Making Creator Headlines · Page 4
Spotify Puts the Membership Desk Beside the Play Button
· New York time
Spotify has introduced Memberships, allowing podcast creators to sell memberships from their show pages and let fans play exclusive episodes without leaving the app. The product opened to creators in October, and creators keep 90% of the earnings. The arrangement brings payment and listening closer together. A fan who decides to support a show can sign up where the show is already playing, rather than navigating to a separate service and then finding a way back to the audio. For a creator, fewer steps can make the membership offer easier to explain and administer. The other side of that convenience is the growing importance of the platform in the relationship between a show and its audience. The app is not simply where a listener presses play. It can also become the place where a creator presents a paid offer and delivers the material attached to it. Exclusive episodes give a membership a concrete appeal, but a creator still has to decide what belongs behind the membership and what remains available to everyone. That is an editorial decision as well as a commercial one: the most persuasive invitation to join cannot make the regular show feel like an empty waiting room. The podcast once asked listeners to subscribe. Now it can ask them to subscribe in a second, more financially enthusiastic way.
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