Spotify announced that week that Joe Rogan’s huge podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, will to Spotify-and only be available as a Spotify exclusive. This continues Spotify’s aggressive push into the podcast space, following blockbuster acquisitions of The Ringer and Gimlet.

This has helped Spotify surge into the most important player in the podcast space outside of Apple. And you have to give them credit for their choice of acquisitions. The Ringer and Gimlet have proven to be excellent podcast producers, so they’re buying talent that can develop shows and drive new content for Spotify.

With Rogan, Spotify grabs one of the top podcasts with 90 million downloads per month, and the exclusive nature of the deal will drive more downloads of the Spotify app. Spotify can sell ads on the show for users who down’t buy a subscription, but then can drive more subscribers by offering the show ad-free to subscribers. Frankly it’s a brilliant play and is money well spent.

Meanwhile, this deal is a huge blow to Libsyn, which will host the Joe Rogan podcast until September. Libsyn has been a hosting leader in the podcasting space, but now has many competitors and has lost their main source of downloads and prestige.

The online music world is getting a new entry soon with the launch of Xbox Music. The question is whether Microsoft will finally get things right after their doomed Zune experiment.

Still, Xbox Music is more than just about rebranding. Microsoft clearly intends it to be an all-encompassing effort. Users can download music a la carte like Apple (AAPL) iTunes, stream music a la Spotify, and listen to customized playlists in the same vein as Pandora (P). Early impressions cast the Xbox Music experience as “wonderful,” even.

The problem is that it’s only launching on Xbox and Windows * and won’t be on other platforms until next year. Still, Microsoft needed a new music service, and it looks like again they might have a good product based on copying its successful competitors.