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It's Thursday. It's Nick. It's time to get into some shit.
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Amazon Music officially adds podcast distribution. The service went live with the feature yesterday, making real something that had been circulating for a few weeks now when podcast publishers started receiving emails from Amazon Music inviting them to add their feeds to the platform. The move was commemorated by a corresponding Wall Street Journal report that comes packed with a handful of key details about the addition. Some of those seem meaningful, others seem half-baked.
To begin with — and in what has become an expected turn — Amazon Music is stepping into the podcast distribution fray with some exclusive deals in hand: one with Disgraceland, which will be exclusive to the platform starting next February, and one with DJ Khaled, who will make an interview show for the service. The latter is your customary “Big Name Deal,” meant to capitalize on a certain celebrity’s stardom to shore up instant listening. (That said, not sure if interviews are the thing that I’d want from DJ Khaled as a person who makes art in the world, but what do I know, right?)
Anyway, exclusive deals are table stakes stuff with big platforms swinging into pods these days, so that’s not terribly interesting. What is interesting lies in the strategic framing: the Journal report seems to primarily frame Amazon Music’s elbowing into podcasting around its dominant position in the smart speaker space.
After all, Amazon continues to be the leading actor in the smart speaker market, with nearly 70% of all US smart speaker owners reporting that they use Alexa devices, per eMarketer. In what has to be Amazon Music’s opening gambit with podcast distribution, the Journal piece reported that, from here on out, whenever an Alexa device-owning user requests for a podcast to be played, the Alexa platform will draw the feed from Amazon Music by default if the podcast is present on the service. If I’m not mistaken, that default had mostly been TuneIn up until now.
This is a big fucking deal. For years, podcast distribution over smart speakers has been somewhat tentative and haphazard at best. It wasn’t a necessarily good experience, but it was a convenient one, and furthermore, conventions around this area were unformed. In a slight echo of Apple and podcasting, there was an element of this distribution line being an afterthought that could potentially flourish organically and on its own terms, perhaps without drawing attention from Amazon. Now we seem to be looking at a situation where Amazon is laying down the fundamentals of enforcement over its structural gatekeeping position as far as podcast distribution over smart speakers is concerned. This has enormous ramifications for the future of podcast distribution, particularly if you assume that smart speakers will be increasingly important to podcast publishers for audience access over time. Not for nothing, I pointed out this potential gatekeeping dynamic in a column back in January 2018: if most smart speaker usage happens on Alexa, and given that Amazon owns and controls the Alexa platform, then we’re talking about a situation where most voice-first computing happens on Amazon’s terms.
We’re at the outset of this, of course, and there is still much to find out. There is no substantial talk about third-party podcast advertising just yet, though the Journal report notes that Amazon Music is only selling ads on its original and exclusive shows for now. But it’s not beyond reason to suspect that Amazon Music might pull a Spotify Streaming Ad Insertion move at some point in the future, as advertising has become an increasingly prominent part of Amazon’s business these days. Such a move would have a crap-ton of ramifications for podcast publishers handling dynamic insertion technology on their own publishing arrangements; I reckon we’ll see a bunch of tension around this area, if we ever get to that.
There is also minimal talk of Amazon Music providing decent analytics back to podcast publishers that opt to distribute over the platform. Seems like table stakes stuff, but it does tell you something about how Amazon Music is thinking about its relationship to the podcast community.
I guess I should’ve actually written about Amazon Music in my Audible column this week — ah well, the column was already long enough. Thing is, this Amazon Music story should be situated more within the “music streaming wars” narrative, as it pits the service more deeply in competition with Spotify and Apple Music, though, to be fair, everything seems like they’re heading towards a totalizing clash that strings all media and platform together over the long run. Ashley Carman over at The Verge made an interesting point that Apple Music seems to be the only major music streaming platform that hasn’t yet added podcasting to its mix, which doesn’t seem necessary on the one hand, because its ecosystem sibling Apple Podcasts is still the incumbent, but on the other hand, it does feel like we’re looking at a possible future in which Apple consolidates the two.
In any case, as much as my Spidey senses are tingling with this development, I’m wary of overstating the point, or overemphasizing the start. If one were to look at the existing situation as is — Amazon Music slapping podcast distribution and some exclusive shows onto its service, while also maybe doing the very same stuff on Audible — we’re essentially looking at a mess. I don’t think we’re looking at an actual strategy, but a rando spaghetti-on-the-wall moment. Which isn’t to say that this won’t lead Amazon anywhere; sometimes sheer weight is good enough.
For reference before we move on: Amazon Music was said to have passed 55 million “customers” at the top of the year; Apple Music claimed to have passed 60 million subscribers in the summer of 2019; while Spotify claims 299 million user worldwide, including 138 million subs.
Oh, and pour one out for the camp that continues to fight the good fight against using the word “podcast” to refer to audio shows that are only available on this or that platform.
Speaking of Apple consolidation…
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Apple announces subscription bundle. During the company’s big press event on Tuesday, Apple unveiled Apple One, a somewhat highly-anticipated subscription bundle that pools together Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, Apple Fitness+, and iCloud under a single set of pricing plans.
This isn’t super directly podcast-related, but as always, podcasting doesn’t exist in a vacuum — especially when it comes to the tech giants and big platforms. This development indicates Apple’s continued lean towards subscription as a core business model for its services, further contributing to Apple Podcast’s general anomalous nature within the Apple services ecosystem.
It also sets up another data point in the on-going clash between Apple Music and Spotify. After the Apple One announcement, Spotify accused the move as being yet another instance of Apple’s anticompetitive behavior. (Here’s the dude Peter Kafka, reporting out the statement.) Apple, of course, denies it. Here’s The Verge with a write-up on that rebuttal, which also points out that Spotify is no stranger to bundling.
And here I sit, marveling at the fiction of modern American antitrust enforcement.
Anyway, staying with Apple for a little longer...
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Jake Shapiro joins Apple Podcasts as "Head of Creator Partnerships." The veteran podcast ecosystem operator made the news public on Twitter shortly after the newsletter went out on Tuesday, which, apparently, seems to be an increasingly vibrant news dump time-slot these days.
Anyway, this development comes about a half-month after Shapiro announced he was stepping down as CEO of RadioPublic and Podfund, both of which he co-founded after leaving PRX, where he also served as CEO, back in 2016. “There is so much more to be done, and I have no doubt that the next phase for both RadioPublic and Podfund will bring innovation and impact to the edges of podcasting’s expanding universe,” he wrote in a Medium post about his departure from RadioPublic and Podfund. “I may be moving on from my role, but not from our mission.”
This leaves RadioPublic and Podfund in a state of leadership transition. Honestly, the state and future of RadioPublic as a business remains unclear to me, given how generally difficult it is to be an upstart third-party podcast distribution platform in these Spotify-defined days. Meanwhile, Podfund general manager Nicola Korzenko, also, has also moved on from that firm, according to her LinkedIn, though she remains an advisor.
Shapiro’s move to Cupertino — professionally, anyway, I’m not sure if he’s physically moving to California, because remote work in the time of COVID-19, etc etc — is the second Apple Podcast hire that gave me whiplash in recent weeks. The other was Apple Podcasts’ hiring of N’Jeri Eaton, who had been NPR’s Senior Manager of Programming Acquisitions. An Inside Radio listicle noted that her role at Apple involves leading “the development of original podcasts” at the company. As a reminder: in its current composition, original Apple podcasts seem to largely revolved around shows that are structurally meant to promote its other services — like those in the Apple One bundle — including a daily news podcast tied to its News+ service and an Oprah book club pod that’s co-branded with Apple Books. She announced the move in July, and started at Apple in August. *grabs binoculars, looks West* What’s going on over there?
Anyway, what does being a “Head of Creator Partnerships” at Apple Podcasts mean? I have no idea — Jake ain’t talking. But the pace and nature of these hirings are certainly very interesting, and I sure hope it means what it seems to mean.
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Quick follow-up to the NPR bundle. One bit I removed from Tuesday’s discussion of NPR’s local-national podcast bundle — largely for space, but also because it warrants its own space of meditation — is the potential future complication of running the Consider This bundle, powered by its own dynamic insertion set-up, through platforms like Spotify that are due to lay their own insertion technologies and frameworks onto distributed third-party podcasts in the future, which may or may not include automatically altering the advertising or editorial content.
I put the question to Bryan Moffett, COO of National Public Media, the sales arm of NPR. “Any third-party platform that introduces new content to a publisher’s episodes or alters existing content without the explicit right to do so is going to have some challenges,” said Moffett. “I don’t know of anyone who does that now, and don’t think any will go that route.”
He added:
If some did, it would accelerate the need for publishers to think harder about which platforms are beneficial to their goals and which aren’t. While the beauty of RSS and podcasting is the ubiquity it provides, it doesn’t mean a publisher has to keep putting their shows in a platform that won’t allow that publisher to understand how the audience engages with those shows, or a platform that is hurting the publisher’s business by manipulating ads or content.
Food for thought.
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Odds and Ends.
- From Variety, on Tuesday: “SiriusXM today announced that Chief Executive Officer Jim Meyer intends to retire on December 31, 2020… Upon his retirement, Jennifer C. Witz, President of Sales, Marketing and Operations, will become the Company’s new CEO. She is the first woman to hold that role at the company.”
- Here’s the Los Angeles Times on the buyouts at KCRW, which has led to a staff reduction of at least 24 people. Godspeed, everyone.
- Song Exploder is now also a Netflix show, out next month. Here’s The Wrap on that development.
- Yep, I saw that whole “WHAT IF THERE WAS A TEN HOUR PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE ON THE JOE ROGAN EXPERIENCE” thing. I thought the Press Box’s take on the idea is pretty much where I’d personally land on.
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Post Note. How will I write these post notes once the NBA season is over
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