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With so many podcast apps now available it is somewhat surprising that Apple still has as big a chunk of the podcast listening as it does. Perhaps the listening public is pretty happy with the Apple podcast App.
Despite throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at the podcasting space, the fact is Spotify has only made a small dent in the Apple Podcast numbers. But that doesn’t stop others from predicting Spotify will soon be the king of podcast listening. Remember all those predictions years ago about how the latest paywall podcasting company was going to be the Netflix of podcasting? Where are all of those pontificators today?
An article in eMarketer quotes analyst Peter Vahle who says by putting podcasts and music in one place, Spotify became the convenient one-stop-shop for everything digital audio. And, the article says, Spotify will surpass Apple in listenership this year.
Vahle: “Apple was the de facto destination for podcasts for a long time, but in recent years, it has not kept up with Spotify’s pace of investment and innovation in podcast content and technology. Spotify’s investments have empowered podcast creators and advertisers through its proprietary hosting, creation, and monetization tools.”
When you have over 60% of the listening market why would you invest hundreds of millions of dollars “to keep up?”
Some have argued that the Spotify podcast experience is clunky and consumers have no real desire to listen to their music and podcasts in the same app. It’s just not that difficult to go from a music listening app to a podcast app on a smartphone. It takes seconds. Consumers have been training themselves how to do that for long time.
To put things into some perspective - or perhaps bring things back to reality - here are the latest listening stats from Libsyn, which is the largest hosting company by number monthly downloads and active episodes. These stats are from the Libsyn database - not the entire podcasting universe - for the month of January.
