Shownotes
In this episode:
— Where's the button to leave Spotify — One tap to skip you, a support ticket to go — The free rider problem, and why strikes need strike funds — Why the trade bodies can't help with this one — What happened when Neil Young actually tried it — My own conflict of interest, stated plainly — The one call to action worth changing this weekPodmastery goodies you can grab:
- Treat yourself to a PodmasteryPodcast Audit
- Founding member doors for thePodmasteryPodcast Communityopen soon
- Everything else:podmastery.co
Transcripts
At the end of last week, I published an opinion piece about the pesky
Speaker:new skip button in Spotify.
Speaker:And when I was talking about it on LinkedIn, I mentioned
Speaker:the idea of an industry-wide boycott to keep them in check.
Speaker:And then I started thinking more deeply about that idea
Speaker:and whether it's even possible.
Speaker:Turns out it might not be.
Speaker:And after recording it, I started investigating how I'd
Speaker:pull my own show from Spotify.
Speaker:And because I'd never considered it before, I hadn't realized
Speaker:how difficult it is to do so.
Speaker:I mean, sure, you can launch a podcast and choose not to have it in
Speaker:Spotify in the first place, and the podcast hosting platform Buzzsprout's
Speaker:own podcast did indeed make that decision until quite recently.
Speaker:But if you wanna take your own show down from Spotify because they're
Speaker:just not aligned with you, 'cause they do bad things like, I don't know,
Speaker:trying to destroy their creators' very livelihoods by encouraging
Speaker:people not to hear their content.
Speaker:Well, if that's the case, you're out of luck.
Speaker:Turns out that the only way to take your podcast off Spotify is to write
Speaker:to Spotify and ask them really nicely to take your podcast off Spotify.
Speaker:There's no button, which is quite something from a company that's just
Speaker:built a very large button indeed
Speaker:This is Podmastery Podcasting Insights, the podcast for people who've seen that
Speaker:terrible Steven Bartlett ad on Instagram where he's claiming he can teach you
Speaker:how to have a top-rated podcast and decided for themselves they'd rather
Speaker:glug a whole bottle of Huel than spend even another second listening to
Speaker:any advice from an overrated dragon.
Speaker:I'm Neal Veglio, the podmaster.
Speaker:Let's get you a step closer to podmastery
Speaker:When everyone started offering their thoughts on Spotify testing
Speaker:out this stupid skip ads button, I had a very visceral reaction to it.
Speaker:And much like the idea that I'm sure every musical artist has had over the years,
Speaker:even the ones that could afford to make it, My idea was, well, why don't we all
Speaker:just leave as a podcasting collective?
Speaker:Then I did some investigating.
Speaker:See, last week when I published that idea on a comment in LinkedIn, I
Speaker:thought that was where we could start shaping the direction for podcasters.
Speaker:And this episode was gonna be all about the good news around that idea.
Speaker:But now it can't be.
Speaker:The theory of podcasting is that RSS makes you free.
Speaker:There's no contract with Spotify, no exclusivity deals, no notice period.
Speaker:You never signed anything apart from accepting the terms and conditions
Speaker:of being published on their platform, which is a button click away.
Speaker:There we are with the buttons again.
Speaker:All of that is true, but what it doesn't give you is an exit.
Speaker:If your show is externally hosted, the procedure for your exit is this:
Speaker:contact support, send your feed and link, and then wait with no published
Speaker:timeframe in mind If you're Spotify hosted, you can't remove the show at
Speaker:all without deleting your whole account.
Speaker:Their own suggested workaround involves publishing a placeholder
Speaker:episode and then just deleting the rest of your back catalog around
Speaker:it, which is not a workaround.
Speaker:That's a hostage situation with a help article and terms and conditions.
Speaker:So let's get the shape of this completely straight.
Speaker:Spotify have built a one-tap button so your listener can skip past the bits
Speaker:where you ask for financial support
Speaker:and a support ticket queue for you to leave when they do that.
Speaker:One tap to skip you and an email and an unspecified wait time to go.
Speaker:It's funny where they chose to remove the friction, isn't it?
Speaker:Right now, friction is the only reason that ad reads survive at all.
Speaker:The only thing making people listen to ad reads is the pain point of them
Speaker:having to bother clicking to skip them
Speaker:And if they're doing something else like, I don't know, washing up or
Speaker:driving, that's an even harder task.
Speaker:So this button removes that friction entirely.
Speaker:And from what little has been said about this, It sounds like that
Speaker:button can be trained to remove that friction almost automatically.
Speaker:It was an easy fix for them to destroy creators in favor of what?
Speaker:I don't know.
Speaker:Money?
Speaker:Encouraging premium subscriptions to utilize this kind of a button And this
Speaker:friction to leaving their platform is the same but in the opposite direction.
Speaker:And whoever controls where the friction sits controls the outcome.
Speaker:And we all know that most creators won't want to suffer FOMO of no longer being
Speaker:available on their platform, particularly if there's no easy way to do it or a
Speaker:timeframe to measure the result of trying.
Speaker:So here's why a boycott fails.
Speaker:First of all, you've got the free rider problem.
Speaker:The benefit goes to every podcaster alive, including the ones who stayed.
Speaker:The cost is borne only by those who decided to leave.
Speaker:the rational move for any d- individual is to let everyone else
Speaker:do it, and that's not cynicism.
Speaker:It's what collective action does without enforcement.
Speaker:It's why strikes need strike funds and people calling out, "Scab!" them
Speaker:not to stay There's the asymmetric pain and the dominance trap.
Speaker:Like the indie with 200 downloads loses maybe a third to half of their audience.
Speaker:Spotify, well, all they're losing is one show out of roughly five million, and
Speaker:the shows big enough to hurt them have got Spotify money, Spotify deals, and
Speaker:ad revenue that a walkout would torch.
Speaker:So they can't really do that, can they?
Speaker:And the exit runs through their help desk, not particularly publicly.
Speaker:A boycott only works as an event, so a thousand shows leaving on the
Speaker:same Tuesday becomes a news story.
Speaker:A thousand shows individually raising support tickets and waiting an unspecified
Speaker:number of days for any human at Spotify to get round to it, that's not an event.
Speaker:It's a temporary tech support challenge that only has to exist until they
Speaker:update their marketing to discourage it with yet more propaganda or a bribe
Speaker:And no press means no pressure, and no pressure usually means nothing changes.
Speaker:So the mechanism defeats itself before anyone's even organized anything
Speaker:Let's counter the argument that nobody could make this stick because there
Speaker:are lots of trade bodies that could technically facilitate a movement.
Speaker:You got Audio UK, which is a trade association for professional
Speaker:audio production companies.
Speaker:You got Podcasters United.
Speaker:That's a thing that exists.
Speaker:WGA East has genuinely unionized audio shops, but that's employees
Speaker:organizing against an employer, a completely different mechanism
Speaker:from independent business owners coordinating against a distributor.
Speaker:And then you've got The Podcast Academy, which seems very good at
Speaker:giving out awards and not much else
Speaker:What none of these bodies has is the one thing that a union needs,
Speaker:the power to make members act together and then bear a cost.
Speaker:No strike fund, no binding vote, no mechanism.
Speaker:Advocacy and networking are both genuinely useful, but not with this
Speaker:And here's the aligned precedent that I think some people are thinking about
Speaker:that is kind of relevant to this.
Speaker:In January 2022, Neil Young, the musician, pulled his entire catalog
Speaker:from Spotify over concerns with the content that top podcaster Joe Rogan
Speaker:was putting out there on the platform.
Speaker:And then Joni Mitchell followed, Nils Lofgren, India Arie.
Speaker:All global press this with household names and real cultural weight.
Speaker:But then just two years later, in March 2024, all were back
Speaker:and Joe Rogan is still there.
Speaker:So nothing actually changed.
Speaker:So my point to you is that if Neil Young can't move them, a coalition
Speaker:of indie podcasters with a shared Google Doc and lots of signatures
Speaker:probably isn't going to either.
Speaker:Let's talk about my personal dilemma because, you know, let's be honest
Speaker:about this, everyone's got skin in the game, and I fully realize that
Speaker:even bringing this up puts me in a slightly uncomfortable position.
Speaker:Namely, that in order to advocate for a boycott, I'd probably have to lead it.
Speaker:I'd have to participate, and that's an expensive principle to maintain.
Speaker:So our network at Podnos, the Indie Creators Network, ICN, I could
Speaker:technically get buy-in from the member podcasts to join in pulling
Speaker:out eventually, and then I've gotta wait for Spotify to action the email
Speaker:whenever they decide to get round to it.
Speaker:But the Podnos client shows on my top-tier packages, they're not mine to
Speaker:pull, and they belong to clients who quite reasonably refuse to lose half
Speaker:their audience for a principle that their podcasting agency talked them into.
Speaker:So within a week, I'd be the bloke who called for a walkout and then
Speaker:didn't walk, and that's exactly the kind of BS move that this show exists
Speaker:to literally take the piss out of.
Speaker:Selling the feeling of action instead of the action.
Speaker:Yeah, we're not gonna become that.
Speaker:Sorry
Speaker:So here's the fundamental problem here.
Speaker:RSS gives you freedom to publish.
Speaker:Nobody can stop you making the show.
Speaker:Nobody can refuse you a feed.
Speaker:No gatekeeper decides whether you're allowed to exist
Speaker:But what it does not give you is control over where you end up.
Speaker:Open distribution means anybody can pick your feed up, including
Speaker:people you probably rather didn't, and getting them to put it down
Speaker:again is a request, not a right.
Speaker:So that's the actual trade in play here: freedom to publish, no control over
Speaker:distribution, and they're not two separate problems you can fix one at a time.
Speaker:They're the same thing viewed from either end
Speaker:So here's the question.
Speaker:If someone offered you the swap, i.e., a body with real collective
Speaker:power, but you got that in exchange for needing permission to publish,
Speaker:you probably wouldn't take it, right?
Speaker:Nobody would.
Speaker:We chose this, and mostly we chose right.
Speaker:podcasters should unite against the behemoth of Spotify
Speaker:is a lovely LinkedIn post.
Speaker:It's also, if you follow it all the way down, a request to be governed
Speaker:So where then is our leverage?
Speaker:Well, here's the deal.
Speaker:It's not with me and it's not with you.
Speaker:The injured party in all of this at the moment is the advertiser who paid
Speaker:for something they didn't get, and the networks like Acast, Audacy, The
Speaker:New York Times, whose sold inventory is being suppressed by a competitor.
Speaker:So now we've got contracts, money, lawyers involved.
Speaker:All podcasters have is a gripe and social media posts
Speaker:Oh, and let's not forget the hero in this story, the press,
Speaker:namely James Cridland at Podnews.
Speaker:Now, James did more damage to Spotify in one week of his reporting
Speaker:than any boycott would have.
Speaker:That's the reality of this here.
Speaker:20 people posting on LinkedIn that they are gonna pull their shows from Spotify
Speaker:with nothing more than a supportive like on the post is definitely not
Speaker:gonna compete with tens of thousands of people reading James informing them
Speaker:of how bad the platform's behaving
Speaker:So here's the truth in all this.
Speaker:The fight is very real, it just isn't ours to win, and pretending
Speaker:otherwise wastes the energy we could be spending on the things that are
Speaker:If collective leverage isn't available, individual leverage is all there is,
Speaker:and you have exactly one asset no platform can skip, reorder, throttle,
Speaker:or algorithm away from existence, and we'll talk more about that in a moment
Speaker:and in a moment, I'll play you a trailer from one of our Podmastery community
Speaker:members, which is incidentally exactly the sort of thing that no algorithm is
Speaker:ever gonna recommend to you, which is kind of the point of having a community.
Speaker:Join the waitlist now, podmastery.co/waitlist
Speaker:Okay, so because I like to leave loose ends tied
Speaker:On your next episode, here is something you can think about doing to combat this.
Speaker:Change one call to action from your next episode from a
Speaker:platform action to a direct one.
Speaker:So not follow the show wherever you're listening to this, not leave
Speaker:us a rating or review, and not check us out on YouTube, which is very
Speaker:tempting at the moment because everyone else is trying to grow on YouTube.
Speaker:But all three of these are numbers that Spotify, Apple, and Google own
Speaker:and can devalue, re-weight, or take away from you whenever they fancy.
Speaker:You're asking your listener for a favor in somebody else's currency.
Speaker:Swap that out for something that comes back to you.
Speaker:Maybe a reply, an email address, a name on a list Nobody has ever built a skip
Speaker:button for an email I hope you found this episode informative and inspirational.
Speaker:If you did, please do make sure that you get signed up to the community
Speaker:waitlist, podmastery.co/waitlist.
Speaker:I'm Neal Veglio.
Speaker:Go make your next episode with the right call to action that
Speaker:hopefully will bring you luck in your continuing journey towards pod mastery
