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Spotify, Joe Rogan ink exclusive podcast deal

On Tuesday, Spotify announced that 'The Joe Rogan Experience', one of the most popular podcasts in the world, is coming to the platform via a multi-year exclusive licensing deal.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: All right, let's move on quickly, talk a little bit more about some news from the streaming space just coming out within the last hour or so, and that is news that Joe Rogan's podcast by the end of this year will be exclusive to Spotify. Now currently, the podcast is not on Spotify at all. So "The Joe Rogan Experience" will move to Spotify, and it will be exclusive there over the next several months. Jen Rogers, basically Joe Rogan crosses into the our universe when Elon Musk goes on the program, but we probably kind of just move past the fact that this is by far the biggest podcast that's out there.

Rogan's been at this a long time, and I've seen a number of people make the comparison to the Howard Stern moving to serious news. That was what 15, 20 years ago, something like that? This feels similar, and it feels like Spotify, given the ringer acquisition, given what we did with Panoply last year. I think Gimlet Media as well. They've been very aggressive in the podcast space, and they're trying-- you know, they view their tam as every pair of ears in the world. And so, Joe Rogan, he talks for three hours. He does it several times a week. A lot of tam there.

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JEN ROGERS: You need a moat, and that's why you need exclusive content, because otherwise there's a ton of places I can go get my podcast. And it kind of depends on which one I pulled up, or if I'm in the car, or if I'm on Alexa. But if it's exclusive and you have to go to that place, that's going to make a difference. And these are the kind of deals that we sort of saw at the beginning of cable or streaming, and you talk about Howard Stern. That gets a name on a map, and that gets you into that ecosystem, and maybe that is the moat for Spotify.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah, I think very interesting just to see that move so aggressively kind of in this environment when, look, there's been reporting-- we've talked about on the show-- are people listening to podcasts less? What are they going to do as our routines are broken, but certainly Spotify feels like they can kind of take advantage of this period, and the stock is up about nine and a half percent right now, $176 per share.

DAN ROBERTS: And guys, just quickly, you know for Spotify, it's a no brainer, because Rogan's audience is big enough that I'm tempted to think the audience doesn't really care what platform it is. I mean, whether it's, you know, the new one that launch, I think you mentioned there's Panoply, there's also-- what's the one with the billboards all over the city that were yellow and it's a subscription for podcasts.

- Luminary.

MYLES UDLAND: Luminary, right.

DAN ROBERTS: Yes, thank you. Luminary. Whether it's Spotify, whether it's Apple, I mean, anyone with this big of a built in audience could probably just join any platform and say, now you need to get our podcast here, and I can't imagine there'd be much fall off, and there's probably only upside for Spotify. Gain listeners who are scrolling the podcast available on Spotify music, oh yeah, people always said that Joe Rogan was good. I'll give that a listen.

MELODY HAHM: Yeah, and Rogan, I think the exact number here, he said that his show reached 190 million downloads a month last year. So for Spotify to get very serious about the video component or the video cast that they plan to really push out with Joe Rogan, that should be very interesting, because I don't know if you guys recall. In January of 2016, Spotify tried to really launch video. Video shows, there were late night clips, essentially YouTube, right? Watching four to five minute clips, and then they quietly folded that initiative, because they saw that wasn't actually a destination for people who focus on audio. I think now that they have this amazing portfolio and this very robust basket of kind of individual entities, they're really betting big on the fact that Rogan will be able to draw in that YouTube-esque audience in a way that he has been able to over the last 11 years.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah, and to your point, Melody, I would be surprised if he doesn't continue to convert and bring his audience with him to the other platform. Seems like a safe bet, sort of the market thing, so the stock again up about nine.