means for making money off music streaming and off podcast, too. first of all, though, we re going to talk about the fallout from a new bbc documentary about india s prime minister narendra modi. it s on iplayer at the moment, and it explores tensions between mr modi and india s muslim minority. it also specifically looks at claims around his role in the 2002 gujarat riots, in which over 1,000 people died. now, the programme wasn t broadcast in india but it s caused a furore there. first of all, let s watch a short clip of the documentary from close to the beginning of the first episode. he is the leader of the world s biggest democracy. he came to power promising a new age of prosperity.
well, if they re not making money, who can? it s100% not a podcast problem. this is a spotify problem. spotify is not making money. it has never made money. and it has a complicated rights deal with music studios, record labels, artists that has basically bled into its podcast offering, and that they try to use podcast as maybe a way of simplifying that difficult rights relationship. but it hasn t worked. and spotify needs to prove that it s going to be a profitable company in the next few years. otherwise, its investors are going to start to ask a lot, lot more and not more interrogatory questions. so those issues are specific to spotify. arielle, more broadly on podcasts, presumably you look across the us market and see lots of podcasts which are managing to well, notjust make ends meet but make money. yes, there is a lot of money happening for independent creators as well as larger publications. and the reason that podcasters are able to do that is because you ll hear this time and
you ve got these multi strand kind of productions, and podcasting is at a stage where i think that in order to be a serious competitor across various media forms, you have to be a bit more dynamic. you can tjust be, i m going to go out on this open rss feed, this old school technology that s been around unchanging for 15 years. it s like newspapers not refusing to go online when when the internet was invented or not creating a paywall. all sorts of opportunities have come about for podcasting, and i think we d be foolish not to take this opportunity to rethink the idea. all right. do you watch podcasts or do you just listen to them? i just listen to them personally. would you watch them? oh, no, iwould not. i personally am somebody who likes to drive the car while i m listening. i like to go on walks. my house is extremely clean because i listen to podcasts. i personally need to be doing something while i m listening or else i don t retain the information. all right. just quickly, nick
opportunity to bring potential listeners from zero to one, listening to no podcast, to listening to at least one podcast. and that will get more listeners spending more time with audio spoken audio in their ears. i think spotify has the opportunity to use its landscape, to use its apps, to use all of the infrastructure that it has to bring more potential listeners into the fold. i think the key is that daniel ek has sort of implied that he sees spotify s podcasting mission as mature now, that it should be evidencing its successes now. i think the key is that daniel ek has sort of implied that he sees spotify s podcasting mission as mature now, that it should be evidencing its successes now. and i think that s the whole industry, which is always treated as kind of nascent, on the verge of being the next big thing. it is a mature industry now. it mayjust simply not be the biggest thing in the world, but why is it not making money for them? they re the biggest music streamer in the world.
at ten o clock, reeta chakrabarti will be here with a full roundup of the days news. first, the media show and a warning this programme contains flashing images. hello and welcome to this week s edition of the media show. now in a minute, we re going to talk about spotify. it s the world s most popular music streaming platform. it spent close to a billion dollars on podcasting, too, but there are all sorts of different developments coming out of spotify at the moment. and its ceo has said that perhaps they got carried away with new investments. we ll try and unpack what s going on and work out what that means for making money off music streaming and off podcast, too. first of all, though, we re