podcasts are a key element, and every day more, in the content proposal of Spotify. The service, which was born as a streaming music platform, over the years has been growing in this type of content. Quite moderately the first few years, but with my foot pressing the accelerator to the bottom for a while now. And it is that, it seems, not only is it that podcasts attract more users every day, it is that they would also be much more profitable than music, at least in most cases.
As a result of this paradigm shift, in recent years we have become accustomed to announcements of great signings by Spotify, of all kinds of celebrities who would create content exclusively for the platform. From Barack Obama to Bruce Springsteen, through Mark Wahlberg and Kim Kardashian. A variety of celebrities from a very, very wide spectrum, which has undoubtedly helped Spotify to strengthen its image in the field of podcasts, another of the arenas in which it faces Apple.
However, and as we can read in Business Insider, after the spectacular nature of some of those announcements, the contents associated with them would not have reached Spotify or, if they did, it would have been in such a low amount that could almost be considered more of an anecdotal collaboration than the fruit of an agreement. And this is something that may seem like a minor problem, but we must bear in mind that many of these collaborations have been able to attract more users to the service, making them become Spotify subscribers waiting to be able to access those hypothetical future contents.
From the beginning of 2019 until today, Spotity has reached more than thirty agreements of this type, including the recent and highly controversial signing of Joe Rogan, who has already cost the company the catalogs of some musicians who are critical of Rogan’s support for denier and anti-vaccine positions. However, some of them have not materialized into anything, such as the recent case of Ava DuVernay, director of Selma, who signed an agreement with Spotify in 2020 to create no less than six exclusive content per year. More than a year later, the agreement has been broken without a single one of said exclusive contents being published.
This is not the only case, it has happened the same with Mark Wahlberg, Kardashian, Jordan Peele, Paul Feig or the Russo brothers and Mark Duplass, signings all of them that were announced with great fanfare by Spotify, and that have ended in nothing. In other cases, the contributions have been testimonial, as has happened with the British Prince Harry (Harry) of Sussex and his wife, the former actress Meghan Markle, with whom he signed an agreement of 25 million dollars, which until now has only had as a result a Christmas special.
It is becoming increasingly clear that, in some respects as well as in others, Spotify is tremendously fast when it comes to making announcements, but that the phase of materializing them is not taken with the same speed. A few days ago we remembered the time that has passed since the company announced its HD music service. Since then, many others have moved and already offer it, while Spotify users are still waiting for it to come to us. And this, and now I speak as the editor of MuyComputer, but also as a user of Spotify, is something that little by little, can fill our patience.
