Spotify's next major attack on the podcasting world is to turn their 100m subscribers into new podcasters

Spotify has a dilemma- the business is built on expensive content which they don’t own.  While they have millions upon millions of subscribers, the majority of their revenue goes towards paying labels for the music they stream.  Spotify is now looking to podcasting as a resolution.

The increasingly popular form of entertainment offers access to free content, against which spotify can still sell advertising and generate valuable user metrics.

Spotify has been aggressive in pushing podcasting on its users, with podcast now very prominently placed on the homepage of the mobile application, and frequently being promoted on the app homepage.

While there are, however, thousands and thousands of podcasts; there is no reason why there can’t be thousands more, with the technology having a low barrier for entry.  Spotify has partnered with Anchor to create an easy to use podcasting platform, which allows novices to create and upload their own podcasts to their servers.

In case you haven’t heard of it, the description of Anchor on the Google Play Store is as follows:

Anchor is the easiest way to make a podcast, ever. It’s the only app that lets you record a high-quality podcast, and distribute it everywhere (including Google Podcasts and Apple Podcasts) – all in one place. No fancy equipment or podcasting experience necessary, and it’s 100% free!

Today, Jane Wong discovered that Spotify intends to promote this feature to their millions of users, by encouraging them to create their own Podcast inside the Spotify player user interface.

Spotify is testing "Create podcast" button to funnel their app users to Anchor, a podcast creation platform that Spotify recently acquired

It's interesting there is a Brazil version of the Anchor promo page pic.twitter.com/0dJz7GoOYK

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) August 27, 2019

It remains to be seen whether flooding podcast directories with low-quality user-generated content is a way of increasing Spotify’s growth and user retention; but given that this does allow the company to potentially escape from the streaming music trap they have built for themselves, it is clear Spotify will at least try.