Swedish firm Spotify has made significant investments buying podcast platforms and reaching exclusive production agreements, thus creating a list of programs that are only available on its platform, which has allowed it to expand the number of listeners, listeners that are also allowing it to expand the number of users of the music platform.
From eMarketer, if Spotify's growth continues at this rate, throughout 2021 to overtake Apple in number of monthly podcast listeners in 2021 in United States. Spotify already surpassed the Apple Podcast two years ago in Europe, India and Latin America. Seeing Apple's sloppiness on its podcast platform, it was a matter of time before Apple gave up its dominant position.
According to the boys of eMarketer, the number of Spotify podcast users will reach 28.2 million per month, surpassing Apple's 28 million. Despite the growth that Apple's podcasts have also experienced, this has been much lower than that of Spotify.
In the next two years, Spotify will continue to grow to reach about 38 million users, while Apple reaches 28.8 million, practically the number of monthly listeners that Spotify has in the United States. While the growth of Spotify in its podcast platform is counted by millions of users, in Apple it is counted by hundreds of thousands.
In 2018, Apple's share of podcasts was 34%, a share that currently stands at 23.8%. According to eMarketer, the fact that Spotify includes podcasts in the same application as its streaming music service, is a differentiating fact that many users have valued positively.
By putting podcasts and music in one place, Spotify quickly became the one-stop-shop for all digital audio. Apple was the de facto destination for podcasts for a long time, but in recent years it hasn't kept up with Spotify's investment and innovation in podcast content and technology. Spotify's investments have empowered podcast creators and advertisers through its proprietary hosting, authoring, and monetization tools.
Too late?
Apple abandoned its podcast platform years ago, without seeking solutions to the requests of its content producers, who They were looking for a method to be able to monetize podcasts.
While it is true that Apple has made different movements in the last year related to this market, it seems it's too late, although at the stroke of the checkbook, it can regain the hegemony it had.
