Spotify To Buy Joe Rogan’s Podcast Rights For A Whopping $100 million

Digital music streaming service, Spotify, on Tuesday, announced that it has signed an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan, an American comedian, podcast host, and mixed martial arts commentator, for his podcast series “The Joe Rogan Experience”. 

This means that the episodes’ full audio and video content would available exclusively for Spotify users. This deal was signed for $ 100 million, making it one of the largest licensing agreements in the rapidly growing podcast business.

Joe Rogan’s podcast will debut on Spotify on 1st September 2020 which includes his full library, dating back 11 years, and will be exclusive on Spotify. Listeners won’t have to pay to access the episodes, but they must become Spotify users. 

 

 

 

 

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Announcement: the podcast is moving to @spotify! Starting on September 1 the podcast will be available on Spotify as well as all platforms, and then at the end of the year it will move exclusively to Spotify, including the video version. It will remain FREE, and it will be the exact same show. It’s just a licensing deal, so Spotify won’t have any creative control over the show. They want me to just continue doing it the way I’m doing it right now. We will still have clips up on YouTube but full versions of the show will only be on Spotify after the end of the year. I’m excited to have the support of the largest audio platform in the world and I hope you folks are there when we make the switch!

A post shared by Joe Rogan (@joerogan) on May 19, 2020 at 11:30am PDT

Spotify said in a press release that Rogan retains creative control over his show. The company will also work with an ad agency to jointly sell ads for the program. Rogan said last year his show reached about 190 million downloads a month.

Rogan’s YouTube channel will remain live but won’t contain full episodes. There would be clips or other supplementary content that could benefit from YouTube’s search algorithm and drive people towards listening to full episodes on Spotify.

The news sent Spotify shares surging higher, up as much as 11% to $174.42 in the afternoon trading.