Spotify ‘grows the pie’ for podcasting in USA

American podcast company Panoply has released data that indicates that Spotify is “growing the pie” for podcast listening in the United States.

A report on Panoply’s blog says:

“Panoply hosts thousands of podcasts on our Megaphone platform. These shows are then downloaded by users through various apps like Apple Podcasts, Overcast, and many others including Spotify.

“Over the past year, since Spotify began offering large numbers of podcasts in its app, the company has increasingly been steering its listeners toward spoken word shows. Our data show the effort has been paying off, and not (or not just) by stealing market share from other apps. Spotify actually seems to be growing the podcast audience, making gains in areas of the U.S. that have been slower to adopt podcasting.”

To verify its conclusion the company examined download rates for 21 of its large-volume shows available on Spotify and other established apps from June 2018 to January 2019.

Two trends became evident from the data:

“First, while podcast listening in general is most popular in the far west and northeast, Spotify registers strongly in the middle of the country.

“Second, because Spotify is stronger in states with less listening overall, the app is likely helping new listeners discover podcasting. This is big. Everyone in podcasting talks about the need to introduce new listeners to the medium; our research shows Spotify is an effective tool for doing just that.”

The blog presented various data visualisations to illustrate its conclusions (click to enlarge).


 

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