Isn't that exactly what Spotify does with podcasts? They also take podcasts that are hosted for free and then put ads in them
However I think the part missing (which again I am trying to fully understand what is happening here, their website really glosses over what is happening) is if Spotify was pulling podcasts from a place that served their own ads to instead serve Spotify ads without compensating where they got it from.
Which my understanding here, is what Musi is doing.
Sure, as far as I know Spotify doesn't block the authors ads but they add ads to podcasts where there are none. The average user doesn't know that Spotify is responsible for that and might stop listening. Some podcasters intentionally publish the first episodes ad free to grow their listener base
Well, the simplest way was to count downloads. Which, while slightly inflated, is a reasonable approximation for "One download, one likely listen". Because we all know it's inflated, it's easy for you and the ad agency to add a fudge-factor of "...minus the ten percent or so that have stopped listening but haven't stopped the auto-download"
But only Spotify knows how many people listened to the episode that Spotify grabbed, then served to their subscribers. Spotify is artificially shrinking the audience podcasters can say they're advertising to, especially smaller podcasters - because with less than a thousand streams or so, no fucking chance Spotify will tell you [in a timely fashion] how many people listened to you