Spotify dethrones Apple as king of podcast listenership thanks to its annoyingly aggressive strategy

All those exclusive podcasts must be working (to our raging chagrin)

In its third-quarter earnings call, streaming audio giant Spotify reported sustained profits from its growing paid membership and ad sales. A good chunk of those ads managed to land on podcasts which more people than ever are listening to.

The company cited Edison Research's Podcast Consumer Tracker survey for the second quarter and other internal findings in announcing that it outpaced Apple Music to become the top podcast platform in the U.S. When asked about which platform they used most often to listen to podcasts, 24% of Edison's 8,000 respondents named Spotify as their choice compared to 21% for Apple Podcasts and 18% for YouTube.

Neither Spotify nor Apple publicly disclose specific metrics on podcast listenership for their own platforms.

TechCrunch reports that analyst house eMarketer predicted that Spotify would top Apple Music for podcast listenership by the end of this year by 200,000 active users to 28.2 million. By 2025, that number is forecast to balloon to 43.6 million. TechCrunch also noted poor reception to Apple Podcasts's recent redesign as a potential floating aid for Spotify.

With the U.S. being the top ad market for podcasts, it sure helps to have the biggest slice of that pie. Spotify has been aggressively courting talent to add shows to its catalogue of 3.2 million podcasts and also front unique ones — this includes a multi-year contract with the WWE —putting out 32 U.S. Originals & Exclusives in its third quarter alone. If you use Spotify for music, don't expect the campaign to get you on podcasts to halt.

In the last 3 months, Spotify recorded profit of €75 million on turnover of €2.5 billion with roughly 20% growth in the number of monthly active users, premium subscribers, and subscriber revenues.

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