Shulou(Shulou.com)05/31 Report--

Amazon Music has signed an exclusive agreement with NPR to distribute Guy Raz's How I Built This podcasts a week before any other platform begins in March. The show will be produced twice a week, at a faster pace than once a week, and will be available in advance through Amazon Music and Wondery Plus. After that week's window, the series will be widely released on podcast platforms and radio stations. Wondery will also receive exclusive advertising sales rights and YouTube distribution rights, while NPR will retain broadcast distribution rights and underwriting rights.

In an internal memo to NPR employees obtained by The Verge, Anya Grundmann, senior vice president of the show, and John Lansing, CEO and president, wrote that the deal was "the first of its kind by NPR" and "leveraged a vibrant moment of podcast space to help us reach a new digital audience through Amazon's platform and marketing efforts and generate guaranteed revenue to advance our mission." They wrote that advertising space would be opened up for NPR promotional films and that the deal would "provide three years of guaranteed funding". This is about the length of the transaction.)

"We thank the extraordinary team behind Guy and HIBT for the opportunity to explore this new business opportunity, which will expand the impact and visibility of key programs and enable us to continue to invest and support our mission," they wrote.

The deal mimics other Amazon deals. It has signed similar one-week exclusive agreements with SmartLess and My Favorite Murder. This is in sharp contrast to Spotify's strategy of signing a completely exclusive deal, as we have seen in Call Her Daddy and The Joe Rogan Experience. While Amazon Music seems to want to recruit new users for its platform, ad sales arrangements are just as important, especially given the purchase of the podcast hosting and monetization service Art19.

Amazon may see the benefits of expanding its programming to sell more ads, an area where the company is increasingly making money. (in this month's earnings call, the company split its advertising business into its own business and said it made $31 billion last year.) It is not clear how much revenue Amazon thinks podcasts are likely to generate, but the availability of more money for large shows within its mandate will help it attract more advertisers interested in space and buying inventory.

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