The Spotify Hurdle

Last week, Spotify signed a massive deal with Joe Rogan. The move to exclusive podcasting is concerning, and has wide-ranging implications, both for privacy and openness.

Earlier this month, Ben Thompson of Stratechery announced the launch of Dithering, a new podcast co-hosted with John Gruber, founder of Daring Fireball. The podcast operates on a subscription basis, costing $5/month or $50/year (less for existing Stratechery subscribers). In his article explaining the launch, Thompson highlighted that just because Dithering wasn’t free did not mean it wasn’t open. New episodes are sent via email over the open SMTP protocol, thus circumventing gatekeepers.

Many large consumer-facing platforms claim to endorse similar values, but there are different flavors of openness at play. Netflix show creators may get larger upfront payments, but at the expense of international rights. YouTube could choose to demonetize its content creators for whatever reason, at any time. And Spotify’s “pro-rata” system for royalty payments has been frequently denounced for being unfair to artists.

Thompson’s definition of subscriptions is “paying for the regular delivery of well-defined value.” Dithering’s model of openness is not like that of Apple Music or Spotify, in…