In January 2022, Neil Young gave Spotify a choice between his music and Joe Rogan. Spotify pulled his songs and kept Rogan. On 8 October 2026, Spotify extended its agreement with Joe Rogan with a new multi-year licence for The Joe Rogan Experience. It did not disclose the price.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the new deal has similar terms to the previous one from 2024, for which Rogan may have received an estimated quarter of a billion dollars. Since then the show has not belonged to Spotify alone. It is also on YouTube, where it now has over twenty-one million subscribers. On Spotify it has eighteen million followers, according to the company's announcement. Spotify is thus again paying for a show that listeners can also play elsewhere.
Ashley Carman, the Bloomberg reporter who writes about podcasts, sees in the renewal Rogan's loyalty to the company that stood by him in the dispute with Young, and also a market that has barely changed since his first signing with Spotify.
The Edison Research ranking confirms this. The most-listened-to American podcasts had the same shows in the top three places in the second quarter of this year as in 2020, with Rogan's in the lead. The Daily and Crime Junkie have only swapped places. The entire top five did not move over two quarters in a row.
A stable top is, according to Carman, good news for the biggest stars. The networks pay the bill. They fight over the same names, write ever bigger cheques, and repeat the whole cycle a few years later. She points to Studio71 as an example.
Within three months of its sale, Studio71 lost three shows
In April this year, the German group ProSiebenSat.1 sold the US arm of Studio71 to Fixated. The sale did not affect the European part of the network. The group wants to concentrate on entertainment in German-speaking countries.
Six days after the group announced the sale, Red Seat Ventures, which is owned by Fox, announced a multi-year deal with the show Kill Tony. Until then the show had belonged to the Studio71 network. Now Fox sells its advertising and also puts it on its streaming services.
In July, two more left. Club Random, which joined Studio71 the year before last, was signed by the network Daylight Media. Eight days later, The Bald and the Beautiful concluded a three-year exclusive deal with SiriusXM. That show was something Studio71 had launched itself. Meanwhile, according to Carman, Fixated has been talking with potential buyers about selling parts of the company.
Jesse Burton, who heads shows at The Athletic, wrote under Carman's post that a network offering stars only a guaranteed sum is easy to replace. As added value he named priority placement in front of hundreds of millions of Spotify subscribers. Spotify has such a shop window. Carman asks whether it is simply a race over who offers the stars more money. In October, Spotify gave Rogan a deal that, according to the Wall Street Journal, has similar terms to the one from 2024.
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