Spotify never revealed the number of listeners Joe Rogan had on his hugely popular podcast. The “Joe Rogan Experience” is a huge podcast with a massive audience. It’s triple the size of the next most listened-to podcast on Spotify.
The Wall Street Journal reported in February that Rogan signed a multi-year contract with Spotify, worth approximately $250 million. Rogan received a minimum upfront guarantee, and revenue sharing based on the sales of advertisements by re-signing. According to the New York Daily News, this contract is for three years.
Rogan announced the new contract in a press statement:
It’s like social starvation if you never have cool conversations or don’t meet interesting people. It’s no wonder that so many people enjoy listening to podcasts. You can become a fly on the wall, and see the inner workings in the mind of someone different from anyone else you might encounter.
In the same press release, Spotify declared Rogan to be the “king of podcasting,” and added that “The Joe Rogan Experience”, “consistently ranks as the most-listened podcast globally” as well as “our users have ranked this show as Spotify Wrapped’s top podcast every year since 2020.”
Spotify has never before released actual numbers of listeners for its podcasters.
Spotify quietly launched a new feature in February that showed how many podcasts are available on its streaming service.
Bloomberg was the first to report the new feature and revealed that “The Joe Rogan Experience,” has 14.5 million followers. This huge number is almost three times as many followers as the second most popular show, “TED Talks Daily.” The “Call Her Daddy’ podcast, with 3.7 million followers, is in third place.
Scoop: It’s a generally accepted truth that Joe Rogan’s podcast is the biggest on Earth (!) But how massive is his audience?
Last month, Spotify quietly started testing a feature that discloses how many followers podcasts on the platform have.
His show is almost 3X bigger than… pic.twitter.com/AOkbqOb3rg
— Ashley Carman (@ashleyrcarman) March 21, 2024
Rogan’s deal with Spotify brings his show back to YouTube where it had previously enjoyed massive success. Rogan’s podcast was removed from YouTube when he signed an exclusive 2020 deal with Spotify that is estimated to be worth $100m.
The top three YouTube videos are: “Joe Rogan Experience”, #1315 – Bob Lazar & Jeremy Corbell, (58 million views), “The Joe Rogan Experience” #1368 – Edward Snowden (38 million views), and “The Joe Rogan Experience” #1470 – Elon Musk (33 million views).
Rogan has over 16.4 YouTube subscribers.
The musicians Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and others announced earlier this month that they would be returning their entire music catalog to Spotify following a boycott directed at Rogan.
Young and Mitchell removed their music from Spotify because they were allowing “irresponsible” people to “spread lies that cost people their lives” about COVID-19 vaccinations. The aim was to remove Rogan from the platform because he continually questioned the official coronavirus story.
Young has withdrawn his protest against Spotify and returned his music.
Young, who spoke this month, said that he made his decision because music services Apple and Amazon now offer the same podcasts of disinformation as SPOTIFY.
He continued, “I can’t just leave Apple or Amazon like I did Spotify because my music will have very limited streaming outlets for music fans.” “I have returned to Spotify in the hope that Spotify’s sound quality will improve and that people will be better able to listen to and feel our music.”
