Spotify must’ve backed up the Brinks truck for Joe Rogan. He announced on Tuesday that his massively popular podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience, would soon be available exclusively on the streaming platform.
Spotify announced the pod would debut on its platform on Sept. 1 and would become exclusive later in the year.
“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,” Rogan wrote about the move on Instagram. “They want me to just continue doing it the way I’m doing it right now.”
Spotify has worked to expand its podcast offerings in the past two years and landing Rogan’s hugely popular show is a massive get.
“The talk series has long been the most-searched-for podcast on Spotify and is the leading show on practically every other podcasting platform,” the company said in a statement.
The migration to Spotify will be a loss for other podcast hosting services, as well as YouTube, where a video portion of Rogan’s interviews are currently uploaded and watched millions of times. The podcasts are typically very long, sometimes over three hours.
“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,” Rogan wrote on Instagram.
Spotify said the video episodes would be available as in-app vodcasts.
Terms of the deal had not yet been made public, but the payout for Rogan had to be sizable. Spotify has shown it’s willing to pay up. It spent some $200 million to acquire the website The Ringer, in part, to expand the platform’s stable of sports podcasts. In 2019, Spotify paid nearly $400 million to acquire the Gimlet and Parcast podcast networks as well as and the podcast tech provider Anchor.
Rogan’s long, winding conversations have proven to be massively popular. His guests range from celebrities to neuroscientists and everything in between. But Rogan, a stand-up comedian, is also a controversial figure. Rogan’s aversion to so-called political correctness has taken the form of comments widely considered transphobic, Islamophobic, and racist.