Spotify Now #1 Podcasts Platform
In September, analysts at eMarketer predicted Spotify was poised to overtake Apple Podcasts in U.S. listenership sometime this year. Today, Spotify announced for the first time it may have succeeded on that front. During the company’s Q3 2021 earnings call, the company said that according to Edison Research and its own internal sources, it “recently became” the No. 1 podcast platform U.S. listeners use the most. Given the U.S. is the largest global podcast market, the milestone is significant and speaks to the sizable investment Spotify has made in podcasts over the past few years.
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Reached for comment, Edison Research confirmed the podcast milestone is based on usage, not downloads.
Embracing and extending. Via Matt Birchler:
Ugh, what really gets be about this is that the Spotify podcast listening experience (in my opinion) is just plain bad. Then again, when Apple’s own app, the other major player in this space, has a 1.8 star average on the App Store right now, so it’s not like people seem to love the built in app on iPhones, which can’t be great for retention.
Previously:
- New Apple Podcasts App Still Unreliable
- Spotify Set to Rival Apple Podcasts Subscriptions
- Podcasts in Big Sur
- Luminary Proxying Podcasts Without Asking
- Spotify’s Podcast Aggregation Play
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
On the bright side, I probably was spending too much time listening to podcasts, and Apple's iOS 14 Podcasts app cured me of that. Spotify isn't much better.
It might be the #1 platform for proprietary audio shows, but it's definitely not the #1 podcasts platform.
Fortunately, there's an order of magnitude more interesting podcasts than one can reasonably listen to, so it doesn't hurt too much when services like Spotify kill individual podcasts and convert them to proprietary audio shows.
One of my pet peeve is to tell people "ah, but wait, this is not a podcast" when they mention one of those shows :)
That was a quick rise! I guess gobbling up the most popular podcasts was a good move. It also helps that Spotify is truly cross platform.
