Podcasts Are Not Music (Premium)

Product design is difficult as, I’m sure, is brand promotion. But if the mobile wave has taught us anything, it’s that tools that exist primarily on this platform need to be focused and concise. And not jack of all trades that try to perform multiple functions.

You do see exceptions to this rule, of course. Microsoft, for example, has semi-successfully squeezed subsets of the functionality from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneDrive into its standalone Microsoft 365 app. And Microsoft, again, has semi-successfully combined email, calendar, and contact management into its Outlook Mobile app.

But it’s perhaps telling that both of those exceptions come from a company that has decades-long roots in legacy desktop computing. And that the most successful mobile apps do one thing, and one thing only. And there are examples of companies that tried to bundle---as Meta did with its Facebook and Messenger apps---and that are now rolling back those changes so that each is a standalone app again. You know, as God intended.

This is what makes the proliferation of podcasting functionality in music apps so frustrating. Podcasts are not music. And below the surface, I see a troubling trend where the focus of these apps is shifting away from music broadly, where they are deemphasizing some of the music-related choices we now enjoy to push an agenda promoting subscription services only. That is, where music apps today offer some combination of cloud music collections and our own libraries, those same apps are now shifting to be all about the services, meaning music services and now podcasting services. So they’re not so much music apps anymore but rather fronts for paid services.

This started, as it always does in this space, with Spotify, a music service that started as a European curiosity that has since taken over the market. I’ve never liked Spotify from a usability perspective, and its evolution over time has only made things worse, but I can’t deny its popularity. In January, the firm revealed that it now has over 205 million paid subscribers and an incredible 489 million total monthly active users. But it doesn’t promote itself as the number one music service (which it is). Instead it is, in its own words, “the #1 audio network,” and the content it highlights along with that is almost entirely podcast-based.

There is an obvious nonsense of having to switch between podcasts, which are typically spoken word, and music, which is not, in its app. But it is more amazing to me that Spotify’s podcasts initiatives have proven to be a financial disaster, and after spending years spending millions of dollars to gain exclusive access to dubious podcasting talents, Spotify, a firm that has never made a profit, is now scaling back. Not on promoting podcasts in its apps, but rather on paying for exclusive access to content that, frankly, should be free to all anyway.

Let me be clear, again. Podcasts are not music.

Spotify has...

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