He framed the story as one where the company was pillaging his audience, evoked a long history of black artists being exploited by (largely white-owned) corporate powers, and accused Spotify of aggressively rendering podcasts as disposable commodities meant to feed its aspirations towards platform monopoly. A veteran of the music industry, Budden proceeded to characterize Spotify as essentially replicating the old power positions of music and the music industry within the podcast context. Last Wednesday, The Joe Budden Podcast, which has the distinction of being one of the first podcasts that signed an exclusive deal with Spotify, dropped an episode containing an extended segment in which Budden vociferously expressed frustration at being, in his telling, wildly undervalued and exploited by Spotify. One could perhaps fault it to be too technical or too academic, but either way, when that piece first dropped, I thought I’d be hearing about it more often, but to this date, I simply haven’t.Īs with matters of political opinion, what’s typically required to drive attention - and swing sentiment - is a sense of spectacle, and last week, we seem to have gotten our very first bona fide spectacle of the Spotify-critical sort, courtesy of the former rapper-turned-media personality Joe Budden. As strong as that argument was, however, it didn’t really seem to break through.
Back in February, the antitrust scholar Matt Stoller penned a strong critique of Spotify in his newsletter, Big, where he sought to illustrate the parallel between Spotify’s efforts in podcasting and what Google did to the web. Which isn’t to say there hasn’t been any noteworthy dissent. There’s always something new coming from Spotify, and that relentless newness has a tendency to crowd out or simply out-date criticism. This press strategy has a “flood the zone” feel, notable for both its ability to create a sense of momentum and its capability, through sheer volume, of drowning out emerging lines of skepticism. The onset of the pandemic slowed the narrative down a bit, but as we crawl towards the end of summer, it genuinely feels like we’re coming out of a stretch where there was a new Spotify headline popping out every other week. Since the Hollywood Reporter dropped that big cover story last November, the company has progressively ramped up the pace of its announcements, whether it was of the dry-but-whoa technical variety ( Streaming Ad Insertion, Video, and so on) or of the overtly sexier talent deal variety ( Higher Ground, Joe Rogan, Warner Bros).
Looking back at the past year, it’s reasonable to conclude that Spotify has been successful in controlling its narrative for the most part. Still digging around to figure out the ramifications of this story for big and small publishers.
WHAT IS WRONG WITH JOE BUDDEN AND TAHIRY MAC
➽ HmmmMMMmmm: From Mac Rumors : “The Apple Watch will no longer be counted in podcast listener numbers for Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab partners because it has been found to falsely inflate listener numbers.” Photo: Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for REVOLT
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