Grubb's thoughtspace

At minute 0, upon hearing the news

Wow, that is an incredible amount of money. How could their ad revenues possibly be worth that kind of a figure? And to all these people on Twitter saying “I hope you'll still release your content on other platforms because Spotify sucks!”, good luck folks. That's not how this works.

2 minutes later

Oh I get it, they're going to borrow the Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, everybody else model and start presenting their own content in their own little walled garden. Oh well, I really enjoyed Reply All. Guess I better download all those back episodes while I still can.

A day or two later

Oh now I get it. This is how Big Tech will start getting their disgusting claws around the last bastion of the fun and open internet that still exists in the form of podcasting. If I were Thor I would bring a mighty anti-trust hammer down on all these assholes. I hope it's not too late, because they control all the channels of distribution and are about to start controlling all the channels of creation. I hate the internet.

But seriously Gimlet, I'm really frickin disappointed. I guess the fact that your very first podcast is called “Startup” is a giant hindsight clue as to your intentions but I really thought your image as young, scrappy journalists shedding light on some of the internet's darker corners was genuine. I guess everybody has a price, and I guess Spotify is calling up every successful podcasting company right now to see what theirs is.