Anyhow, take two of the podcasters I happen to listen to:
- Michael Moore's Rumble - MM's complete focus until things get better
- Steve Lehto's Lehto's Law - Lemon law, legal and other stories
both stream to Youtube also, which are subject to two or more completely different corporate masters. It seems like a silly suggestion if there's no technical, legal or economic barriers to publishing to N platforms to suggest podcasters are locked-in. If someone were deplatformed from YT and Spotify, there's Twitch, Floatplane and Vimeo and hundreds of others. A sensible creator should have a website at a minimum to sell merch and link to social media, and have backup content sites and backup means of monetization (in-content, sponsored, and/or patreon/paypal direct). I think the big platforms are making it more and more difficult for small creators to make money, but I also think creators, large and small, need to diversify and protect themselves from being dependent on or being locked-into exclusive deals with any one corporate platform.
OTOH, paraphrasing Chris Hedges, public commons and public discourse have been replaced with corporate platforms, public-private "partnerships" and mixed-use shopping areas. Slowly-but-surely, a number of corporations are gobbling us up and making us subject to their arbitrary whims (Youtube's opaque processes to handle copyright and fair-use). He refers to it by the name "inverted totalitarianism".. corporations subvert democracy with unlimited "speech" PAC money, manufacture consent through PR messaging, Cambridge Analytica's and troll factories to shift sentiment in desired ways, and possess immense control over individuals to express themselves and make a living that's not obvious until it's used, the effects of which are rarely obvious to other people.