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Spotify, Music, and Podcasting: The Meteor is Coming
In sports, after a big trade or acquisition, sportswriters are fond of writing “winners and losers” columns, where they give their assessments of how the teams involved fared. I eat those up. Today, our increasingly growing little world of Podcasting has its own big acquisition to announce: Spotify’s purchase of both Gimlet and Anchor for hundreds of millions of dollars.
I’m not going to write about any of the “losers” here. Not my style. But there are winners aplenty. Certainly, the companies involved. The whole industry may now see increased investment, which will lead to increased reach, better tech, and better content.
But there is an eventual domino to fall here that could lead to the biggest winner of all: music listeners. Walk with me for a moment.
First, why is Spotify doubling down on podcasts? There is an overt reason and slightly less overt reason. The overt reason: you can’t become the #1 audio platform in the world (their stated goal) if you don’t feature the nearly 25% of consumed audio that is spoken word programming, at least here in the USA that is the portion seen in Edison’s Share of Ear® research. So to attract and retain audio’s best customers, Spotify needs to represent all of the interest in audio. That one’s simple.
