One of the great things about podcasts is that there’s an extremely low barrier to entry, both for creators and listeners, which means any show can theoretically build a big enough audience to survive and also something can somehow become the biggest show in the world without necessarily needing to capture a dramatically large percentage of the total podcast-listening community. That’s different from TV and movies, where you’re missing out on part of the conversation if you don’t watch Game Of Thrones or Marvel movies, which makes it somewhat surprising when big companies like Spotify are willing to throw what must be huge piles of money at exclusive licensing deals for specific shows that some podcast listeners couldn’t care less about.
Anyway, all of this is a preamble to say that Spotify has bought the exclusive rights to The Joe Rogan Experience, the show that is ostensibly the Game Of Thrones or MCU of the podcasting world (at least for people who like to get regular updates from Elon Musk, which surely includes all of us). This comes from Vulture, which is very stunned by what it considers to be the enormous importance of this news, referring to it as a “tectonically big” and noting that it is “widely believed” that Rogan’s show is “one of the biggest revenue-generators in the industry.”
The exclusivity won’t kick in until “a few months” after September, which is when episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience will start appearing on Spotify non-exclusively, and Vulture says the deal covers both the audio and video version of the show. That presumably means no more YouTube content for the show, or at least less YouTube content than there is currently, but we might not know what the actually looks like until this all takes effect later this year.