🔗 Spotify is buying Bill Simmons’s The Ringer to boost its podcast business

5 February 2020 đź”—

www.vox.com

Peter Kafka:

When it purchased Gimlet Media last year, it kept that podcast company’s stuff available on all platforms.

I’ve started to consume The Ringer more through its writing than its podcasting in recent months and this news makes me very nervous.

First of all, the above from Kafka is a bit misleading. See the below description pulled from The Two Princes feed:

To hear the rest of this story you can find all episodes of season 2 exclusively on Spotify right now. This may very well be a timed exclusive, similar to what they did with Crimetown season 2, which started coming out through RSS over six months after it was released on Spotify, but I haven’t seen anything definitive one way or the other. And to note, I know you don’t need a paid account through Spotify to listen to their exclusive podcasts (yet), but I prefer to listen through Overcast.

But going back to the Ringer, it’s probably good news they’ll stop doing Luminary exclusives (probably a decent hit to Luminary), but I worry they start limiting shows like they have with Crimetown and The Two Princes and I have little faith they do much to support the writing at The Ringer. The Ringer has already lost several of my favorite writers, and I can’t see Spotify doing much to stop the bleeding in that regard.


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