While the Joe Rogan controversy appeared to push SPOT stock sharply downward this week, the company’s reported Q4 2021 financials (released earlier this week) draw a less troubled picture with lots of green ink. Click through for a simple breakdown of quarterly and annual comparisons in user growth and revenue growth. Continue Reading
Spotify released quarterly earnings last night. In the investor call, the Q&A session began as many observers probably guessed it would: “Our first question today is going to come from Rich Greenfield on Joe Rogan.” CEO Daniel Ek treated it as a non-emergency, with careful answers. Meanwhile, podcasting contributed to higher gross margins. Continue Reading
Spotigate? Roganomics? Today we learn that Spotify and its headline podcaster Joe Rogan are maneuvering to get in front of apparent accelerating damage resulting from a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience which created public outcry over statements about Covid vaccines. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek clarified and disclosed; Rogan apologized and promised. Click for more. Continue Reading
The latest turn in the Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan drama on Spotify shifted from a musician to a star podcaster on Saturday afternoon when Dr. Brene Brown announced on Twitter that she would cease production on her two Spotify-exclusive podcasts, Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead. Continue Reading
Spotify has acquired Australian podtech company Whooshkaa. The company says it will integrate Whooshkaa’s platform technology into Spotify subsidiary Megaphone. One important piece of that technology is an easy way for radio broadcasters to turn their content into on-demand podcasting. Continue Reading
A day after Spotify’s end-of-year Wrapped product, the company releases Wrapped for Publishers. It offers podcast listening metrics in 2021. It is stuffed with growth in double-, triple-, and even quadruple-digit percentage increases. Click through for details and a link to Spotify’s PDF. Continue Reading
After weeks of anticipatory promotion, Spotify unleashed its annual “Wrapped” feature yesterday. Unfortunately, the package is available only in the mobile app, and the video presentation requires memory and operating system resources that are unavailable on some phones. The result is a wave of social media complaints that the Wrapped experience crashes quickly, and closes the Spotify app. We present Spotify’s tech requirements, without providing a universally accessible format. We also review the Wrapped personalized playlists, which are quite enjoyable and don’t have special requirements. Continue Reading
The Infinite Dial, globally recognized as a singular authoritative consumer survey and reference for how people consume digital media, will be extended to the UK next month. The annual American edition has been produced for 24 years, resulting in exceptionally valuable trend lines illustrating consumer uptake of streaming audio and podcasting. The brand has expanded to Canada, Australia, Germany, and South Africa. The December 2 release of a UK version will be Edison’s first for that region, and is supported by Bauer Media and Spotify. Click for the registration link. Continue Reading
Bad Robot, the film/TV firm founded and run by J.J. Abrams, whose franchises include Star Trek and Cloverfield movies, has jumped into audio with the creation of a podcast unit. Abrams pulled Christina Choi away from Audible to head the venture. The whole thing is tied up with Spotify. Continue Reading
On the same day that Edison Research and NPR released The Spoken Word Audio Report for 2021 (RAIN coverage HERE), Spotify announced its acquisition of Findaway, the audiobook facilitator and distributor. Finances of the deal are undisclosed, and might not represent the potential long-term impact of the acquisition to Spotify and to spoken word listening. Continue Reading
In yesterday’s initial coverage of Spotify’s Q3 earnings report, we noted that the word “podcast” was used 17 times in the company’s official release, while the word “music” was used 10 times. In the hour-long earnings call, the emphasis was even more on podcasting, which was mentioned 48 times, while “music” was spoken a mere eight times. Hence the emphasis on podcasting as a business priority in the global leading streaming audio platform. Click a lot of info and quotes. Continue Reading
Spotify is expanding its podcast feature set while reinforcing its walled-garden experiments in podcasting. The latest: Video podcasting. “Soon, Spotify users will see a lot more video podcasts on the platform,” the company says as it rolls out the capability.… Continue Reading