> By 2021, Spotify had paid to sign some of the biggest names in podcasting, and it was ready to start squeezing its competitors… Now, Spotify chief content officer Dawn Ostroff — a TV veteran most famous for bringing Gossip Girl to the CW — was ready to stop many of these creators and companies from sharing podcasts on Apple and Amazon, and keep the content exclusively on Spotify.

I have noticed Spotify trying to funnel a decentralized podcasting ecosystem based on RSS into their own walled garden, with some pretty big plays -- it would be really encouraging if they fail at this! I sure hope so. And that nobody else can pull it off either.

> The company saw podcasting as a rapidly growing space without middlemen.

Anyone else see the irony there? Without middlemen? Spotify was trying to cement itself as the middleman in as much podcasting as possible, right? Or maybe it's not irony, it's exactly that, Spotify saw a space without middleman and thus an opportunity to lock itself in as the middleman.

Of course it's not over yet, and Spotify remains in the game, along with others trying to capture podcasting in walled gardens.

> The company said in 2021 that it overtook Apple as the biggest platform in podcasts, and the company is similarly neck-and-neck with SiriusXM as the biggest podcast network, making the company both one of the biggest producers of podcasts and the place where most people listen to them

Seems like the podcasting ecosystem is a bit more resistant to walled gardens than most spaces.

I wonder why? Is it just because Spotify's attempt was so pathetic? Or some trait of the community? Maybe a little of both?

Personally I'm very glad that podcasting has resisted Spotify's takeover attempt so far. But I'm curious if we can take lessons from this community and apply it to other communities dominated by monopolies and walled gardens, like the App Store on iOS or ISPs.

Some anecdatum: I stopped listening to Rogan's full podcasts when he moved to Spotify because I'm sometimes interested to listen but not enough to download a new app, sign up for a new account, etc. Bootleg (and official, I think?) accounts post his clips which I watch sometimes, I notice they have 100s of thousands or millions of views. I assume Spotify was expecting to capture all those views. If Rogan clips disappeared from YouTube I just wouldn't watch it.

Use https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp to grab what you need before the account is nuked.