Spotify acquires The Ringer, adding a big, sporty fish to its pod pond
Primed for pod-ification... Spotify has doubled-down on its podcast offerings. The latest catch: The Ringer — ex-ESPN personality Bill Simmons' podcast network, offering 30 sports pods (+ other topics) and reportedly boasting around 100M monthly downloads. Spotify thinks podcasts are the radio of the future, so it's going in big:
- Last year: Spotify shelled out over $400M to buy podcast companies like Gimlet (pod producer), Parcast (original shows), and Anchor (DIY pod recording software).
- By December: 500K podcasts were on Spotify's platform.
- Today: Its pod-ience (pod audience?) has almost doubled since the start of 2019. More than 16% of Spotify's monthly users listen to podcasts, and that's driving sign-ups for its paid version.
- Now: It's using the Ringer to up its sports offerings. Because, you know, sports is kind of a popular topic. "We bought the next ESPN" — Spotify's CEO Daniel Ek.
The results are in... Spotify added a record number of paying subscribers for the quarter (11M), and now has 124M total (271M including its non-paying users). But that pod-ification has also cost it big. It lost $85M this quarter, in part thanks to its costly pod-cquisitions.
This could mean pod war... Apple is #1 in podcasts, Spotify is #2. But Spotify's got a huge lead in paying ears overall with 124M subscribers compared to Apple Music's 60M. The Ringer pods (like most of Spotify's) will still be available on other platforms, like Apple. But someday Spotify might make them exclusive to its app in a gated audio garden — if Apple does the same, it'll be a "choose your side" pod world.