Sources: Spotify to double down on original content and fund a new batch of podcasts in coming months, as it promotes shows from established producers
Streaming company promotes shows from established producers — Top music site tries to diversify offerings beyond songs
Context & Ripple Effects
Spotify's first swing at originals was video: a slate of 12 original series in May 2016, offered to free and paid users alike. The new podcast push reported here extends the same playbook into audio, where production costs are lower and the company already owns the listening habit.
The timing matters because the field was about to get crowded — two years later Apple began planning its own fund of original, exclusive podcasts explicitly to compete with Spotify. This 2017 batch is the seed of the catalog explosion documented in the related coverage, where Spotify's podcast count went from 2,500 at the time of this report to roughly 2 million by early 2021.
First-order effects
- Established podcast producers get a funded commissioning channel inside Spotify, while the platform gains exclusive-leaning content it can promote to both free and paid tiers without renegotiating music licenses.
Second-order effects
- Apple's response — reaching out to media companies to fund exclusive podcasts — turns podcast exclusivity into a bidding contest between the two biggest audio platforms, raising what producers can charge.
- As the catalog balloons toward the ~2M shows counted in 2021, discovery becomes the bottleneck, pushing Spotify to invest in editorial promotion and recommendation rather than raw inventory.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, streaming services stop being interchangeable music jukeboxes and compete on owned or exclusive formats — the trajectory that later has Spotify courting video creators with seven-figure offers and exploring festival livestreams to become a one-stop shop.
The trend: Music streaming platforms are diversifying from licensed songs into commissioned original audio and video content to differentiate their catalogs and chase profitability.