Being the sort of person who's already paranoid and must know exactly what's going on at all times in every inch of my own house, I can only imagine strapping on an Apple Vision Pro will make me feel even more vulnerable. Give it a few years, I guess. | Enjoying 1.5x Speed? Feel free to send this newsletter to your buds, and click here to read previous editions. And hey, feel free to write me anytime: nicholas.quah@vulture.com. | Want more recommendations from our critics? Subscribe now for unlimited access to Vulture and everything New York. | | | Photo: Vivian Zink/Syfy Getty Images/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via | | In a sense, we've come full circle. Sort of. Last Friday saw the announcement that Joe Rogan is staying with Spotify, striking a new partnership with the platform and resolving a question that's been the source of some hubbub going into the year. The Wall Street Journal was first to break the news, reporting that the multi-year deal is thought to be valued up to $250 million via some combination of minimum guarantee payments plus a cut of the advertising revenue. | It's worth placing the size of this deal in context. Today's Spotify is one trying to practice what market analysts like to euphemistically call "cost discipline" after years of splurging backfired when the broader financial picture turned sour; recall the multiple rounds of layoffs last year, new talent deals being smaller and controlled for risk (as with the case of Trevor Noah), and the general disinvestment from anything resembling original work. This is also a Spotify on the backfoot, one that's flailing about for opportunities while trying to keep those costs down: audiobooks, video, AI. Rogan almost certainly had all the leverage going into renegotiation. And notably, the new deal isn't a continuation of the status quo. The Joe Rogan Experience will no longer be exclusive to Spotify as part of the updated arrangement. It will soon appear across all platforms, including YouTube, which is increasingly being considered a podcast distributor. | If you're wondering what's in it for Spotify without the exclusivity, the answer is, well, still quite a lot. Being what's widely assumed to be one of the largest podcasts in the world — if not the largest — The Joe Rogan Experience remains a huge engine that would help Spotify in a few different directions. Obviously, it will generate advertising revenue, and cash is good for Spotify now that tech companies have to actually prove they can be profitable. It will keep advertisers excited to talk to Spotify about Megaphone, its podcast hosting and monetization platform that's become central to paying off the huge bet they placed on the category over the past few years. The Joe Rogan Experience will also continue to play a big role in Spotify's pivot to video, which remains haphazard; the platform seems to want to both build out its own in-app video experience while making money off partners like The Joe Rogan Experience by helping monetize it on YouTube. | The same logic applies to the other big Spotify content news in recent weeks: the announcement that audio episodes of Call Her Daddy, another blue chip asset in Spotify's portfolio, will no longer be exclusive to the platform. (However, the video versions of that show will still be exclusive to Spotify's video experience. Like I said, it's haphazard.) Technically, Call Her Daddy isn't the last of the Spotify-exclusive podcasts; the platform still has some original productions behind the wall, including its IP-dabbling audio drama Batman: Unburied, and a spokesperson told me that the company is "evaluating plans to roll out other shows on a case-by-case basis over time." But the big partnerships like Rogan and Call Her Daddy are the ones that define Spotify's non-music business, and both going wide effectively ends Spotify's foray into a platform-exclusive strategy, which will leave behind a very mixed legacy at best. | On the one hand, I've heard plenty of industry types argue that pursuing exclusives was the very reason Spotify can claim to have overtaken Apple in terms of podcast listenership. On the other hand, if that's the victory, it's a Pyrrhic one. That's a lot of cash and bodies they burned through, and not to mention goodwill, to the extent that matters. Furthermore, exclusivity almost certainly prevented many of its shows from getting a fair shot at building an audience that could've helped justify their existence. It's even strongly believed that The Joe Rogan Experience's own audience took a hit due to exclusivity, at least initially, though that notion is often disputed; the best anyone could prove the theory was through indirect measures, as was the case of this 2021 effort by The Verge. | What a difference a bust cycle makes. When Spotify's original Joe Rogan deal was first announced back in 2020 — several months into the pandemic, when the podcast market were frothy and bumping — a chief executive of a podcast company texted me "game, set, match," expressing what became a prevailing sense that the Swedish platform had gotten an insurmountable leg up on everyone else. That was three years, a global pandemic, multiple Rogan controversies (oh right, this is an election year), a faux-cession, several interest rate hikes, and a brutal stretch for podcasting ago. I'm pretty sure the executive who sent me that text is no longer in the business. | Spotify turned out to barely have a plan, and looking back over the past few years, it seems like the grand podcast future the platform helped usher in is one that ultimately looks a lot like the past. By this I mean an ecosystem that, on the upper echelons at least, basically looks like old-school radio — a sense further underscored by the other other big podcast news that Smartless, the wildly popular Jason Bateman-Will Arnett-Sean Hayes celebcast, is moving from Amazon to SiriusXM for $100 million, per Bloomberg. "It's starting to shake out in a reminiscent way of terrestrial radio and some other things," said the satellite radio company's chief content officer, Scott Greenberg, in a recent investor call. Hard to dispute that. | But when I say podcasting these days has started to look like what did in its earlier years, I'm also referring to how wide swathes of today's podcast mainstays are broadly the same as in the late-2000s: chat shows, iterations of what you'd find on broadcast radio, Rogan. (And Bill Simmons, and Marc Maron … and even Roman Mars. They're all still here!) Perhaps most importantly, the push towards walled gardens has been abandoned for now, with podcasting swinging back to open-publishing. This is an unalloyed good, because it means no one player can structurally control the space. At the end of the day, Spotify plowed through so much money to get ahead, only to seemingly end up right next to SiriusXM. | One thing that has always been fun about Criminal is how simultaneously easy and difficult it can be to describe. It's a podcast about crime, duh, but also sorta, kinda, not really. It's certainly not a true crime show, however defined, which is something a lot of crime-related podcasts like to say but ultimately wobble around the edges of. As a practice, the team, led by creators Phoebe Judge and Lauren Spohrer, approaches "crime" as a concept with a broad palette. The show deals with stories involving murders, fatal injustice, organized crime, and all sorts of law-breaking, of course, but those events are typically used as starting points to go after something else. Judge likes to say it's about the "human experience," as she did when we chatted recently, using the term both earnestly and with mild awareness saying as much can cause eyeballs to roll. | However you describe it, Criminal has spent years routinely pumping out fascinating yarns about the difficult and strange things people get caught up in, and while it's perfectly justifiable to accuse of me of bias for saying as much — technically speaking, we're colleagues, since Vox Media, my parent company, acquired the show in 2021 — I do believe it's grown to be one of the great narrative shows to have come out of the early podcast boom, circa mid-2010s. Sadly, it's among a dwindling number of its kind, given all that's happened in the podcast biz of late. | The show celebrates turning a decade old this year, and they're staging a live tour to commemorate the milestone. To mark the occasion, I called up Judge and Spohrer to talk me through what they believe are four quintessential episodes that reflect both the past and present of the show.. | "695BGK" (Released April 3, 2015) | This episode explores a police shooting that took place in Texas on New Year's Eve 2008 — when authorities shot Robbie Tolan, a Black man, after mistakenly identifying him as driving a stolen vehicle. The officer had keyed in the wrong license plate by a single digit. | "[695BGK] is about a young Black man who was shot by a white police officer in his parents' front yard. We traveled to Texas and spent time with the family, and we weren't sure how much time they were going to want to spend with us or what the experience was going to be like. But we ended up spending a lot of time with them over several days and feeling like we really got to know them in a deeper, more personal way than we would have if we had done this in a studio. It was a real generosity on their part, that they were so open with us. We also had the audio from the police officers' camera recording, so it felt immersive in a documentary way where we were able to not just tell you what happened but let us hear from multiple family members and, in a way, from the officers, who declined to be interviewed. | We won a Third Coast award for the episode, which shocked us because the show was just me and Phoebe. We were in North Carolina keeping our heads down — all the cool podcasts were in New York. So to be honored in that way was really meaningful. It stood out as a moment when I was able to stand back and say, 'people are getting what we're trying to do.'" — Lauren Spohrer | "Triassic Park" (Released July 16, 2015) | The episode tells the story of what officials at the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona tried to do to prevent people from snagging its hundreds of millions-year-old wood as a souvenir. | "To this day, this is the one of the episodes I bring up as a favorite when people ask me. It's the story of a national park that was having a really big problem with people stealing petrified wood. They didn't know what to do about it, but eventually what they try to start doing is make people feel guilty by saying, 'if you steal wood, you're potentially going to be cursed.' | The wonderful thing about this episode is that we had a plan for the whole thing, we were going to have these specific people we talk to — and then all of a sudden one of the rangers said, 'Actually, there's this other woman who's been dealing with this a lot, do you want to talk to her?' And I said, okay, sure, and when she got on the phone she started telling me about how she found women stuffing petrified wood in their bras. It just became the most wonderful clip. Totally unexpected. | It was one of the first times we realized the best thing we could do is just take the lead from the people who know the subject the best. You might have a plan, but it doesn't matter. They know the story better. Just got with it. That has shaped how we make the show; we're totally open to taking a left turn, because sometimes you find the best anecdotes, the best tape." — Phoebe Judge | "Ghostwatch" (Released October 21, 2022) | This episode revisits a notorious broadcasting hoax in the UK that took place in the early nineties, when the BBC aired an hour-long special of a fake haunting… that, of course, was largely presented as real. | "From the really early days, we've done episodes about people doing things to try to change their reality, or maybe pull a fast one in some way and play with other people's expectations of reality. 'Ghostwatch' feels to me of apiece with 'Masquerade,' about the children's book with the riddle, or 'The Clearwater Monster,' which is about a guy who creates the appearance of a giant monster on a beach. There's a subset of Criminal episodes that are about pranks, for lack of a better word, or this slippage between what seems real, what's scary, and what's been constructed by another human being. | With 'Ghostwatch,' we were fascinated by the cult status of this faux-documentary. Then we realized we could talk to the creators and hear what it was like for them then and how they feel about it now, but the idea that they would construct this Halloween special and the lengths to which they went to make it seem real intrigued us." — Lauren Spohrer | "911" (Released February 2, 2024) | This episode unpacks an unexpected situation in which a 911 operator picks up a call — to find her daughter on the other line. | "I remember a few years ago I had to call 911. I was in North Carolina, and I had to call them for someone in Chicago, and the 911 operator who I spoke to told me, 'We can't help you.' And I said, 'What do you mean you can't help me?' I was shocked by the fact there were different systems, and we thought about 911 from that moment on. | This story is about a veteran New Orleans 911 operator who is working one day when the phone rings. It's her daughter; she had been at work at a McDonald's, and she was locked in a freezer with someone when she called. Her mother is trying to do her job while speaking to her daughter, so you hear her voice trying to be professional: 'Tell me where you are.' And her daughter's saying, 'Mom, you know where I am.' It's just wonderful to hear their voices together, and then we get to hear from them about what that moment was like. But in the episode, you also get to learn the history of how 911 even started, and how people have been calling for help for hundreds of years. | It's a really perfect Criminal episode, because you have this emotional experience and you get to walk away and turn to someone and says, 'Did you know they used to ring bells to get people for help?'" — Phoebe Judge | ➽ This just in: Slate's Decoder Ring, a.k.a. Willa Paskin's cultural mystery emporium, is coming back February 14, and it's shifting from a seasonal model to an always-on schedule. This is on-trend; the bigger picture being that it's likelier for narrative productions these days to land on a better business model if they're able to publish consistently. If it can be done in a way that doesn't burn out everyone involved, I'm into it. Decoder Ring is a gem, and I'm intrigued to see it go full magazine radio show mode. On the docket ahead: a discontinued soft drink that targeted Gen Xers, why you'll find an entire magazine devoted to Robert Redford at checkout counters, and Captain Planet (he's our hero). | ➽ Bit of a lore percolating around this Audacy project, One Handshake Away: Peter Bogdanovich and the Icons of Cinema, which is being pitched around as one of the last things Bogdanovich was working on before his death in 2022. The podcast is premised around the film director being in conversation with contemporary filmmakers about other historically revered filmmakers. After his death, his ex-wife Louise Stratten and Guillermo del Toro took over hosting duties, and here we are. | ➽ Speaking of Bogdanovich, gotta replug this, and this. | ➽ The Big Dig being so good makes me interested in paying attention to whatever else the PRX-GBH partnership cooks up. Looks like they're next collaboration drop next week: What Is Owed?, hosted by Saraya Wintersmith, which seeks to find out what effective reparation policies for slavery might look like in a city like Boston. | ➽ Maximum Fun is really on a roll of late. The coop just announced another addition to its lineup: the British podcast Sound Heap, dubbed a "podcast of infinite podcasts" in the sense that it's basically a show featuring clips of fake podcasts that are all strange and absurd. One imagines a kinship between this and the Andy Daly Podcast Pilot Project. | ➽ The new season of Campside Media's Chameleon is called The Michigan Plot, which is about, well, the 2020 plot in Michigan to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer. | ➽ Chris Ryan is on Longform this week? Hell yeah. Greatest pod talking head of all time. | ➽ Hey, happy Lunar New Year, everyone! | And that's a wrap for 1.5x Speed! Hope you enjoyed it. We're back next week, but in the meantime… | Sign up to receive Vulture's 10x10 crossword every weekday. | | | |
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