Following reports from The NY Budgets and other news outlets, Senator Maggie Hassan is demanding information about how Spotify is handling phony podcasts promoting potentially illegal online pharmacies.
Spotify said last week that it had removed dozens of podcasts identified by CNN that blatantly promoted the online pharmacies purportedly selling drugs such as Adderall and Oxycontin, in some cases without a prescription. Business Insider also reported that it had flagged 200 podcasts that Spotify subsequently removed.
The fake podcasts — which had showed up among the top suggestions in searches for drug names — violated Spotify’s rules and threatened to direct users to spammy and potentially illegal websites.
US law prohibits buying controlled substances online without a prescription. Parents, experts and lawmakers have urged tech giants to do more to prevent the sale of counterfeit or illicit drugs to young people through their platforms, after multiple teens have died of overdoses from pills bought online.
Now Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat and theranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, wants answers about how these fake podcasts proliferated on Spotify and what the company is doing to stop it from happening again In a letter sent Thursday, Hassan urged Spotify CEO Daniel Ek to “take action to prevent fake podcasts that facilitate the illicit sale of drugs.”
“Far too many parents have experienced the unimaginable pain of losing their child to an accidental overdose,” Hassan told CNN News in an exclusive statement ahead of the letter’s release. “Spotify has a responsibility to significantly ramp up its efforts to stop criminals from using the platform to facilitate deadly drug sales to anyone, especially teens.”
The letter asks Spotify to provide details about the content it has taken down; how many users interacted with the drug sales podcasts before they were removed; whether the company earned any revenue from the podcasts; and whether Spotify works with law enforcement when it discovers illegal content. It also asks what moderation tools and practices the company has implemented to identify drug-related content and whether it will be making any updates considering the recent reports.
Hassan has asked Spotify to respond by June 12.
In a statement to The Budgets last week, a Spotify spokesperson said: “We are constantly working to detect and remove violating content across our service.” In response to Hassan’s letter, the company reiterated that statement, and a spokesperson added that such content also exists on other platforms and that the company has earned no revenue from the phony podcasts.
You may remember Tony Hinchcliffe as the stand-up comedian who, last fall, maligned the island of Puerto Rico in an inflammatory set during a rally in New York for the Trump presidential campaign.
Despite the criticism for those comments, Mr. Hinchcliffe landed a Netflix deal in March for three specials based on his long-running live comedy podcast, “Kill Tony.” That show is ranked modestly at No. 51 on Spotify and No. 178 on Apple Podcasts’ top charts, which track the most popular podcasts in the United States based on a combination of various factors: streams, downloads, subscribers and other mystery metrics.
Yet a new chart, released Thursday, offers new hints about Mr. Hinchcliffe’s mass appeal. For the first time, YouTube has published its ranking of top podcasts in the United States, offering a fresh perspective on a sprawling landscape.
There, “Kill Tony” is ranked No. 2, just below the reigning king of podcasts, Joe Rogan.
Top Podcasts by Platform
Top Podcasts by Platform
Data as of May 15 · Source: Platform listings · By The New York Times
Another major difference from the Spotify and Apple charts: Many popular and well-established podcasts did not make YouTube’s top 100 ranking, which is based on overall watch time. Among the missing: “Call Her Daddy,” “Crime Junkie,” “SmartLess,” “The Daily” and “New Heights,” all frequently in the top 10 of various quarterly or annual lists.
There were familiar names on YouTube’s list, including MeidasTouch, Shannon Sharpe and Theo Von in the top 10. But when compared with the existing charts, YouTube’s version sometimes seems like a fun house mirror. While the hit podcast “Dateline NBC,” for example, was absent — it does not regularly upload episodes to YouTube — the CBS true-crime newsmagazine “48 Hours” appeared at No. 4.
Theo Von and Donald J. Trump last year on an episode of Mr. Von’s “This Past Weekend” podcast show. (Theo Von/YouTube)Ben Meiselas, co-founder of MeidasTouch. (Michael Lewis/Variety)Shannon Sharpe, a former N.F.L. player, is among podcast hosts with spots in the top 10 on YouTube. (Sean Gardner/Getty Images)
Despite its roots in video, YouTube has come to dominate podcasting. It is the preferred service for one-third of weekly podcast listeners in the United States, capturing more users than Spotify or Apple Podcasts, according to Edison Research. But that happened only in recent years, in conjunction with the growing popularity of video podcasts.
“They saw something other people didn’t in video,” said Brett Meiselas, a founder of MeidasTouch, comparing YouTube against the other platforms, which are now trying to attract more video creators and viewers. Mr. Meiselas, who said the chart was “a long time coming,” was pleased but not entirely surprised by his show’s No. 5 spot: “It means our work is getting out there.”
As podcasts broadly continue to rise in influence — helping to sell products, find voters and spread hot-button ideas — YouTube’s chart represents another tool for understanding who holds sway with American consumers.
It is a way to “help audiences and podcasters alike understand who is shaping that conversation,” said Brandon Feldman, the director of news, civics and podcast partnerships at YouTube. The chart can also serve as “inspiration,” or “a guide” to success for other podcasters looking to increase their audience size, he added. The ranking will be updated every Wednesday.
Mr. Hinchcliffe’s success, for example, embodies the “cultural zeitgeist,” Mr. Feldman said: “The audience is showing us what they’re looking for.” (Anti-woke comedy is Mr. Hinchcliffe’s specialty.)
The chart also comes as podcast platforms inch toward some more transparency in their metrics.
Spotify recently announced a feature that reveals how many times a podcast episode has been played. But historically, podcast platforms and producers have closely guarded their streaming and download numbers. YouTube is an exception, having published view counts long before it became a podcast destination. (It now claims to reach one billion podcast users per month.)
The big shows missing from YouTube’s chart could still join in the coming weeks. But for some podcasts, this may require a deeper investment in video — or, at the very least, ensuring their videos are correctly organized into YouTube playlists, which is critical to the ranking, Mr. Feldman said.
Joe Rogan at President Trump’s inauguration in January. (Pool photo/Saul Loeb)
Charts are imperfect measuring sticks, susceptible to manipulation, lacking in transparency and calibrated more as snapshots of current popularity rather than overall popularity.
Mr. Rogan, for example, moves up and down the rankings, but no show has ever come close to drawing his total audience. (Hosts who have managed to unseat his position on the charts include Kylie Kelce, who does not appear on YouTube’s top 100 list, and Mel Robbins, who is ranked at No. 76.)
Kylie Kelce attends an Eagles Autism Foundation event in Philadelphia, on June 13, 2024. (Michael Simon / Getty Images for HP Inc. file)The millionaire TV personality pointed out that 20-year-olds are living through a recession, workforce changes, and unfair scrutiny from leaders. (Heidi Gutman / Getty Images)
But platforms benefit when new names rise to the top, said Melissa Kiesche, senior vice president of Edison Research, which has built its own list of podcast rankings based on surveys. “They don’t want to see Joe Rogan at No. 1 every single week forever,” she said. Discovery drives more listening hours.
Sometimes that discovery applies to household names, too. YouTube’s top 50 included podcasts from legacy television brands such as “NBC Nightly News,” “60 Minutes” and “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”
Mr. Feldman characterized the chart, where Gen Z social media stars sit alongside cable figures who rose to prominence in the 1990s, like Nancy Grace or Tucker Carlson, as a “good testament to how those worlds can coexist and hopefully thrive together.”
Spotify informed The Budgets that they have paid podcast publishers and creators over $100 million since the start of January.
The payout is the result of a program introduced in 2025 that opened up new revenue streams to eligible hosts. But it is also an attempt to draw more creators (and their audiences) to Spotify, as the rise of video podcasting has driven many of them to YouTube.
Video has come to dominate podcasting. More than half of Americans over the age of 12 have watched a video podcast — but primarily on YouTube, according to an Edison Research report from January. The service claims to reach 1 billion podcast consumers every month, making it the dominant platform for podcasts — a media king and kingmaker — and leaving onetime audio-only platforms like Spotify and Apple Podcasts in the dust. (Spotify introduced video podcasts in 2019.)
Compared with YouTube, Spotify has become a podcast underdog, with about 170 million monthly podcast listeners among its total audience of 675 million. One indication of how far Spotify has to go to catch up to the top player: YouTube paid out more than $70 billion to creators and media companies from 2021 to 2024.
The company reports earnings on Tuesday and is expected to make about 540 million euros in pretax income on 4.2 billion euros in sales, according to S&P Capital IQ.
But Spotify, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange but is based in Stockholm, remains a major player in the industry thanks in part to its talent roster — it distributes and sells advertising for the biggest podcast in the world, “The Joe Rogan Experience.” And it achieved its first full year of profitability in 2024. (Mr. Rogan’s podcasts are also available on YouTube.)
The new partner program aims to chip away at YouTube’s dominance. Spotify previously paid creators only by sharing advertising revenue with them, much like YouTube. Now it also gives them incentives to upload videos, with eligible creators earning additional money based on how much premium subscribers engage with their videos.
The company is trying to attract more viewers. At the same time that Spotify announced the partnership program in November, it announced that paid subscribers in certain markets wouldn’t have to watch dynamic ads in video podcasts. Video consumption has already increased by more than 40 percent since January, according to Spotify.
The question now is whether Spotify can persuade creators to shift priorities.
David Coles, host of the horror fiction podcast “Just Creepy: Scary Stories,” said he is re-evaluating his “home platform” after his Spotify revenue recently surpassed his YouTube revenue. Last quarter, Mr. Coles said he received about $45,500 from Spotify. After joining the company’s new partner program, his quarterly Spotify income rose to about $81,600.
This increase can be even more dramatic for larger shows and podcast companies, like YMH Studios, a comedy network with 2.1 million YouTube subscribers that produces popular podcasts including “2 Bears, 1 Cave.” While declining to share exact figures, YMH Studios said its quarterly Spotify revenue more than tripled after joining the partner program.
Although creators emphasized that these are still early days, Alan Abdine, the head of advertising revenue at YMH Studios, called the new payment program “a game-changer” and “a very happy surprise.”
