Got an email today:
We’re excited to let you know that Amazon Music and Audible will be adding podcasts to our respective services, including Amazon Music’s free tier. Please note that this information is confidential. In advance of launch, we would like to invite you to make your podcast(s) available on our services. Agreeing to add your content ensures your podcast(s) will be available to Amazon Music’s rapidly growing audience of over 55 million customers. Both Amazon Music and Audible will stream your content directly from wherever you host it; we will not rehost your content.
Here’s Amazon sending me an email about Audible “adding” podcasts and telling me that this is “confidential”. I guess if it was confidential, you shouldn’t send it via unsolicited email. This makes me wonder about confidentiality, though: how does information become confidential? It must be a contract: a non-disclosure agreement, maybe hidden inside a work contract… or if based on mutual trust. But why would I trust Amazon and Jeff “$3000/s” Bezos?
So here is this service, made for the richest man on earth to earn more money by letting other people listen to the podcasts you make – but they don’t share your burden, they don’t cover your expenses, they don’t pay for your equipment, they don’t cover your hosting. “We’ll be your middle man, we’ll help you reach 55m people!” You do it for the exposure while we do it for the money. Ah, capitalism.
Truly, this is the attack of the middle men: mediocre men, inserting themselves everywhere, taking your stuff. To think that we believed the Internet would help us get rid of them.
#Amazon #Capitalism #Podcast