SiriusXM Holds the Fate of the Stitcher App In Its Hands
The march of podcast consolidation continues. Is Stitcher next on the chopping block? Liberty Media’s SiriusXM bough the company in 2020 in the wake of it’s 2018 purchase of Pandora, and just merged the advertising arms of both into a new company called SXM Media. If you note the branding, things may not be looking good for Stitcher, but it goes much deeper than that.
Let’s back up. “SiriusXM, you mean that satellite radio station Howard Stern is on?” Yes, and no. I mean SiriusXM, the digital audio corporation with 150 million listeners in North America that has amassed an end-to-end podcast empire rivaled only by Spotify.
When the corporation bought Stitcher it was already mostly redundant to the podcast ecosystem they had acquired: Pandora platformed their content, Adswizz sold ad space on it, and Simplecast hosted it. Stitcher, of course, has it’s own platform, and monetized content under the Midroll Media brand.
But Stitcher did have something that SiriusXM didn’t: Earwolf. That longstanding in-house podcast network provided the last piece of the puzzle in SiriusXM’s play to turn Pandora into a true competitor to Spotify: a reliable stable of popular original content.
So what to do with Midroll and the Stitcher Platform? Well, we all saw where this was going, right? Midroll and Adswizz have been consolidated into the Sirius Podcast Juggernaut with SXM Media.
That leaves the Stitcher App. As expected, content from Earwolf was added to Pandora in 2020, but Stitcher also offers paywalled podcasts only available on it’s app. SiriusXM CFO Sean Sullivan told investors the company is monitoring and evaluating Stitcher’s subscription-only content, but added “we are focused on distribution and monetization of podcasts.”
If I was in charge of Stitchers app right now, those comments would scare me shitless. Sullivan also called Stitcher Premium “small” and “probably a less material portion of the overall portfolio of business.” Ouch.
But we shouldn’t be surprised by this comment. It reflects the facts: the Stitcher app is just out of sync with the rest of the ecosystem that SiriusXM is building around podcasts. So why not fold the Stitcher app into Pandora and just distribute Premium content across as many platforms as possible to raise more ad dollars? (Or, turn them into ‘Pandora exclusives’ al la Spotify?)
Stitcher’s own listeners would probably cheer the move. Many of them cried bloody murder on Earwolfs subreddit after unofficial feeds for Stitcher Premium content outside the app were shut down. Reddit user xRedd summed up the sentiment nicely: “I am not exaggerating when I say I’m never listening to an episode on your app.”
Those in the know might mob me with RAIN NEWS’s article on Stitchers stunning rise to #1 on Triton Digitals rankings. But these rankings point to the success of Stitcher branded podcasts across all platforms, they reveal nothing about Stitchers app. (And Stitcher’s rise seems to have as much to do with a curious drop in NPR listenership as it’s own success).
But I concede rolling the Stitcher platform into Pandora would be difficult. You’d have to deal with the troublesome business of migrating users over to another platform, which may or may not work. And even if it’s subscription revenue is a ‘drop in the bucket’ according to Sullivan it’s still reliable revenue. So goes the old adage: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But, what if it is broke? Stitcher is one of the oldest and most venerated podcast platforms, but it’s hard to deny it’s glory days are behind it. Despite a popular update and consistent appearance in rankings of “best podcast apps,” Stitcher didn’t even appear in the top 10 most popular platforms in a 2020 survey from Reuters (Number 4? Pandora).
The popular and “essential” comedy history podcast The Dollop has called Stitcher a “bullshit app” and asked it’s listeners, “please don’t use Stitcher.” The sizeable Philosophy Bites podcast also does not appear on the platform.
Amateur podcast producers Wayne Clevenger (Everett’s Many Worlds) and Justdan Seventythree both said that their content would not appear on Stitcher after listing it, presumably due to technical issues. That checks out for me, I originally listed three more podcasts I couldn’t find on the platform before they inexplicably appeared in searches the second or third time I tried to find them.
So where does this leave us? Right back where we started: navigating a torrent of high profile acquisitions and consolidations in the podcast industry every few months or so. While hosts, podcast networks, and monetization companies have been snatched up left and right, platforms have mostly been spared (Sorry, RadioPublic). None have been merged or absorbed. Stitcher could soon receive the honor of being the first. I doubt that it will be the last.
