Spotify Announces The Acquisition Of Podcast Discovery Start-Up Called Podz
Spotify Announces The Acquisition Of Podcast Discovery Start-Up Called Podz. Podcasts are all the rage, but podcast discovery is a challenge. Spotify announced its acquisition of Podz, a start-up that’s trying to solve the problem of podcast discovery.
“At Spotify, we are investing to build and scale the world’s best (and most personalised) podcast discovery experience,” the company told Tech Crunch. “We believe that Podz’ technology will complement and accelerate Spotify’s focused efforts to drive discovery, deliver listeners the right content at the right time, and accelerate growth of the category worldwide.”
Since podcasts are usually upward of 30 minutes long, it’s hard for listeners to browse new shows — listening to an episode of a podcast isn’t as easy as trying out a song by a new artist. So, Podz developed what it called “the first audio newsfeed,” presenting users with 60-second clips from various shows. Podcasters often use apps like Headliner to create clips to promote on their social media accounts, and Podz follows the same idea. But instead of podcasters manually choosing how to promote their show, Podz chooses a clip using its machine learning model, which was trained on more than 100,000 hours of audio in consultation with journalists and audio editors.
“Already, the average podcast listener subscribes to seven podcasts but follows almost 30 on Podz,” M13 General Partner Latif Peracha told Tech Crunch via email in February. “Early signals make us optimistic the team can build a transformative product in the category.”
Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek. It is one of the world’s largest music streaming service providers, with over 356 million monthly active users, including 158 million paying subscribers, as of March 2021. Spotify offers digital copyright restricted recorded music and podcasts, including more than 90 million songs, from record labels and media companies. As a freemium service, basic features are free with advertisements and limited control, while additional features, such as offline listening and commercial-free listening, are offered via paid subscriptions. Users can search for music based on artist, album, or genre, and can create, edit, and share playlists.
