With Amazon and Spotify pursuing walled-garden strategies for podcasting, we’re likely to be headed for a bifurcated podcasting world, where one axis of companies pushes for exclusivity and walled gardens while the other pushes for ubiquity and ad revenue.
The two biggest podcast publishers today, by a wide margin, are iHeartRadio and NPR. Although the latter is a nonprofit and the former is not, they both have the same fundamental strategy: to distribute their shows as widely as possible and maximize revenue from ads and sponsorships. As we’re especially hearing on many of iHeartRadio’s shows, pre-recorded third-party ads placed on these podcasts make them sound more and more like commercial radio.
This could put the iHeart/NPR axis on a collision course with the Spotify/Amazon axis. iHeart and NPR are increasingly dependent on Spotify for distribution, because Spotify is now, according to Statista,, having recently leapt ahead of Apple Podcasts. Amazon Music is likely to climb that list in the coming year or two.
In other words, Spotify and Amazon have increasing amounts of leverage against other podcast publishers. One or both of them could de-emphasize iHeart’s or NPR’s podcasts in their search results, make them more difficult to subscribe to, or require them to pay fees to be available on their apps. Conversely, shows published by iHeart, NPR, or other publishers may be so popular that they are “must-haves,” in which case the money could flow in the opposite direction, as it does in cable TV.
If any of this happens, we’ll have a podcasting world that looks more like television, with its tiers of free broadcast, basic cable, and premium cable channels, instead of the world of digital music where all of the services offer more or less the same enormous catalog of content. Amazon’s potential acquisition of Wondery puts podcasting on a path towards a crossroads; the next couple of years are going to be very interesting.
Whatever they do I just hope they don't touch my fav shows 😩
04/12/2020 | VIGÍLIA DE AVIVAMENTO | SÉRIE O ARREBATAMENTO DA IGREJA | FridayVigilExpo