Spotify wants to remix into a social platform

The Future. As live audio and podcasting become more popular, Spotify is aggressively investing in new formats to become the king of social audio. With few rivals to speak of that are as varied as Spotify, the company could transform itself from a (mostly) individual-experience platform to one that becomes a bona fide community destination.

Talk of the town
For Spotify, music was just the beginning.

• It moved into podcast production and distribution, which is already driving immense growth by empowering users to start their own shows and platforming big names like Joe Rogan and Ava DuVernay.
• It opened up a social-audio feature called Greenroom in order to compete with Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces.
• It’s moving into audiobooks with its acquisition of Findaway.

And its advertising game in the audio space is second only to traditional radio, which still pulls in $30 billion in revenue… revenue that CEO Daniel Ek says “needs to shift online.” With few competitors in the ad-supported audio space, Spotify will likely absorb that revenue in the coming years to fund its expansion.

Shop Spotify
Spotify wants to become the TikTok of YouTube or audio, the central hub for all audio creation, distribution, and community, powered by a state-of-the-art recommendation algorithm. And it wants to make sure that creators have all the tools they need to understand their audience. Ideally, the more data transparency creators have, the more they’ll want to create, driving engagement.