Joe Rogan is sticking with Spotify.
The company has locked in a new multiyear agreement with Rogan, securing licensing rights and advertising sales for The Joe Rogan Experience. People familiar with the matter say the renewal carries terms similar to the previous contract, which included an earnout estimated at $250 million.
Rogan made clear he wasn’t interested in going anywhere else.
“The partnership with Spotify has been an amazing fit, and they’re incredible to work with. I’m extremely happy and excited to continue with them for years to come.”
The numbers behind that partnership are hard to argue with. The Joe Rogan Experience has held the No. 1 spot among U.S. podcasts tracked by Edison Research every year since 2019. The show has built a following of more than 18 million people on Spotify and over 21 million on YouTube, a reach few media figures anywhere can claim.
Rogan has personally claimed at one point an episode averages 11 million views.
The official clips channel added 18M views this past month.
The main channel added 44M views in the last 30 days.
This presents a steep decline since 2024 when it was averaging closer to 60M.
Rogan launched the show back in 2009, long before video podcasts were a common habit. He’s credited with helping turn the long-form, camera-on conversation into a format of its own, sitting down with comedians, actors, politicians, scientists and authors for conversations that regularly stretch past three hours. That willingness to let a conversation breathe, rather than cut it down to a tidy segment, became part of what set the show apart.
It also turned Rogan into one of the central figures of the online manosphere, a label that captures only part of a much messier political identity. He’s backed Bernie Sanders, built a reputation as a sharp critic of cancel culture and interviewed and ultimately endorsed Donald Trump ahead of the 2024 election. More recently, he’s turned a critical eye on the Trump administration itself, taking aim at its approach to immigration enforcement. It’s a record that resists easy labeling, and that unpredictability is arguably part of why audiences keep tuning in.
Plenty of the show’s biggest moments over the past year had nothing to do with politics at all. Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, YouTube star MrBeast and UFO enthusiast Bob Lazar all sat down across from Rogan, a reminder that the show’s draw extends well past any single lane of guest.
Spotify first brought Rogan into the fold in 2020, paying more than $100 million for exclusive rights to the podcast as part of a broader push to build out its podcast business. At the time, some wondered whether locking the show behind Spotify’s walls might cost it listeners. Instead, the opposite happened. Edison Research found the show reached roughly 28.4 million Americans per week in the second quarter of 2026, up dramatically from 6.6 million at the start of 2020.
Spotify loosened its grip in early 2024, renewing the deal but allowing the show to spread back out to other platforms, including YouTube. Throughout the arrangement, Rogan and his team have kept full editorial control, with Spotify taking a hands-off stance on content.
That hands-off approach has been tested before. Musician Neil Young pulled his catalog from Spotify in 2022, pointing to what he called vaccine misinformation on Rogan‘s show. Spotify stood by Rogan rather than part ways, and Young eventually brought his music back to the platform in 2024.
Spotify has framed the relationship as a two-way benefit, arguing that authors, musicians and comedians who appear on the show get genuine exposure that sends listeners looking for their work elsewhere. For a company now counting 300 million premium subscribers, the show has become a case study in what a single piece of content can do for a platform’s growth.
Jordan Newman, Spotify’s head of content partnerships, tied that growth directly to Rogan‘s staying power.
“Joe has built something incredibly enduring, and his show continues to resonate with a massive global audience because there’s simply nothing else like it.”
