Joe Rogan, Spotify & The Free Market
In late May of this year it was announced that Spotify had bought exclusive rights to one of the world’s largest Podcasts — The Joe Rogan Show for a reported ~$100 million.
The news and social cycles that followed were somewhat chaotic. A mixture of competitively charged statements from people within and outside of the professional podcasting community came careening onto the social airwaves within minutes of the announcement.
There was however one central ingredient missing from the collective chorus of criticism: clearcut unity on what the problem was.
The sentiment was largely negative and many are unhappy with Rogan’s move, but the majority of those in protest found it difficult to express exactly why they were upset.
Some believed the primary issue to be equality of pay. Ted Gioia tweeted that “a musician would need to generate 23 billion streams on Spotify to earn what they’re paying Joe Rogan for his podcast rights.” Whilst this is anecdotally an easy tweet to get behind, taking a cross disciplinary pay equality argument to its extreme quickly gets you into some vulnerable places in economic theory and rationality.
Next came the voice of the listeners. The dissenting undercurrent was tangible, but it couldn’t seem to find its expression beyond voicing a mild annoyance in needing to download an extra app (given that Rogan’s show will still be free). The collective podcasting community felt it was bad, even evil, which left some questioning why, exactly, it was “wrong” of Rogan to sell the rights.
The truth in why people are fundamentally against the Spotify deal may lie in the fact that it rubs against the grain of the major (and majorly supported) trends of the decentralisation and democratisation of content over the last decade.
Decentralisation is in many ways the internet age’s version of ‘sticking it to the man’. It appeals to our basic beliefs of equality of opportunity, justice and fair compensation. These subversive ideals stem from a feeling of being taken advantage of by ‘big business’: the publishers, labels, banks and other intermediaries of the economy that start out simply connecting two ends of a transaction and inevitably end up dictating terms, controlling output and taking larger and larger slices of the pie for themselves.
Examples of the decentralisation and democratisation movements can be found in many spheres, but perhaps the most obvious relate to the financial and content world.
In the banking sector, a large part of blockchain’s popularity in the lay world is based on the application of its mechanisms to sidestep traditional banking and legal systems (and their related fees) through providing peer to peer transactions.
Looking more specifically at content creation and consumption, examples are not difficult to come by: Amazon (famously not in cahoots with publishers) launched a self publishing software allowing niche writers to avoid the arduous task of having to get a publishers to choose their work, publish their work, uninvitingly change their work and ultimately control the rights to their work. The primary call to actions of the Amazon self publishing platform are unsurprisingly, “Make more money” and “Keep control of your rights”.
Medium was found with the mission of providing niche and unknown writers with the distribution channels that only traditional or established online entities previously had access to. The benefits of the democratisation of content can’t be diluted to avoiding big business alone. There are real social benefits from increased diversity of content in the world. As Nassim Taleb discusses in his book Black Swan:
“So as the author of this little book, you can sit there, bide your time, be available in search engines… the quality of readership has improved markedly over the past few years thanks to the availability of these more sophisticated books. This is a fertile environment for diversity.”
The Black Swan. Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
In 2004, podcasting dovetailed powerfully with these trends. Anyone with a smartphone can immediately start publishing their programming to the world. No intermediary, no label, complete creative control and distribution at the tap of a button. In many ways, podcasting is the totem of the new era of independent content creation — podcasts on major streaming sites have adopted a sponsorship and advertising model and are free to listen to.
With this context, snapping the lens back to the Joe Rogan deal puts the collective frustration in a little more focus. The Spotify deal removes one of the most popular podcasts in the world from all platforms except for Spotify and in the process intermediates the widely celebrated “independent” format of podcasting — against the grain. A powerful supporting pillar of the decentralisation movement is the idea that it stops ‘big business’ from controlling distribution or worse, the creative process. As inadvertent proof of the collective fear, Rogan made sure to include the following in his official statement:
“It’s just a licensing deal, so Spotify won’t have any creative control over the show.”
Taking a moment to analyse the Joe Rogan brand itself further compounds the incongruence of the deal with not only the democratisation of content movement, but Rogan’s brand as a whole. Rogan is famously known as a voice in the wilderness of sorts. In a ‘politically correct’ West he is the antidote to his listeners. Saying what others won’t, with a crafty sheltering under the “I’m just dumb” banner when it gets him in hot water. It’s a strategy that has proven to work to gain a following in an increasingly liberal West. So when an ‘against the grain’ public figure that is on the “Rebel end of rebel”, as Eric Weinstein recently put it on Rogan’s show, sells the rights to his show to a company and that company intermediates the access to his independent, rebel fuelled content, the narrative gets a little twisted. People feel as though we’re moving backward.
Ultimately Rogan lives in a capitalist society. It would be hypocritical of any to judge Rogan for monetising his show and leveraging his hard work in building a brand and a podcast worth buying the rights to. It’s also unreasonable to expect Spotify not to want to spend its hard earned capital to pursue its strategic objective of more listeners.
In fact, one of the reasons that creators like Rogan would be tempted by the Spotify deal would be because the world’s pursuit of this direct connection between creator and consumer is tracking ahead of the development of mechanisms that allow consumers to directly compensate creators. The economic model of democratised content is lopsided in favour of the consumer. Businesses such as Substack that are looking to address that imbalance through direct payment methods to creators are still very much in the venture capital startup realm and are by no means commonplace.
Further to this, audiences have a learned synonymity between democratisation of content and “free of charge”. We don’t expect to have to pay for online content as is proven by the many failed attempts from online publishers to make content paywalls work sustainably.
Ultimately Rogan’s listeners and the content consumer at large can’t have it both ways. We can’t fight for the democratisation, decentralisation and disintermediation of content without concurrently putting more effort (and capital) into the establishing and scaling of our content creator compensation mechanisms. Until that model is addressed and effective at scale, Rogan and others like him have every right in the world (pun intended) to sell to the people most willing to pay them in a free market.
