Spotify Makes Podcasting Move
• Music streamer Spotify is jumping headfirst into the burgeoning podcasting industry with the acquisition of Gimlet Media and Anchor, so says Variety. Gimlet is a podcast producer featuring shows like Homecoming (which was adapted into an Amazon Prime series starring Julia Roberts), StartUp and Reply All, while Anchor provides a distribution and monetization tool for podcast creators.
According to Recode, Spotify is paying $230 million for Gimlet. The transactions are expected to close in the first quarter of 2019 and subject to usual closing conditions. “These acquisitions will meaningfully accelerate our path to becoming the world’s leading audio platform, give users around the world access to the best podcast content, and improve the quality of our listening experience as well as enhance the Spotify brand,” said Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, when announcing the acquisitions. “We are proud to welcome Gimlet and Anchor to the Spotify team, and we look forward to what we will accomplish together.”
In a blog post, Ek says he didn’t plan on getting into podcasting when he founded the company 11 years ago, but he’s in it now. He says Spotify is now the world’s second-biggest podcast platform (behind Apple), and that podcast listening will eventually make up 20 percent of Spotify’s usage. Ek wrote, “We are building a platform that provides a meaningful opportunity for creators, excites and engages our users, and builds an even more robust business model for Spotify in an industry we believe will become significantly larger when you add Internet-level monetization to it.”
And he’s not done yet — Spotify disclosed that it plans to acquire more podcasting companies, pegging total spending of $400 million-$500 million on multiple acquisitions in 2019.
According to Ovum’s Podcast Market Forecast for 2018-2023, the number of monthly podcast listeners will surpass 1.0 billion in 2020, and this growing audience will become increasingly valuable to industry players and advertisers, with podcast advertising revenue expected to increase by 49% in 2019.
