Simply put, Spotify paid $100 million for “The Joe Rogan Experience” for a reason. Even though there have been signs that the podcast’s popularity has fallen since its exclusivity deal (see this analysis by The Verge), the deal did what it was supposed to for Spotify: it helped make the company the largest podcasting service in the world, beating out Apple Podcasts for the first time in 2021, according to The Washington Post.
Paying for music streaming rights, after all, is expensive. Though artists might not see a huge return from streams of their tracks — it reportedly takes 315 streams for an artist to make just a single dollar — Spotify still pays out a huge percentage of their income toward royalties, a problem they can mitigate by diversifying. “They’re looking for other places where the revenue split isn’t that dramatic,” said John Simson, a music and business professor at American University. “[…] Podcasts were certainly their go-to.”
