“We believe that there’s still an enormous amount of potential in improving the user experience,” Ek said on a call with investors. That likely means doing a better job of helping people find them and being the best player where users can listen to them. “Well, guess what? That team is now working on podcasts.”Įk emphasized a similar idea on the company’s most recent earnings call about the two acquisitions, referring more broadly to improving the “user experience” around podcasts on Spotify. “The music that we feed to you through our discovery engine through our machine learning is pretty darn good,” said Courtney Holt, Spotify’s head of studio and video, at the Hot Pod Summit at On Air Fest in Brooklyn, New York. Spotify has been successful in this realm when it comes to music, with playlists like Discover Weekly, and it intends to create the same kind of feature for podcasts. “Well, guess what? that team is now working on podcasts.”
Still, the team has a lot of work to do to bring podcasts to the masses and make Spotify the default listening app. This much is clear: Spotify knows podcasts can generate ad revenue - podcasts are estimated to bring in $659 million in revenue by 2020 - and it’s willing to invest in exclusive content to make sure that people listen on its platform. Both will continue to operate, but they’ll do so with the added goal of making Spotify the go-to destination for podcasts. Spotify spent more than $300 million to acquire Gimlet Media, the maker of Reply All and other popular shows, and Anchor, the company behind an app that allows anyone to easily create their own podcasts. The big questions have been about what Spotify is going to do next with its first two acquisitions. Most everyone involved in the deals, including Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and Gimlet Media’s Alex Blumberg and Matt Lieber have appeared on calls, at conferences, and, of course, on podcasts to discuss what’s coming next. Spotify has been on a media blitz to hype up its plans. In the month since Spotify announced plans to spend up to $500 million on podcasting, it’s homed in on exclusive content plans, hinted at ongoing work to improve discovery, and broadly started to construct a picture of how it views the future of podcasts.