
2 podcast app, closing in on Apple Podcasts and ahead of all independent podcast apps.

This strategy is paying off: Spotify is now solidly the No. Spotify is including podcasts in its music service, and not charging for them separately, as a way of diversifying its offerings and helping it compete against rivals such as Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Amazon AMZN Music Unlimited. Luminary, for example, has been said to have only 80,000 subscribers and has had to drop its price from $8 to $5 per month.

Yet the idea of direct consumer payments for podcasts has grown very slowly. (Rogan has a history of guarding his intellectual property: he has been accusing other comedians of plagiarizing his material for years.) Many high-profile podcasters-including Joe Rogan-demanded that Luminary stop making their podcasts available because it had no license for them. A year ago, when Luminary launched its service, it caused a major backlash from the podcasting community by making free podcasts available on its app but hampering the publishers’ ability to earn revenue from ads and crowdfunding. Until now, podcasters simply put them up online and made them available freely to anyone who wanted to listen to them-i.e., they didn’t bother with licenses.īut that’s going to change.

Licenses give others rights to do these things in exchange for money or other considerations. Podcasts are subject to copyright, which means that podcasters have a set of exclusive rights to their podcasts that includes the right to distribute them and perform them publicly. Licensing is a fact of life in the music and television industries, but it’s new to podcasting.
