What is known about the acquisition of Podz
Music listening service Spotify has acquired Podz, a startup that allows you to cut podcasts. The company believes that this deal will give an opportunity to increase the audience of users and become more known to the authors of content.
Cutting podcasts is often used to promote a product in social networks. However, the authors do it manually, which takes a lot of time and requires certain skills. The app from the company Podz lets you speed up the cutting and make it higher quality. The product is based on artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. The program has been trained for 10 thousand hours of audio, thanks to which it itself chooses exactly which passage and how long to allocate from the whole show.
It is not yet officially known how much Spotify paid for the service. The platform for listening to audio content plans to fully integrate the Podz product into its structure by the end of the year.
Podcasts are often more than 30 minutes long, which is not always convenient for listeners, who can’t listen to the whole show at once. Thanks to a feature from Podz, users can now check out a condensed version of the podcast series, and if interested, continue to listen to the full version.
According to research from TechCrunch, a listener of this type of content subscribes to an average of seven shows, and that figure rises to 30 when using the Podz service. The startup is growing rapidly, having raised more than $2.5 million in pre-seed rounds from M13 before striking a deal with Spotify. The number of podcasts hosted on the platform is $2.2 million.
Spotify has an active focus on podcasts, with the company spending about $800 million in total to acquire streaming rights. The most notable deal in 2020 was with Joe Rogan, who produces a well-known podcast and has a multimillion-dollar audience. Also significant in the same year was the purchase of Megaphone, which provides hosting services for podcasts.
Despite the fact that Spotify is present in Russia, the function of listening to podcasts is not available. However, the company promises to launch a section with this audio content in the near future. In 2021 the service introduced a paid subscription to listen to such shows for the United States.
Spotify has been developing its platform and acquired the Locker Room, which is a direct competitor to Clubhouse. Now platform users with many musicians, podcasters and composers can connect with their audience on the Spotify platform.
