The Joe Rogan Experience will soon become a Spotify exclusive, meaning episodes’ full audio and video will only be available through the platform starting later this year.
The show will become available on Spotify globally starting on September 1st, and it’ll become an exclusive sometime after that point. Listeners won’t have to pay to access the episodes, but they will have to become Spotify users. Spotify said in a press release that Rogan retains creative control over his show. It didn’t disclose how much it spent on the deal. The company will also work with an ad agency to jointly sell ads against the program. Rogan said last year his show reached about 190 million downloads a month.
Rogan’s YouTube channel will remain live, but it won’t contain full episodes… Spotify’s podcast ambitions always directly targeted Apple, which, up until now, has been the biggest name in podcast players. But with the Rogan deal, Spotify also has another new target: YouTube. When it began testing its video podcasting feature earlier this month, it did so with the backing of two popular YouTubers. Rogan is one of the most popular YouTube podcasters, often with millions of people watching each episode, so losing his voice on the platform is a major hit to YouTube and a big gain for Spotify.
MacDailyNews Take: Emminently pirateable, for those who care. And, as Spotify and likely even Joe Rogan know well: Without Apple, podcasting wouldn’t even exist; it wouldn’t even have its name.