Add Spotify to that long list of meats. Joe Budden announced on his August 26 episode The Joe Budden Podcast With Rory & Mal that he would leave the platform, where his show was an exclusive for two years, on September 23, when his contract expires. Budden said his performance was “undermined and underestimated,” comparing the podcast to more recent acquisitions such as Bill Simmons’s The Ringer network, which Spotify bought for nearly $ 200 million. “Spotify has never provided this podcast individually,” Budden claimed on the episode. “Spotify only cared about our contribution to the platform.” A Spotify rep told Variation that conversations with Budden were “ongoing.”
When Budden’s podcast moved to Spotify in 2018, it was one of the biggest hits in podcasts for the platform at the time. Now Budden claimed, “Spotify is looting. You plunder the audience of the podcast, and you keep plundering every step of the way. In the podcast episode, he said the platform did not pay bonuses, even though it exceeded listeners’ expectations by 900 percent, and his team could not step up for Christmas and New Year because it would cause them to air episodes. miss. At one point, he claims, Spotify offered Rolex watches instead of bonuses, then said the watches Budden and his team chose were too expensive. Even if it loses Budden, Spotify will continue to build the podcast network, taking over Joe Rogan’s The Joe Rogan Experience earlier this year (put on the platform in September) and earlier in August debuted a podcast by Michelle Obama. As for Budden’s future, he added: “September 23 I can not tell you where this podcast will be. But as it stands, I can tell you where it will not be, and that is Spotify. “
