Well, ladies and gentlemen, things were just going a little too good for a little too long. I should have seen it coming. But I was blind. Blind to the machinations of man and his blind faith in capitalism.
Kind of.
I took a stand some time ago to get Spotify out of my life when they said it was totally cool to platform Joe Rogan. Joe is one of the most popular sources of willful ignorance in the country. Anyone that says to you “I’m just asking questions.” is lying to you. They already know the answer, but they’re counting on you not being able to wade through their thigh deep mound of bullshit to see what they’re really getting at.
I used to have a Spotify account. I paid for it. But after that, I stopped. I couldn’t, in good conscious, keep sending money to that platform.
Anyway.
Many years back I put the Electric Leftovers show up on a little platform called Anchor. It came highly recommended, it did everything I needed it to do, it was free, it wasn’t owned by anyone at the time. All the boxes were checked for your middle aged podcast host.
But then.
Spotify bought Anchor. They didn’t do much with it at first, they just owned it. Begrudgingly I stuck with it though as, at the time, I think we were on the tail end of year 7 of the show. That’s a lot of shows to move around. But I did start, at about the time, uploading the older stuff to YouTube as a video. Not as great but it’s there.
But then.
Spotify rebranded Anchor to “Spotify For Podcasters” or some nonense like that. I continued to begrudge. Earlier this week I hit my begrudge limit. Spotify is now, starting in May, going to require anyone using Anchor/Spotify For Podcasters (hereto known as SfP) to have a Spotify account. This does… what? Exactly? It’s working fine as is, it’s doing the job just fine. It’s a numbers game. Likely there are enough people using Anchor/SfP now but don’t have a Spotify account that Spot there wants to claim them as their own. To do that you just make em get it.
I don’t know if anyone else will remember this but several years ago YouTube changed their account structure and tried to force everyone that had a YouTube account to get a universal Google account. If you didn’t have gmail, well too bad now you need it or you can’t use the channel you’ve had for nearly a decade. It also had something to do with that really weird Google+ thing? Everyone with anything in the googleverse had it but no one used it? Eventually in 2019 they killed it. No one noticed. I don’t like gmail. I hate google. But I had to capitulate to keep the channel open and operating. Thankfully that requirement didn’t last long.
Oh, and.
Speaking of Google killing of failed services… Google Podcasts is going away. It’s shutting down. It’s being replaced with YouTube Music. Not sure how that’s gonna work but whatever. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
And so.
Spotify has pinched my last nerve. So the podcast will be leaving Anchor/SfP sometime this year I will be taking it down. I have moved the hosting for all new episodes to this very website. I’ve already got it setup, you can find it by clicking the Electric Leftovers link at the top of this page and you can subscribe directly from here. You’ll also find a link to other services that I’ve got the show hosted on. Amazon, iHeart, Podchaser, Audible, etc. I’ll add more as I’m able to get it setup.
I don’t like it, but I’m not going to just accept that I have to deal with Spotify because they wanted to buy up the competition, as it were. We have choice and I’m choosing to not “partner up” with a guy that doesn’t want you to get a vaccine because RFK Jr. once told him it gave someone he never met a tummy ache, but thinks taking horse meds and steroids is totally cool. I don’t have to do it, I won’t do it.
Finally. I want to thank ya’ll for sticking with me on the website, Youtube, Twitch, the podcast, and all that jazz. It’s been a long run. I think I was barely 22 when I started doing this stuff and I’m 40 now. That’s a lot of time to devote to all this nonsense. I dunno how long I’ll keep it up, but if ya’ll keep watching, I’ll keep making.
Thanks a lot.