deal for indie podcasters. Yeah? An indie podcast rubbing shoulders with the big guns?

Spotify’s a player. Spotify is also a business. 

When it comes to that appeal for indie podcasters, what lies beneath the surface?

Spotify is Podcasting ‘s 800lb Gorilla

As mentioned before, Spotify is the mega player in the space. They’ve long overtaken Apple for audio only podcasts, and they are a serious challenge to Google’s YouTube in the video podcast space. 

Do indie podcasters fair well under the Spotify regime?

And it isn’t random happenstance that made this reality come to fruition. 

Spotify, made some bold, strategic bets on podcasting that have paid off handsomely.

The most obvious example of Spotify’s bold vision was signing the most popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, to an exclusivity deal. 

A $20 million exclusivity deal. 

Not only can Spotify make bold, industry changing moves, they have the capital to back them up.

That should excite independent podcasters. A rising tide lifts all boats. 

If an indie podcasters is where Joe Rogan is at, then, they can ride Rogan’s wake to success. Because that’s how science works.

Not $20 million of success, but measured success all the same, right?

Spotify’s Plays Statistic

If there’s one question we get asked here at DiscoverPods more than any other, it’s how to get more plays. Spotify has a solution.

How Spotify’s Statistics Work in a Nutshell

Basically, the core features of the Spotify Plays program is as follows. With the caveat that some features may change before the entire program begins rolling out.

But we’ll get to why that matters in a few minutes.

Core Features:

  • Displays the total number of times people have actively listened to or watched a podcast episode
  • Only counts full episode plays (not clips or previews)
  • Visible in the Spotify app for episodes with more than 50K plays
  • Numbers are shown as milestone markers (50K, 100K, etc.)

This information would be public facing. Can indie podcasters on Spotify see who listens? Of course, and this program does have some interesting upgrades to the creator dashboard, but it’s these public facing metrics that are important.

What’s the Impact on Indie Podcasters?

It’s a difficult question to answer broadly, because it comes down to competition in your niche. We can tell creators broadly how to create a better, quality, program, and how to engage an audience, but we don’t know how large a potential audience is.

Podcasting statistics on plays have been notoriously opaque. On individual shows mind you, not the industry as a whole. The big players stand ready to shout growth numbers from the rooftops to the earnings calls.

The numbers we have are released by the creators themselves or the platforms like Apple, Spotify, Pocket cast, Alitu, Buzzsprout, etc. 

But the latter only releases selected numbers in the aggregate. Which makes sense. 

They want to let the world know that if someone is listening to a podcast, they’re doing so through that particular platform. Those platforms are going for a bandwagon effect.

Creators on the other side of the coin use this opaqueness to show potential advertisers how popular they are. They’re using real numbers, but they can keep those numbers close to the vest.

They aren’t openly sharing that data with the public.

Why? 

Because as an indie podcaster it’s unrealistic to think you’re going to have 10 million downloads like you’re a pop star or band with a big hit. 

It’s a slower medium, with more time invested on both the creator and listener end. 

But will John Q Public understand that distinction when they’re browsing cover art on Spotify?

Good question. And it’s got some people pretty antsy.

The Spotify Plays Ignites the Indie Podcasters Pushback

Nobody knows what John Q Public is going to think. We know that Spotify has spent years conditioning them that more is better when it comes to art.

Volume over value. 

Spotify isn’t alone on this. Big tech publishing platforms have spent the last several years with their thumb on the scale for what our collective attention is pointed at.

That’s what their algorithms do. Grab our attention and monetize it. 

Can’t blame them, that’s capitalism, but at the same time it’s difficult to say that they are transparent in they way they tip that scale, tweak that algorithm.

In fact, it is an arms race between those who create the algorithm and those who seek to outwit it, get around it, and sell that advice. There’s a whole cottage industry for this cat and mouse game.

The end result is a problem for small publishers. 

The initial metrics were going to place a cut off tag of “less than 50,000 listens.”

Frankly, that’s a lot of listens for new or indie podcasters. 

But in setting that bar, Spotify was placing something of a stigma on that tier of creators.

It's not as though the numbers are a secret, but this program will make it more difficult to climb out of the "Aspiring Podcasters" category.

No longer were they up there next to Joe Rogan. No, now there is clearly a hierarchy, and who wants to go mucking around at the bottom levels of the pyramid when Spotify is already telling them what’s good.

Why’s it good? It has higher downloads.

That’s the only metric. 

So in an age of digital guerilla marketing for a new podcaster, it’s absolutely impossible to have enough downloads out of the gate to make it out of the first couple of tiers where someone might take a chance on your content. 

And there’s the rub.

Your passion project, whatever quality, has been labeled as such. Numerically, it’s a hobby. 

If listener attention is currency, are they going to spend it on your passion project?

Spotify seems to be betting, no. Or at least, it’s not in Spotify’s financial interest to point them in your direction.  

Podcasting’s Shifting Business Landscape

On its surface, Spotify Plays seems like a fair endeavor. 

Everyone is on the same playing field and let the public decide. 

But when we go back to the pyramid model of how these tiers work, the problem comes into greater focus. 

While it’s true that at some level, it’s all the same to Spotify. They host the cover art, the pages, stream the listens, expend the processing power for the searches. 

That’s basically what they do on their end. 

The difference is, the bottom tiers don’t make them any money, the top tiers do. Where the exclusivity that sells monthly subscriptions are. Those tiers have their attention. It’s where they made the big investment. 

The lower tiers, if they were to go away all together, at best Spotify wouldn’t care, and it might even save them some money. 

Spotify Plays all but ensures those lower tiers will have a harder time, and it will come not from them, but from listeners’ finite attention pool. 

Spotify can outsource that job. 

Is that too cynical?

If you’re a celebrity who wants to do a rewatch of your TV show, or wax political, that works for Spotify. You have a built in audience to leverage. 

Unless you’re coming to Spotify with a built in audience… oof… are you really a partner?

The Spotify Plays Fallout

For now, Spotify has walked back and tailored some of the milestones following the public backlash from creators.

Which is a good thing. 

That said, it’s another one of those instances where the biggest players in the room can move really fast, ultimately selfishly, break stuff, and pay someone to clean up the mess.

After all, this isn’t the only piece of backlash against Spotify by users of their questionable decisions.

Spotify killed Anchor, and nothing since has come close. It’s infuriating.
byu/CommercialKale2132 inpodcasting

The problem with that model, which, again, is not unique to Spotify, is that it crushes a lot of creators who don’t have the bandwidth or capital to wait around to see if the mess is going to be cleaned up. 

So, to answer the question succinctly.

Is Spotify a Reliable partner for independent podcasters. 

Sadly, but expectedly, no.

It’s why we’ll keep working to promote good work. Which is labor intensive but labor worth doing. 

If you’d like to partner with us and have an independent podcast you’d like spotlighted, head on over to the submission form and we’ll see what we can do. 

Until next time, keep creating. 

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