How Spotify made around $5 Billion in 48 Hours

Barath kumar
4 min readMay 25, 2020

How Joe Rogan’s Deal Impact the World of Podcasters and Influencers.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

This is the story of How tides are shifting and new paradigms are being created…

Joe Rogan, host of The Joe Rogan Experience Which is one of the most popular podcasts in the world has signed an exclusive licensing deal with Spotify for 100M$. Starting from Septemeber 1st. this podcast will be available on Spotify later this year it will be exclusive to the platform.

“It will remain free, and it will be the exact same show,” said Rogan. “It’s just a licensing deal, so Spotify won’t have any creative control over the show.

“They want me to just continue doing it the way I’m doing it right now.

“I’m excited to have the support of the largest audio platform in the world and I hope you folks are there when we make the switch!”

Now this Podcast, which gets around 190 Million Download per month is gonna be exclusive to Spotify. This means, it won’t be available on youtube or Apple Podcasts, which is a major loss of those two platforms. Not only this, It dramatically increases the value of all Content creators especially Podcasters around the world.

Let me explain…

Let’s say you live in LA, California. You Bought a House for $500K 5 Years ago. Last Month your neighbor sold their house (Which is the exact Size as your House) for $1.5 Million. Suddenly your value is appreciated to $1.5 Million. You’re House is now worth $1.5 Million!

Photo by Breno Assis on Unsplash

This is exactly what’s happening to Podcasters & Content Creators from this deal!

Spotify has already started to make Acquisitions to become the leader in the podcast industry. Earlier Last Year, Spotify Acquired Gimlet Media: A Podcast Network on the same day they acquired Anchor.FM: A Free Podcast Creation tool.

This year they acquired The Ringer and Bill Simmons’ flagship show and now this Acquisition!

you may be wondering how Spotify made over $5 Billion with just a $100 Million Deal with Joe Rogan.

Let’s Crunch in some math…

Photo by M. B. M. on Unsplash

On May 19th, 9.30 The Spotify’s Price was $161.43/Stock.

The company’s Worth was around $29.2 Billion.

After 48 Hours… It’s an increment of 17.3%

May 21st 9.30 The Spotfiy’s Price was $189.46/Stock

The Company’s Worth was around 34.3 Billion Dollars.

At the time of writing this Article, The Company’s Worth around $35 Billion.

Technically, Joe Rogan’s Podcast Worth is around 5 Billion.

This kind of Deal indicates how powerful the Influencers can be and the Future is bright for them. There might be a $1 Billion Deal very soon in the future.

The Spotify made 50X of the Investment from JRE Podcast. I Know stocks will be fluctuating. But this Deal is more than an increment of market cap for Spotify. They are sending the message that they are going big on the podcast industry. If this continues, Youtube & Apple Podcast are going to Lose to Spotify in the podcast game.

They went after one of the popular Arguably #1 Podcaster in the world and they made it exclusive to their platform.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

Spotify actually doing what Amazon has been doing for years. Analyzing the data from their buyers. Based on the buying patterns. They started to create their own label products. Now Here Spotify is analyzing the type of content that its users are consuming and inserting relevant ads over. They call it as Streaming ads Insertion.

Now Spotify could be a worthy space to invest your ad budget compared to Facebook & Google.

Tides are started to shift, Especially when Apple podcast & Youtube isn’t doing anything to retain the podcasters, this is the perfect time to take over.

Spotify isn’t gonna stop here. They are going to Burn Cash like anything to market in all the platforms to Reach more eyeballs for the podcast.

This action created a Positive Attraction to Spotify. They got Everything right now.

Spotify has been giving money to the record labels for each listens. But here these podcasts could be so lucrative and more money-making.

To Capture the Market, They can sign Celebrities doing an Exclusive Podcast with them. Ideally Nostalgic and Pop culture Figures. Something like they did with Obama.

They can Completely focus on Youtube Influencers who still haven’t started their podcast and sign them exclusively. We call it the “Spotifier Program” we anybody with a certain amount of followers can be incentivized more than what they will be getting paid from other platforms.

Spotify is also Bringing out Video Podcast. This could be the new late-night shows. They can bring Live Podcasts. These sets of Actions are clearly gonna make them the youtube for the podcast. Who knows they could even beat youtube.

10 Years isn’t a Long time… Let’s see how it goes.

Thanks for investing time & Improving your Knowledge!

Cheers,

B. Barath Kumar

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