What the heck is going on in this industry right now?
A breakdown of what the heck is going on in this industry right now.
Amongst the chaos that just is the end of the year for everyone, these days the podcast industry itself has been an absolute loose cannon.
News about layoffs and podcast cancellations have been hurling at us from all directions.
As I’ve been wrapping up projects before the holiday break – and also, for some reason, starting new ones – I’ve also been trying to keep up with all the podcast and media industry news coming out, and I feel like I can’t be the only one who's kinda like, whoa.
I finally got a chance to sit down and comb through all of the industry updates and commentary floating around right now and make sense of them, and I've compiled it all into a somewhat comprehensive breakdown, so you don’t have to.
That being said, please feel free to drop your comments or email me to add any more colour here!
It all started with Spotify…
In 2021 Spotify tried to take over the podcast industry.
At the time, Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, went so far as to say that podcasting “should be a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry… Audio is ours to win.”
The headlines coming out this year have confirmed that Spotify has not in fact “won audio” (IMO), but they’ve certainly been acting like they are the podcasting industry.
Everyone’s eyes popped out Animaniacs-style as Spotify spent the last couple years dumping money into podcasting, locking in Spotify Exclusives and celebrity deals. But now our eyes are bulging for a different reason.
Spotify is wrapping up the year rubbing every lover-of-the-craft the wrong way; by canceling their top-tier podcasts Heavyweight and the Pulitzer Prize winning podcast, Stolen, and undergoing their third round of layoffs of the year laying off 17% of the company – around 1500 people. In January, Spotify laid off 600 people, then again in June with 200 podcast-specific roles,
In the midst of all of this, this year Spotify turned a profit for the first time ever, and its stock seems to keep rising. In fact, Spotify stock went up 7% the day after the recent layoffs were announced.
Finally, Spotify CFO Paul Vogel “decided to part ways” with the company soon after these recent layoffs. He cashed in more than $9.3 million of Spotify shares the same day the job cuts were announced, according to PodNews.
“These sales may have been automated; but the timing has been described as insensitive at best,” said PodNews’ James Cridland in a recent newsletter.
All of this news from Spotify is a lot to digest. It leaves podcasting feeling a bit tainted, at everyone's expense but Spotify’s.
“Spotify took a billion-dollar swing and whiffed, and now podcasters have to navigate the fallout,” said Amanda Silberling in her awesome piece on TechCrunch, Everything you know about the podcast industry is a lie.
Make of this what you will, but I feel weird about it all.
Me listening to a Spotify podcast just *knowing*.
Meanwhile in Canada…
CBC announced this month that they are cutting 600 jobs.
They announced that cuts would mostly come from the technology and infrastructure department, but also included jobs in programming.
CEO Catherine Tait said that audiences may notice some changes to prime time television and “fewer programs on Gem, for example, perhaps not all the renewals of your favourite series, and perhaps fewer episodes of some of your favourite series.”
The cuts are effective immediately, sadly, right in the middle of the holiday season.
There’s nothing here that directly points to podcast programming, or radio for that matter, regardless this is pretty upsetting news. Especially if you’re a life-long public broadcaster lover like me. Also, you just never really know with these things!!
On the tails of the Spotify news, I can’t help but be a little nervous for the folks at CBC Podcasts because, as I mentioned off the top, this industry has cannon balls flying all over the dang place right now.
This blow to Canadian media also comes after Bell Canada laid off 1,300 people and closed 6 radio stations in June of this year.
As someone in the middle class of podcasting, it’s hard not to look at media execs with a bit of side-eye. That’s why the video of Tait talking about this year’s Christmas bonuses has been circulating online a ton…
More podcast casualties south of the border.
The blows just keep coming, as long beloved podcast, Anna Sale’s Death, Sex & Money also announced that the show is coming to an end after 8 years due to steep budget cuts at WNYC.
The podcast recently hosted an event in New York to celebrate and mourn the show called “Four Interviews and a Funeral”, where Anna Sale gave a pretty heartbreaking eulogy that feels apt to the current state of the podcast ecosystem:
“When you don’t know what’s coming, there’s a tendency to rush past the ending and just try to get shit locked down.”
Also this month, veteran podcast network TWiT made a number of layoffs. Read the full announcement on PodNews.
So has the podcasting bubble burst?
I don’t know if this is too bold to say, but the podcast industry feels like it’s in the hands of Elon Musk right now.
Contributing writer at Slate, Scott Nover, said it perfectly, it’s “been burned by rampant M&A, unbridled hype, dwindling margins, and the once-eager fingers of the biggest names in tech.
As Nover pointed out in his piece on Slate (which I also highly recommend reading), it was Vulture who predicted that the industry would see a “dramatic bubble-burst” or a “more gradual deflation”.
It’s hard to say whether or not a bubble has truly popped, but it's also hard to deny that the podcast industry feels like it's headed for some sort of notable change soon — whether that’s because it’s eventual maturity means people can thrive in this space, or because tech companies screw around with it so much that it turns into an all-knowing, AI-podcast-entity that destroys the human race.
Katie Jensen at Vocal Fry Studios, put out a poll with some more reasonable suggestions:
“If you can’t make a go of it with these incredible shows you are simply bad at podcasting,”
- Lydia Polgreen, former Gilmet Managing Director
