On Spotify’s Podcast Strategy and the book, “The Glass Hotel”
What I think about Emily St. John Mandel’s new book (it’s good!) and Spotify’s habit of cordoning off podcasts (it’s bad!)
This week, I finished Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, a book that I enjoyed despite its flaws. I also read several articles about Spotify’s new podcast strategy of gobbling up oroginal content and gating it off from other apps. This book and this emerging trend both interested me a lot, so I’m recording my thoughts on them here. Read on for a quick book review and some scattered thoughts on podcasts.
A mini-review of “The Glass Hotel”
Emily St. John Mandel is probably best known for Station Eleven, a brilliant post-apocalyptic novel about a world destroyed by a new disease. I wrote about the book a few weeks ago, arguing that now is actually the perfect time to pick it up. Now, Mandel is back with The Glass Hotel, a book that has absolutely nothing to do with the end of the world (though it does also deal with similar themes of despair and resilience).
The Glass Hotel is a complex narrative told from several different perspectives. The key event in the book is probably the financial crisis of 2008 and how it uncovered a ponzi scheme that nearly everY character was either hurt by or involved in. This is an interesting perspective on the Great Recession and how it uncovered a web of lies in addition to the (more mundane) stock market losses for some people. However, this isn’t a book about Wall Street or losing money. It’s about the intersecting lives of people who lived through these things.
There isn’t really a main character in The Glass Hotel, though a woman named Vincent, her brother Paul, and boyfriend Jonathan Alkaitis all get significant narration time. They’re all well written and interesting, though by design not always likable. Much of the action either takes place at a remote hotel in Canada (where the title of the book comes from), or is linked to this place in some way.
My overall opinion of the book is that it’s good, but not great. Mandel is a really strong writer, and her descriptions and characterizations are what makes the story work. The plot itself takes a back seat though, which I didn’t like. Although the narration (with multiple “protagonists”) is the same way that Mandel wrote Station Eleven, I found that the setting and story of her earlier book worked much better than they did in The Glass Hotel.
However, this isn’t a bad book by any means. Again, the writing is so strong that I would even recommend it to friends or other readers who are looking for something enjoyable. I think a lot of my reaction comes from personal preference rather than anything else, which is odd to me since I liked Station Eleven so much.
I think I ultimately prefer books with a more cohesive story. There are some really interesting events in The Glass Hotel, but the entire narrative feels more like a collection of loosely-connected vignettes than one storyline. I know that’s intentional on Mandel’s part, but personally that’s not the kind of book I find most compelling.
Spotify’s podcast emergence feels wrong
The idea of a certain piece of content being chained to a certain device or service is nothing new. For decades, video game console makers have published their own, exclusive, games to lure consumers away from competitors. More recently, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Disney have all created their own shows that customers can only watch on their specific platform. Now, the strategy of exclusive content has come to podcasts as well.
Spotify has been gobbling up podcast creators and shows at an alarming rate. The company’s acquisition of Gimlet Media and the Ringer made headlines on their own, but the recent announcement that The Joe Rogan Experience will only be available on Spotify is the clearest shot across the bow for everyone else in the industry. It’s probably inevitable that some company (whether Apple, who is reportedly planning its own exclusive shows, or someone else) would start making podcasts exclusive to a particular platform, but there are plenty of people who don’t like this news.
I’m one of those people. Fortunately, Spotify hasn’t taken any of the Ringer’s shows off of Apple Podcasts (at least, none of the ones I listen to), and Gimlet’s excellent Reply All is also still freely available. However, it feels like the day when a podcast I really like will be tied to one platform is coming soon.
The best part of podcasts — back when this was still a medium for weird ideas, before corporations everywhere realized how much money could be made — was that they were free and available nearly everywhere. I’m not tied to Apple’s podcast app, but it’s free and works pretty well, and I am definitely tied to the idea of only using one app for podcasts. If shows I like start disappearing into the Spotify morass, I’ll probably stop listening to them.
The views expressed are mine alone and do not represent the views of my employer or any other person or organization.
