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How Spotify has quietly expanded its content platform
An interesting article in Fast Company, “”, looks at Spotify’s success with podcasts, a phenomenon that has been growing in popularity since 2005, but has not yet become the next big thing many predicted.
In 2005, three young Silicon Valley industry veterans, , and , created to try to capitalize on what was then expected to be the explosive growth of podcasts. The arrival of Apple with iTunes and the appearance, almost by chance, of a product created to coordinate the people who worked at Odeo distracted them from that idea and led the company to pivot to become Twitter and completely abandon the world of audio, which Ev Williams has now returned to after and .
Meanwhile, in Europe, a company managed to navigate the complex world of music rights by incorporating several record labels into its shareholding, while convincing music fans to stop downloading unlicensed music and instead use a freemium model with ads between songs, or paid a fee for an ad-free music experience. The Spotify that and founded in 2006 is now a tech giant, one of the few that Europe can truly be proud of, and has long been trying to expand its dominance in music to other areas of audio based on…
