Is Audio Podcasting Dead?
Recently, Spotify announced a name change from Spotify for Podcasters to Spotify for Creators. It was all over the podcasting news. The whole industry went crazy commenting on what this meant for podcasters and my LinkedIn feed was awash with doom and gloom.
But is the doom and gloom warranted?
Is audio podcasting dead or heading that way?
Having spent years in the podcasting space, I have some thoughts on this evolution and how Spotify compares to YouTube currently.
Spotify vs YouTube: Monetisation Requirements
Spotify's new creator platform aims to monetise podcasts in a way that mirrors what we've seen with YouTube for video content. However, getting into this program requires meeting certain criteria: 10,000 hours of watch time and 2,000 users within 30 days. This could seem daunting, especially when YouTube's requirements—1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours over a year—appear more lenient and attainable.
It seems like Spotify might be targeting larger creators initially but I would hope they will become more lenient on monetisation as the program grows and develops.
Hosting on Spotify - The Problem with Analytics
Spotify’s approach might seem akin to YouTube’s time-tested model but in order to make money on the Spotify platform, you must host your show on Spotify. That makes sense but the analytics on offer from Spotify aren’t great. They’re basic at best. YouTube wipes the floor with Spotify as far as what you can learn about your audience.
I can’t see a situation where I would host my podcast on Spotify and accept lack lustre analytics. They would need to completely redesign their analytics to pique my interest there.
For audio-only, great podcast hosting platforms like Captivate showcase a wide array of valuable analytics including comparing episodes, looking at specific dates, trends over time, unique users, tracking attribution links, booking in your guests seamlessly. That’s not even an exhaustive list.
Creators like me need detailed insights to grow our shows, and Spotify's offerings fall short.
Impact on Audio-Only Podcasts
A lot of “audio-only purists” have a very real issue with how video podcasting changes the audio experience. And listen, they’re not wrong. When you’re recording a podcast with video in mind, you’re often making different production and editing decisions. Maybe you want the microphone a little further away so that it’s out of shot, you can’t cut as much of the “fluff” content out because the continuity in video isn’t there. It’s not as clean, the use of sound is different, the use of music varies. There are so many decisions that you make as a video editor that are different to what you would do if it was audio only.
But it doesn’t mean that audio-only podcasting is dead.
There is still a huge audience out there that are audio-only consumers. I see it in the stats that we collect from our client roster every month. Some have both audio and video podcasts and the audio-only listenership far outweighs the video version. The experience is vastly different.
Not every show needs to have a video proponent. It’s all about what the overall objective is and who you’re trying to reach. I think the bigger realisation here is meeting your audience where they are. Have you done the work to understand where you need to be to reach them?
That may mean video, but it also may just be audio. It’s an important part of developing a show in my opinion and a whole article in itself that I won’t get into now.
I believe the best thing about podcasting is that there is space for everyone and there is an audience for every niche.
Considering Revenue Models
In an interview that Colin and Samir did with Daniel Ek, Spotify's CEO, he pushes the narrative that Spotify will benefit creators by offering a subscriber-based revenue model split. This is opposed to YouTube’s ad-centric approach. If executed well, this could eliminate the need for listeners to endure unwanted ads as we know ad load is a problem. But we don't yet know if this revenue model will truly benefit creators financially or if it will mirror the less lucrative experience of musicians on Spotify and the teeny tiny amount we receive per stream.
It’s well documented that relying on Spotify stream revenue as an independent musician (between 0.003 - 0.005 cents per stream) to keep your career alive isn’t necessarily a viable option. It’s fine if you’re Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran, but not for the smaller creators.
Will podcasting revenue operate in the same way?
The Curation Conundrum
Spotify’s promise of more curated content brings both hope and concern. Algorithmic dominance on YouTube helps smaller creators find audiences based on view-based recommendations, whereas Spotify’s editorially curated approach might obscure niche creators. This curatorial model could potentially sideline lesser-known shows unless we see more democratization in discovery and recommendation processes.
I want to know how the smaller shows will be surfaced to new audiences. It would be interesting to see an “upvote” type method incorporated similar to Imgur which allows the people to curate themselves.
Where Do We Go from Here?
Despite my critiques, this competition between YouTube and Spotify could usher in new opportunities and improvements. Video podcasting is here to stay, but so is audio—there’s room for both formats to innovate and captivate audiences. It all depends on where your audience is and how best to reach them.
Don't feel pressured to switch to video if it's not your comfort zone. High-quality, consistent content with a great audio experience can still build a loyal community, even if growth might be slower in some situations.
Podcasting doesn't have a one-size-fits-all model. Whatever your choice, consistency and quality are key. So, as Spotify and YouTube vie for creators, remember there’s always space for pure audio. Engage, innovate, and evolve at your pace—the audience is out there waiting to connect with you.
Transcript:
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121 - Is Audio Podcasting Dead
[00:00:00] Is audio podcasting dead? Spotify just announced that they are changing the name of their back end of Spotify from Spotify for podcasters to Spotify for creators. And they had this big kind of launch event that was talking about all the things that are changing and how you're going to now be able to become monetized on Spotify.
[00:00:20] This is for podcasters, for creators. Yes, you can already be monetized on Spotify for music and other ways, which we'll get into, but for podcasters, there currently is no way for you to make money off of doing that on Spotify. Spotify is looking to change that and has now created a program that is trying to rival the YouTube creator program, but the requirements for entry onto those programs Are vastly different for Spotify.
[00:00:48] You need to get to 10, 000 hours of watch time within 30 days, which feels like a big ask, and you need to get 2000 users. Again, within 30 days. That doesn't seem as difficult to do depending on the content. Whereas with the YouTube creator program, you need a thousand subscribers within 365 days and 4, 000 watch hours within 365 days.
[00:01:14] YouTube at this point seems to be a lot more lenient. It's a lot easier to be monetized on that platform based on those metrics that I have just outlined there. It seems like at this point, Spotify is really gearing towards maybe the bigger creators. They're trying to test the platform. They want to, you know, iterate things and they don't want everyone getting in there already.
[00:01:34] Maybe that's what they're doing. Maybe they're going to make it easier. I would hope that they are, but for right now, That's what you need to do to be monetized on both of those platforms. I found it really interesting. I watched a interview that Colin and Samir do. Shout out to Colin and Samir. They're just awesome.
[00:01:53] I love them. Please give them a subscribe if you don't already. Uh, they sat down with the CEO, Daniel [00:02:00] Ek of Spotify and chatted about this new Spotify for creators platform thing and how that all was going to play out. And he gave away so little information, it was kind of frustrating. And I know this is very new and they're still figuring it out themselves, but it just didn't really give you much.
[00:02:19] It didn't really put my mind at ease. It didn't make me go, cool, yes, I'm definitely heading over to Spotify. It just didn't tell me enough information for it to do anything. He didn't really answer the questions as much as I would have liked him to, especially around, you know, monetization and, uh, you know, the, the revenue sharing and things like that.
[00:02:40] So I didn't get what I needed from there. What this broadly means with the question that people are kind of asking is what is this going to do to podcasting? What is it already doing to podcasting? So many creators are going to YouTube now to have video podcasts. I'm doing that right now. Okay. Like I'm on YouTube and I'm also on podcast platforms.
[00:03:00] they're going there to YouTube is that kind of lessening the experience of the audio platform, of the audio experience, to a degree. It may be. If you're setting yourself up for video, like, you know, you've got a nice space and you, you want it to look really good on video. Sometimes that means that the audio isn't, or the way you're speaking, isn't the way you would speak necessarily if you were just on audio only.
[00:03:28] I hear it all the time when I'm editing people here at Bambi Media, our clients, you can tell the ones that are doing a video version, Versus the ones that are doing an audio version, because there is a different way. There's a different tone of voice sometimes until they get really comfortable with it.
[00:03:43] And production cuts for audio are different to the production cuts that you would do for video. So the experience is different. And a lot of the time you are editing for video and audio is coming second because you don't want to edit twice. You don't want to. Edit the [00:04:00] video and then go into the audio and edit the audio, especially with budgetary constraints.
[00:04:06] You know, most clients don't have that as an option where they go, yeah, do an audio edit and do a video edit. It's like we're doing the best that we possibly can to service both of those markets. There's a little bit of a pull away from audio sometimes because you feel like you've got to make it work for video because YouTube is where you're monetizing.
[00:04:28] That's where you're potentially going to make money. Whereas audio, you're not going to make money as quickly. Maybe getting subscribers and getting a couple of dollars a month and having these, you know, these crowdfunding, crowdsourcing sort of campaigns and Patreon and stuff like that. You can monetize that way, but it's easier in a way to do it on YouTube.
[00:04:50] So I think that that's going to create a situation that might be a little bit, you know, Hard for people to come to terms with the fact that it's not just about audio anymore. It is about audio and video because they're trying to reach more people. The amount of people that listen to audio only is a certain bucket.
[00:05:08] And then you've got people that just watch videos and you're trying to get all those people. I absolutely get it and it only helps your show doing that. So to me, it is going to make an impact on audio podcasting. It may stop people from actually launching shows because they think it's all about video these days and I don't want to show up to a camera.
[00:05:29] I don't want to invest in that equipment. I don't want to put my makeup and hair like together. I just want to be a mess and I just want to audio only. And if that's not going to work, if people aren't going to accept that on video, I'm just not going to do it. And I really hope that that isn't what happens, but I can see how that would happen.
[00:05:47] Some of the things that I don't like about this Spotify for creators program thing. One of the things I didn't mention before was the fact that you need to host your show [00:06:00] on Spotify and the analytics on Spotify. are not great. You know, they're okay, but you can't really go deep into your analytics in the way that you can with other podcast hosting platforms like Captivate, for example, the one that we use.
[00:06:14] Buzzsprout's pretty good too, but Captivate I like the most because it is the most tailored and customized. You can compare episodes against each other. You can look at how a particular episode performed on a certain day or over a long period of time or a short period of time. You can look at. At, uh, integrating attribution links, and you can check how those links perform over time using all the backend of captivate as well.
[00:06:39] You can get your guest booking organized through there. So everything's seamless. It's it's in one platform or it can be. So it makes it really nice for the person actually doing the podcast to be able to go to that one place and see everything that they need to see. So. where all the people are that are listening, how many unique users even they have.
[00:06:59] There's just so much more data and tailored information that you can get from Captivate that you're just currently not getting on Spotify. And I find the actual platform there to navigate and find where you are. like the different analytics in different places, I find it kind of silly to use. I just don't like it.
[00:07:17] If I'm comparing YouTube to Spotify, YouTube absolutely wins. The amount of information you get from YouTube and your analytics, how far down the rabbit hole you can go with that is huge. Spotify doesn't have that. So if I have to host my show on Spotify and then accept the average analytics that they're providing me, That's not giving me all the data I want.
[00:07:39] I don't like it. That would be my first thing is like, you're making me host it on Spotify so that I can make money off of the Spotify platform, but you're not giving me the tools as the creator that I need to actually grow my show the way I want to using the data. One thing that Daniel Ek did say was [00:08:00] that Spotify is a subscription model service, kind of more like Netflix than YouTube is.
[00:08:06] So YouTube is a platform that is obviously heavily dominated by advertising. And that's how the creators also make money. They make money off of having a subscription. ads in their shows and the longer their episodes run for the better the show is like the more people that watch it and everything there's just more ads you have more ads that happen on youtube whereas with spotify what he's saying is that because it makes its money off of subscribers, then the user experience will be different and the ad load will be a lot less or non existent.
[00:08:40] If they're, you know, a Spotify premium member, then there are no ads. That's the same for YouTube, by the way. But he's kind of saying like, it's more. Curated than YouTube. And so the experience is going to be nicer for those people that are watching on Spotify versus those that are watching on YouTube.
[00:08:59] And then from a creative point of view, you're making your money off of a revenue split of Spotify subscribers versus AdSense with some YouTube premium dollars in there as well. So Daniel's kind of pushing that way of like, no, this is, this is a better model because it serves you better as a creator, because you know, you don't have to have or you won't have so many ads in your show.
[00:09:25] And then everybody wins. That was really nice to hear as to how it actually plays out in real life. You know, the jury's still out. That's my sort of, Issue number two is saying, okay, it's going to be a split of revenue from your subs, from the subscribers on Spotify and there won't be many ads, but okay, what is that revenue?
[00:09:45] Like what model is that? How much are you making from there? And is it going to be just as much as YouTube or is it going to be vastly different? I would imagine they're going to make it competitive because otherwise, why would people switch from YouTube to Spotify? I'm not [00:10:00] sure on what's going to happen there.
[00:10:02] The third issue I have is something else that he said, like on YouTube right now, it's very algorithm based. You can come to YouTube and let's say you previously searched for property prices or Bitcoin prices or something, right? And then the next time you went to YouTube on your, like for you page, you have more of that content.
[00:10:21] You have more Bitcoin stuff. That's the algorithm giving you what it thinks you want based on that video that you watch previously. Whereas with Spotify, he's saying that there is algorithms, but it is more editorial based. Who's curating that from Spotify's standpoint? You know, Spotify has playlists at the moment.
[00:10:40] Who's picking those playlists, like for music? Is podcasting going to be the same? Is Spotify going to be sort of suggesting and saying, well, this is what you should be listening to. This is what's hot, or this is what the zeitgeist is telling us is good. And so there's a little bit of algorithm, but there's also curation.
[00:10:58] Whereas with YouTube, there's not really any kind of curation, and I kind of like that. If you think about that more broadly, if Spotify is curated, how do the little guys get their shows known? With YouTube, you have good SEO, you have a good thumbnail, And you have something that you know, maybe it's trending.
[00:11:18] You're much more likely to be serviced. You could have so few views. You could have so few subscribers and you'll be served. Because it's in an algorithm and it's so much more searchable than it is with Spotify. Spotify, they're curating it. And they, uh, have a little bit of algorithm behind it. The little guys, I feel like, aren't going to get the exposure.
[00:11:41] Yeah. That the big ones get. That's something that, again, I feel is potentially damaging to how the creator economy kind of works so far. What do you think about that? Do you want someone else to curate your experience? To find shows that it thinks you should be interested in, but it's not [00:12:00] algorithmic based, it's more curation based.
[00:12:02] What do you think? I would love to know what your feedback is on that. And so in the same way If you're a new podcast, and you have content that is a particularly niche topic, and it's good SEO, and it's easily searchable, but you're a nobody, you know, in quotation marks, you're a nobody, you can have a hit on YouTube.
[00:12:26] Your podcast can be seen and shown on YouTube. Spotify, how is that happening? My other issue is referring again back to the kind of the revenue model. And this is something Daniel also said, how, you know, they're so focused on having everyone make money for creators to make money, to make it easy for creators to make money.
[00:12:46] I mean, I'm also a musician on Spotify with tracks that you can download on Spotify. And there was a period there where I had songs that were on large television shows. In Canada and on NBC as well and CTV. So my songs were around and I was getting a lot of downloads, streams, whatever on Spotify. So even if we look at the data that I have in the backend of my CD baby account, which is where I distribute all my music through, we have, uh, you know, a bunch of downloads here.
[00:13:22] And then per stream I'm making 0. 0, 0. 7. 6 cents per stream? When I was selling albums, like, You had to buy an album or you had to buy a single. Per single you would make, you know, a dollar nineteen or something like that. You made a lot more money before this whole digital distribution sort of happened and then everything was streamed and you got all these tiny amounts of money for everything.
[00:13:52] It doesn't really add up to a hell of a lot. If this is the, if this is the revenue share, if this is the [00:14:00] model that Spotify is employing for podcast creators, I will be very sad. I will be very sad about that. And I hope that isn't the case. So that's my other issue is what's the revenue and how a podcast creators who spend all this time creating all this stuff, just like the musicians do, how much money are they actually making being on Spotify and having you host at Spotify?
[00:14:27] So in order for this to kind of win, I really think that we need discovery and curation option on Spotify so that we can do our own curation and that the really small creators can be surfaced and there's maybe like Imgur, kind of like Imgur. I don't even know if Imgur is still a thing, but you know, you could upvote something and then it would appear higher and higher.
[00:14:49] That sort of discovery for smaller shows would be really good. I don't want the curation to Come from the people. I want the curation to come from a wider net, kind of democratize that stuff as well. In summary, I still think that this is a good thing. I know I've kind of been a bit negative about it, and I think I should be.
[00:15:10] You know, I've been in the podcasting space now for a decade, and I've seen a lot of things come and go, and video podcasting is not Going away. Video podcasting is very much something that is happening. I like that there's some competition happening between YouTube and Spotify. I like that Spotify is potentially, you know, more focused on the subscriber and the subscriber revenue and not so much about ads.
[00:15:34] I think that that experience could be really good, but as to whether how that actually plays out, I'm not sure how it's actually going to go for the audio creators out there. For those of you that are like, I don't want to do video. Don't. You don't need to, you don't need to do video, okay? You can just be audio only.
[00:15:55] You can have a beautiful, wonderful audio only podcast with a [00:16:00] fantastic amount of listeners. You won't be surfaced as easily, like your search isn't going to be as easy unless the podcast platforms really change, which that would be good as well. Uh, but you'll still have the community that you're after.
[00:16:14] And there is room for everybody in this space. Absolutely. In this medium, the way you make money will be different. You won't be able to, you know, monetize in the same ways as you can. If you're on Spotify and YouTube, you might have to be a little bit more creative with that side, but it doesn't mean that you just.
[00:16:31] That you shouldn't do it, that you shouldn't start a podcast because you can't go video. Be audio. Be the place that someone comes for that solely audio experience where they get really just involved in the ears and just enjoying what you're providing without feeling like they need to watch you at the same time.
[00:16:50] Do whatever you need to do to get your message out there in the way that feels most comfortable to you and you will find an audience. It may be slower, it may not be the giant audience that you could get if you SEO tagged everything and you, you know, you had everything on video and it was all polished to perfection, but that's okay as well.
[00:17:10] I'm giving you permission to do podcasting the way you want to do podcasting and however ever you do it, if you put consistency. At the forefront, high quality content, and that's like what you're actually delivering, as well as the audio experience. We want good microphones. We want good production value from an audio only show.
[00:17:34] If you do these things, it's still going to be a great show. That's my take. Let me know what you think. Is Spotify ruining everything? Do we need a competitor to YouTube? Is audio podcasting dead? Put those things in the comments, reach out to me, and if you like this stuff, you know what to do. Like, subscribe it, do the things that people always ask you to do.
[00:17:58] Okay, [00:18:00] bye.
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Colin and Samir interview Daniel Ek
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