“When you see the aggregation and consolidation like we’re seeing now, with Spotify buying all these podcasts, that means it’s late days. The business has matured enough that they decided to buy into it,” Cuban said. For context, Spotify struck a deal worth more than $US100 million with Joe Rogan, host of The Joe Rogan Experience, in September.
“If it was early days, if it was still a free-for-all, they’d just bring in as many original podcasts as they could for dirt cheap and turn them all into stars, as opposed to buying (current) stars,” Cuban told me.
While Cuban doesn’t have a podcast of his own (yet), he’s reportedly co-founding an upcoming audio-first platform called Fireside. A recent report says it will allow creators to “broadcast, record, and monetise conversations” alongside helpful analytics, and it will likely compete with the buzzy invite-only conversation app, Clubhouse.
Image: Erica Mandy
