Spotify Aims To Get 300M Users To Listen To Podcasts

Spotify wants to own the podcasting space, and it’s made that clear with a series of high-profile acquisitions and deals over the past two years — including the Ringer, Gimlet, Joe Rogan, and, most recently, Megaphone. Its next goal: get more of its 300 million users to start listening to podcasts, reports VOX

Peter Kafka talked to Gimlet Media’s new head of content, Lydia Polgreen, about how she plans to achieve that at the Code Media@Home series.

“Our goal is to get people into the habit of listening to content on Spotify that’s not music,” Polgreen said. While the growth of podcasts has been strong, it’s still a tiny fraction of overall listening for the service. She pointed to the latest Edison research that podcasting hit an all-time high in 2020, now accounting for a 6 percent share of audio consumption in the United States.

To that end, Gimlet is experimenting with mixed media extensions of podcasts, like vodcasting (video podcasting), and it’s leveraging Spotify’s robust predictive algorithm to feed music listeners shortform spoken content in the Daily Drive, its recommendation service.