and he has put out a statement, which we ll hear in a minute. he s also insisted he s not anti vax, butjust explain to us why concerns about joe rogan and covid which aren t new, they ve been around for some time why have they escalated in the last few days? well, they started escalating, actually, a couple of weeks i ago, when there was a letter. from 250 concerned scientists, worried about rogan s comments. but then it really took off when neil young, i who has a history of standing up against large institutions. in the music industry, he said, i m going to pull my music. . it s going to be me orjoe rogan. - and thenjoni mitchell followed him. - yesterday, the artist - india.arie followed him. also a popular podcaster, - brene brown, said she would be no longer contributing episodes, so it reallyl ballooned. and then internally as well, spotify s employee base, i which has long been in crisis over rogan, they re actuallyj having a town hall right now over this issue. -
to make money off streaming music? exactly, and as it s been said, the revenues. i spotify went public in 2018 and essentially is trying. to transform itself from a music - streaming company into a publisher. they re a media company. it s the same way when the - washington post produces a podcast. you know, we edit the content, i we have control over the content because it s associated with our brand. - it s our podcast. so this is a big transition, - basically from being a platform to being a straight up media . company, and with that comes lots of responsibilities. also, there is revenue there. right now, advertising revenue is a really small portion - of spotify s revenue. they make only about 15%. they make much more from subscriptions. - but when you look at the kind of ad prices that ads in an exclusive - podcast can generate, you start to understand also why they re going into it, i not just differentiation, because streaming. any artist can stream i in ten different places,
and briefly, elizabeth, finally, do you think that technology companies, which is what they were initially, like spotify, are geared up to handle these editorial challenges? of course they should be. spotify isn t just a technology i company, it s a media company. and, yes, that s what its actual employees have been asking. since the minute that they signed the deal with rogan in 2020. - its entire employee base said, well, let sjust develop somej editorial control now that - we re in the podcast business, just the way any other company like the bbc or the washington i post that s in the podcast business does it. - i ve got to exert a little bit of controljust on this programme because we re completely out of time. it s been fascinating talking with all of you. thank you very much, elizabeth dwoskin, jake kanter, batya ungar sargon, marianna spring and, earlier, rosanna pound woods. and from me and all of the media show team, bye bye.
could you colonise the galaxy in a million years? absolutely. the entire galaxy. so you would start with mars, build bases on mars, then you d use mars to jump off to all these other planets, set up places there, and over thousands of years, easily.? yeah. kind of like, you know, from one solar system to the next. and.yeah. that s something for us to consider. jake kanter, let s bring you in here, media correspondent at the times. can you explain to us why spotify, a business initially based around music streaming, would move so heavily into podcasting with an exclusive deal withjoe rogan? well, first and foremost, podcasting is absolutely booming at the moment. and joe rogan is perhaps spotify s biggest bet in this area. they ve spent a reported $100 million tying him down into an exclusive deal. and i think what it does is it speaks to the growing streaming wars in audio. ultimately, spotify has determined that exclusivity over rogan is more valuable than the music of neil young, and