Spotify buys Gimlet and Anchor on its march to rule podcasts

[MUSIC] Podcasts, so hot right now. [LAUGH] [LAUGH] Spotify. [LAUGH] Spotify announced it bought two podcast companies, Gimlet and Anchor. I can't say that I've actually heard of Anchor, but Gimlet to me that sounds like a pretty big deal. I mean like. That's a rather significant podcasting company, right? Right, yeah. So, this is something that Spotify has been messaging that they would be doing. That they're really interested in non-music audio entertainment. So, it's not a surprise that they would be going after podcast, they've been talking about how much they're interested in that kind of thing. But, I think it is surprising how much Spotify thinks the market for podcasts really are. It's still sort of a niche thing. Not in terms of listening, but in terms of making money off of it. Right. And that's something that Spotify really needs to do. Music streaming doesn't make a lot of money. Most music streaming companies are not profiable, including Spotify if you look at their end total Like year, rather than just looking at a single quarter. But yeah, they want to spend up to, like, half a billion dollars on acquisitions this year and this is a big chunk of it. Wow. How do you think this helps them against Apple Music? Well Apple In terms of iTunes is obviously the de facto place that people get their podcasts already. So while Spotify is still ahead in the game, against Apple Music, in terms of the number of people that are using it, and the number of people that are subscribing to it, podcasting is an area where it's definitely Apple's turf. So, if Spotify wants to sort of change the equation about how we find podcasts How people post podcasts and where you're listening to your podcast, then Apple's the one that they're still gonna be batting up against. Right, that being said, they're not gonna pull Gimlet's podcast off of iTunes, right? That would be a pretty crazy nuclear option. That's a great question. Yeah, that'd be a great question. I mean, you could say that. If they were to do that, it wouldn't be like they'd be putting it behind a pay wall, because Spotify obviously has the three tier to listen to anything with ads. And that's not going to be going away any time soon, and so it would be, I guess it just depends on how disruptive they wanna be to dedicated podcast listeners. Mm. If people have Sort of their ingrained ways of doing things. Even if it's not necessarily a loyalty to Apple, like I gotta listen to- Yeah, this is where I get it. Yeah. it's at least a very ingrained behavior. So, it would be interesting to see if they do pull it off. I would be suprised if they do, just because it would be so disruptive to this core audience of podcast listeners. But we'll see.