The Future of Podcasts on Spotify

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Spotify is an amazing company.

I don’t just say this because I hold the secret ambition that eventually they’ll give me a $500,000 salary and a corner office full of inflatable furniture (and a nameplate reading “NICK’S DREAM EMPORIUM”), but because they hold the keys to unlocking podcasting. For everyone else involved in this game, we are constantly playing with one eye closed, one hand tied behind our back and one leg chopped off with a rusty handsaw. Spotify get the full picture.

They have data from creators and users of its Anchor hosting platform. They have data from all the other creators who distribute via their output mechanic. They have ads data courtesy of Megaphone. They have audience data from their app. They are the one company who has a panoptic view of industrial analytics. And that makes them an amazing company, even if I’m still sitting here on non-inflatable furniture.

Spotify has just released their FAN STUDY, which is a heavily editorialised analytics report released via Anchor for creators. It is a fairly unique set of insights, born of data that we rarely see in…