ON Tuesday and Wednesday June 5 & 6, while we in Australia were all enmeshed in analysing the new GfK Radio 360 Survey measurement system, Spotify was doing some consolidation of its own.

On June 5 Spotify VP and Head of Podcast Business Sahar Elhabashi released an internal document about their podcast business.

The keys points were:

• Spotify is now the most-used audio podcast platform in most corners of the world and the No. 1 podcast publisher in the U.S.
• There are now more than 100 million Podcast listeners on Spotify
• Over half a billion people have listened to a podcast on Spotify
• Consumption has grown more than 1,400%
• Podcast content has increased from 200,000 titles to over 5 million shows
• 165 of Spotify’s Original and Licensed shows hit #1 on their charts across 99 markets in 2022
• Podcast ad revenue experienced high double-digit growth from 2021 to 2022

Further in that document was the “strategic realignment of our group” which means around 200 people, or 2% of Spotify’s workforce, would lose their jobs. Spotify’s production studios Parcast and Gimlet also would merge into more unified studio operations after the recent axing of about 15 of their original podcast series.

The next day, Spotify released its shiny Loud & Clear data, about the company’s royalty payments and global streaming in general.

Key takeaways from it were:

• All-time payouts to music rights owners is nearing $40 billion and $3 billion to publishing rights owners in the last two years
• Spotify pays nearly 70% of every dollar generated from the music industry back into it.
•  Bigger name artists generating $1M+, and smaller scale, generating $10,000+, have both more than doubled in the last five years
• More than 10,000 artists from more than 100 different countries generated more than $100K from Spotify alone
• There are nearly 3000 of what Spotify calls Heritage artists. Streams of tracks that are more than five years old generate them a passive income
• Around 200K professional or professionally aspiring recording acts globally on Spotify generated 95% of the total royalties in 2022 with over a quarter of all artists who generated more than $10,000 self-distributing to Spotify, which is a 200% increase since 2017
• Nearly 35% of those artists who generated more than $10,000 live in countries outside the top ten music markets (Australia is one of the top ten)

Spotify and streaming have helped create a diverse and in some instances well supported music industry. It is far and away the most downloaded music service app in Australia.

Spotify for Podcasters is also clearly doing okay, based on the document above. The Spotify platform hosts more than five million podcasts. I personally use Spotify for podcasters to create business and individual podcasts for others, because it is free and relatively easy to use and maintain.

But I’m also waiting for the day when Spotify puts in place a fee or ongoing charge for that use. Imagine an even $1 monthly fee, let alone the US$12 a month I pay to rival platform Buzzfeed across 5 million podcasters. It’s not far away.