Quite recently, Spotify has been on the hunt to build a podcast empire it seems. The music streaming platform has bought two podcast firms and plans to spend up to $500m on expanding the app’s capabilities from just playing music, to become a podcast app too. This newfound growth was kickstarted when the Swedish company acquired Gimlet, the podcast firm behind a variety of popular podcasts including Homecoming, which later adapted into a TV series on Amazon starring Julia Roberts. The company has also acquired another platform, Anchor, which is known for allowing individuals and companies to create, publish and monetise podcasts. There was no price disclosed of the purchase, however Gimlet was reported to be sold to Spotify at a cost of $230m of their $500m budget.
Founder and chief executive of Spotify, Daniel Ek, proposed the idea of tapping into the revenue streams of the rising interest in podcast apps. He said “We believe it is a safe assumption that, over time, more than 20% of all Spotify listening will be non-music content,” in a blog post. News of all this was revealed when Spotify announced its first ever quarterly profit. Their earnings from the first three months of 2018 amounted to approximately $106m (£82m), however it is expected to fall back into the red this year.
Despite the paid subscriber number projected to rise from 117 million to 127 million, the company said its loss guidance for 2019 had increased from €200m to €360m.
