Spotify said on October 8, 2026 that The Joe Rogan Experience will stay on its service under a new agreement covering several years, with episodes remaining available on other platforms too. The company published no payment figure, no end date and no advertising detail.

In Short

Spotify said on October 8, 2026 that it has agreed to keep Joe Rogan's podcast for several more years, and episodes will also stay available on other platforms. The news matters because the show is one of the largest in audio and video, yet Spotify did not say what it is paying, when the deal ends or how ads are handled. For listeners and viewers nothing changes right away, because new episodes keep arriving on Spotify each week.

What Spotify published on October 8

Spotify posted the news on its For the Record newsroom under the headline "Spotify and Joe Rogan Continue Longstanding Partnership". According to Spotify, The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE) is the world's most popular podcast and, with 18 million followers, has been the most-followed show on the service since the partnership began in 2020. Six years on, the company describes it as a defining show on Spotify, with a global audience and a format built on long-form conversation.

The new arrangement is described as a multi-year licensing agreement. According to Spotify, fans can keep watching or listening to new episodes on Spotify each week, "as well as across other platforms". The post does not name those platforms.

Rogan said in the post that the partnership "has been an amazing fit". Jordan Newman, Spotify's Head of Content Partnerships, said that "Spotify's podcast business has grown alongside JRE over the years". The post also calls JRE "the top podcast across all major platforms in 2025", without naming a source for that ranking.

To mark the news, Spotify put a few questions to Rogan about his listening habits. He said he mostly listens to 1990s hip-hop while exercising and named The Tim Dillon Show as his go-to podcast for errands and chores.

What the post leaves out

Several details that normally define a content deal are missing. There is no payment figure and no end date. The post does not say whether any window of exclusivity applies to audio or video, which platforms carry the show, or how advertising is sold and shared between Spotify and the show's team.

The 18 million figure also calls for careful reading, because it counts followers rather than plays or reach. On June 11, 2026, Spotify redefined a podcast play as a listen or view of at least 30 seconds, in line with a definition from the Alliance for Measurement in Podcasting. The post offers neither a play count nor a reach estimate, so the follower number cannot be set against the download, view or audience figures that other parties publish.

The claim of a 2025 lead across major platforms matches several public rankings, although each measures something different. Edison Research's Top 50 for the third quarter of 2025, released on October 17, 2025, kept the show in first place on US reach among weekly podcast consumers aged 13 and older. Apple placed it first in its US listenership rankingin the year-end charts published on November 18, 2025. YouTube's Recap, announced on December 2, 2025, listed the show in the top position among podcasts, ahead of KILL TONY and Good Mythical Morning.

From exclusive to shared

The relationship has changed shape before. According to Bloomberg, Spotify said on May 19, 2020 that the show would arrive on its service on September 1 of that year and later become exclusive to it, with Spotify also gaining exclusive rights to the video recordings. According to the Associated Press, a new partnership published on Spotify's corporate blog on February 2, 2024 opened the show to competing platforms, including YouTube and Apple Podcasts. The AP noted a reported value of up to 250 million dollars for that deal and said Spotify declined to comment on the financial details.

The October 2026 agreement arrives roughly two years and eight months after that change, and its wording keeps availability on other platforms in place.

Where the audience sits

Retaining the show does not settle where most viewers and listeners spend their time. YouTube added podcasts to YouTube Charts on May 15, 2025: a US top 100 updated every Wednesday and ranked by total watch time, with clips and Shorts excluded. Edison Research ranked the show first in both its second-quarter 2024 and second-quarter 2025 lists, and its third-quarter 2025 release noted that The MeidasTouch Podcast briefly passed the show in YouTube's podcast rankings.

A survey released on October 1, 2026 by Sounds Profitable, covering 5,473 US adults in August 2026, put YouTube well ahead. Among people who had ever consumed a podcast, 63% had used YouTube for podcasts in the past 12 months, against 33% for Spotify, 21% for Netflix and 15% for Apple Podcasts. As the platform used most, YouTube held 40%, Spotify 17% (down from 18%), Apple Podcasts 8% (down from 11%) and Netflix 5%.

Counting rules differ between services, and recent studies show how far apart the units can sit. Podstock, a podcast analytics company, said on May 12, 2026 that a Spotify stream averaged about 1.5 times the consumption time of a YouTube view of the same episode, a pattern it found in 95% of the episodes studied; the company gave no exact sample size. On September 3, 2026, Podtrac reported, after a change to how YouTube counts views on August 24, that 64% of counted views on podcast playlist episodes were engaged views, against 58% for other channel videos, based on 84.2 million views on August 27 and 28.

A catalogue study by MillionPodcasts, circulated on August 10, 2026, modelled the show at more than 14 million monthly listeners, the largest in its top ten. The company says its listener counts are modelled rather than measured. The same study found that about 77% of 34,208 active English-language video podcasts showed no brand activity.

Spotify's podcast business around the show

Spotify's second-quarter 2026 results, published on August 4, 2026, put the service at 777 million monthly active users and 300 million Premium subscribers. Ad-supported revenue was 446 million euros, up 1% as reported and 3% in constant currency, against a restated 440 million euros a year earlier. Spotify had originally reported 453 million euros for the second quarter of 2025, a 1% decline, so the two bases do not reconcile. Automated channels made up nearly 40% of ad-supported revenue, up from just over 30% in the first quarter, and ad-supported monthly users reached 494 million, up 14%. Podcast growth came from sponsorship gains inside the Owned and Licensed portfolio.

At its Investor Day on May 21, 2026, Spotify said more than 500 million users had streamed a video podcast, up nearly 50% year over year. It added that podcast engagement had doubled since the 2022 edition, that the podcast business was in a second consecutive year of profitability, and that it saw a long-term path to 40% margins.

The Partner Program, which opened on January 2, 2025 in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, was followed by a reported 300% rise in creator payouts in January 2025 compared with a year earlier. On January 7, 2026, Spotify cut eligibility thresholds by 80%: from 2,000 to 1,000 engaged audience members, from 10,000 to 2,000 hours consumed over 30 days, and from 12 published episodes to 3. Sponsorship tools rolling out from April 2026 let enrolled creators add, replace and schedule host-read sponsorships in video episodes.

Video licensing elsewhere moved in parallel. On October 14, 2025, Netflix and Spotify agreed a distribution partnershipbringing video podcasts from Spotify Studios and The Ringer to Netflix in the US from early 2026, appearing on both services at the same time. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the Rogan show was left out. Disney+ and Hulu began adding iHeartMedia podcasts on August 14, 2026, six in total, and Netflix's second-quarter 2026 shareholder letter disclosed iHeartMedia programming as well. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos told analysts that podcast viewing appeared incremental and concentrated in daytime hours.

The sales plumbing has changed too. Spotify's automated podcast buying, extended on July 11, 2025, covered Original and Licensed podcasts through the Ad Exchange in 12 markets and through Ads Manager in eight. On July 6, 2026, Spotify added podcast inventory to its direct Ad Exchange integration with Amazon DSP, together with programmatic guaranteed deals that set fixed CPMs against Spotify's first-party audiences for audio and video. The October 8 post does not say whether the Rogan show sits inside any of those channels.

What the news means for marketing

For the advertising market, the notable feature of the announcement is its silence on advertising. A show that Spotify itself places at the top of several rankings is now covered by an agreement whose commercial mechanics, including who sells the sponsorships and who keeps what, sit outside the public record. The surrounding system is moving quickly: automated channels near 40% of ad-supported revenue, sponsorship tooling for video episodes, and a play definition rewritten in June.

The second feature is the measurement split. Because the agreement keeps the show on several services, its audience continues to be described in units that do not convert into one another: followers on Spotify, reach in Edison's survey, watch time on YouTube. Each platform also changes its own counting rules, as Spotify did on June 11, 2026 and YouTube did on August 24, 2026.

The third is competitive position. Spotify's statement that the show is its most-followed sits beside survey data that place YouTube first among podcast platforms by a wide margin, and that put Netflix, whose video podcast deal with Spotify left the show out, at 21% of past-year use. Holding a title and holding the attention of its audience are separate outcomes, and the October 8 post addresses only the first.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Spotify and Joe Rogan, host of The Joe Rogan Experience. Jordan Newman, Spotify's Head of Content Partnerships, and Rogan are quoted in Spotify's post.

What: A new agreement covering several years that keeps the show on Spotify while episodes remain available on other platforms. Spotify disclosed no payment figure, end date or advertising terms.

When: Spotify published the news on October 8, 2026, six years after the partnership began in 2020.

Where: On Spotify and, according to the company, across other platforms it does not name. The announcement appeared on Spotify's For the Record newsroom.

Why: Spotify framed the agreement as a continuation of a relationship in which its podcast business has grown alongside the show. Public data places the show first in several 2025 rankings, while survey data place YouTube ahead of Spotify as the most-used podcast platform.