Although Spotify will try to have its cake and eat it too as it bows to the mob’s demands, the music and podcast streaming giant ultimately will not cower to its ultimate request and completely cancel Joe Rogan’s request for one simple reason: it cannot afford to.
Sure, there’s the explicit financial calculation. For starters, Spotify paid Rogan a staggering $100 million for the exclusive rights not just to his new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience but also the entirety of its decade-plus back-catalog. Given the millions of listens per episode Rogan’s shows scored on YouTube alone before the exclusivity deal, the price of paying out Rogan’s contract without aggregating the potential billions of more views would be prohibitively expensive.
