I'm not sure what you mean. Are you expressing that Spotify taking down episodes is not censorship? Or that a popular podcast with 11-million listeners is not a significant cultural node?
spotify can't do that unless they own the rights to the podcast, otherwise they might run afowl of copyright laws. I believe their intent is to have one place for podcasts (both their own premium ones and freely accessible public ones).
This was my thought too but I can't seem to find anything from Spotify's new policy that touches on content removal for subjects unwilling to appear on a recorded podcast. Maybe legal disputes could be playing a hand here, however the timing is too convenient. Easiest answer seems to be Spotify is doing some cleaning on their yard after the recent backlash.
I don't even live in North America and even i've cancelled my long-standing Spotify family subscription over this. I came to Spotify for the music, not right-wing podcasts.
A little speculative but interesting nonetheless. If other “Spotify exclusive” podcast hosts are getting frustrated Spotify has a much bigger issue on their hands.
They considered intervening with them, which by far doesn't mean banning them.
To put it into context after their acquisition they had been pushing podcasts in general, white noise podcast accidentally profited from it, and a bit too much.
Which is with what they considered intervening with.
But banning them would have been the last step if others don't work.
And even then you still would have white noise songs, just not podcasts. Or more likely podcast just not promoted, i.e. you need to more explicitly look for them.
I.e. the chance for Spotify removing users access to white noise content was close to non-existing as far I can tell.
No shit, it was always clear that's what's gone happen.
Any podcast that goes exclusive on Spotify is simply a podcast I'm not gone listen to anymore. Luckily some of the podcast that were bought by Spotify are still available normally.
> I'm pretty sure that Spotify's API allows access to podcasts outside the official app.
I wouldn't be too sure about this. I know its API (or at least some parts of it) are only available to premium users, because they can't serve ads via third-party integrations.
I don't know if there's an exception for podcasts, but I wouldn't be surprised if your option is either the app or paying to not use the official app.
Podcasts on Spotify still aren't available in every country. What's even weirder, there are countries where Spotify is officially present but still has podcasts disable for local users in the app.
For me there's no legal way to listen to Joe Rogan. Not that I care too much. But I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who simply can't.
It looks like they went on rampage yesterday and removed a bunch of episodes. I don't recognize the names (and there too many) so I don't know why that even happened. I have watched a number of JREs and this is odd. I like Spotify a lot but I have no issue leaving them if this is the new policy. There are a lot of music services out there and Spotify shines because of the podcasts.
> we've removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID since the start of the pandemic
Doesn't sound like they're principled on free speech.
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