After flailing around with various attempts to grow beyond music, Spotify might finally be taking a bite out of Apple’s podcast business.
Since the start of September, Spotify appears to have overtaken Apple as the most popular service for podcasts in several countries—including Equatorial Guinea, France, Israel, Morocco, Norway, Romania, Sweden, and Tunisia, according to one study put out by podcast advertising company Voxnest.
The gains Spotify has apparently made in Sweden are particularly important, Voxnest says, “because it’s one of the top countries in the world listening to podcasts.”
The study hardly says anything about Apple, which has its hands full with the recent launch of Apple TV Plus and all the other things that have driven its market cap above the trillion-dollar mark, but growth in podcasts is big for Spotify. Merely turning a profit recently was a nice surprise for the streaming music company, and the company’s CFO, Barry McCarthy, reportedly suggested recently in a conversation with CNBC that podcasts could be as big a deal for Spotify as original content is for Netflix.
Reached for comment, a Spotify spokesperson confirmed that podcast consumption is enjoying “sustained growth” at the company:
“Spotify is up to 248+ million monthly active users, 113+ million are subscribers in 79 markets. We have 500,000+ podcasts on platform and that number is climbing every day…”
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