Spotify may owe millions from missing licenses and may have gained millions from missing podcasts?

 HOSTS:

• Listen to James Cridland and Sam Sethi   

GUEST: 

• Jeff Price CEO - Word Collections
  
  Spotify has pulled a number of comedy albums from its service, after claims they weren’t licensed correctly.  Jeff Price has announced a $3.5m investment round for his Word Collections company, which “focuses on getting comedians and other spoken-word performers paid for the use of their works for the first time”.

NEWS:

• The Infinite Dial 2021 for the UK was released last week. The headline was 41% of the UK population (16+) listens to podcasts every month - around 23m people. The data is directly comparable to the US (41%), Canada (38%) and Australia (36%). The data was paid-for by Bauer Media and Spotify. 
  
  
• Links: Adam Bowie looks at the data.
• We interview Larry Rosin President at Edison Research next week.
  
  
• Exclusive: Spotify has made a number of exciting press releases about new podcast partnerships in the past two years: but many of those Spotify announcements have yet to result in a single new podcast, according to our research. Where are they? And what’s going on?
  
  
• A Sky News investigation in the UK has discovered antisemitism, racism and white supremacist material in podcasts on Spotify.  Spotify has removed 150 hours of content after the news channel’s report. “In some cases, explicit slurs could be found in episode titles and descriptions while album artwork displayed imagery adopted by white supremacists,” the story says. The podcasts are still available on Google Podcasts.
  
  
• Alex Paterson has listened to more than 350 hours of The Joe Rogan Experience.  He says he: “compiled some of the worst examples of Rogan’s sexist, racist, and harmful commentary over the past year -- all paid for by Spotify”.
  
  

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