Spotify's CEO: “I got carried away”

• Spotify released the company’s Q4/22 financial update. In an earnings call, Daniel Ek admitted “In hindsight, I probably got a little carried away.” We carry a longer quote from Ek about podcasting below.

  • Podcast ad revenue wasn’t split out, but was up “in the mid 30% range Y/Y”. Podcasting also delivered “improving profitability”. The Spotify Audience Network saw “healthy double digit growth Q/Q”
  • Total ad revenue was up from €385mn ($418mn) to €449mn ($488mn) Q/Q (with “two months that outperformed and one month that underperformed”).

• Edison Research’s Share of Ear and Edison Podcast Metrics are to be marketed to advertising agencies by Nielsen. It’s a significant step for the study, which is the only survey to measure all podcast listening across the US.

• UK podcast company Novel has secured a £5mn ($6.2mn) Series A investment round. The investment will be used to accelerate growth with strategic partners, and to establish the company’s own network of originals.

• Podcast ad buyers have yet to see a slowdown in their budgets, even while other budgets have been cut, says Digiday.

• US radio broadcaster Radio One has launched a podcast network. The Urban One Podcast Network has a website up today.

• RØDE has added a version of the company’s NTH-100 headphones that adds a broadcast-grade headset microphone.

• Mozilla’s Pocket has announced a number of new partnerships, including with PRX supporting The Science of Happiness.

• Los Angeles radio station KPCC is to rebrand to LAist 89.3, to join the brand used by its on-demand and podcast unit LAist Studios.

• Further reading: Key takeaways from Podfest Expo from Christopher H Loo says that artificial intelligence was hard to escape … and The Irish Times focuses on the country’s young podcasters.

Moves and hires

• Philana Patterson is to become the new Head of Audio at The Wall Street Journal. She joins Alan Haburchak , who was confirmed as Editorial Director of Audio earlier this month; it’s part of an audio expansion by the WSJ.

• Steve Lickteig has joined CNN as the Executive Producer of podcast and audio content. He’s worked at NPR, Slate and NBC News.

Tips and tricks - with Podcast Movement Evolutions

• Podcast Generator shares some top tips on how to grow and build a following

Podcast News

Crime Analyst has joined the AdLarge podcast portfolio. The show is hosted by world-renowned former New Scotland Yard criminal behavioral analyst, Laura Richards. Cathy Csukas, CEO of AdLarge, describes the show as acutely focused, smart and informative.

Songs My Ex Ruined is new from Nevermind Media today - a podcast about songs people can never listen to again, because their terrible exes destroyed them forever. It’s hosted by music journalists and podcast producers Courtney E. Smith and Melissa Locker.

Insider Interviews with E.B. Moss returns for a new season today, kicking off with the former CEO of NPR, Jarl Mohn. Known by podcasters as “the former CEO of NPR”, he’s also the creator of E! Entertainment TV; and known to arts institutions as a generous benefactor.

Spotify’s For The Record contains interviews with Paul Vogel, Daniel Ek and Alex Norström after their financial results.

Spotify’s Earnings Call podcast contains the full earnings call recording.

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Daniel Ek on Spotify’s investment in podcasting

From the earnings call (from 27'53" - transcript lightly edited).

"Investors remain sceptical that podcasting is a good business, and that it has meaningfully moved the needle for Spotify. Can you help them understand why you believe in the investment to date - especially in the context of your recent management changes?" - Rich Greenfield, LightShed Partners

Daniel Ek: Four years ago we entered into podcasting the major player in podcasting had been doing it for 20 years and was considered the unassailable leader. So we wanted to tackle this heads on: and we realized that this was a nascent space that was growing.

All of it still was under-consumed to what we believe the potential was in the industry. And we took the medium and have grown the audience overall globally by a huge margin to what was through four years ago.

It wasn’t just that we took audience from another platform but we actually grew the pie meaningfully for podcasters. And as a result you know now we have over five million creators on Spotify - so a massive increase in the number of people who are creating podcasts. This is true across the world.

We went from being almost nowhere four years ago to now being the leader in many markets around the world in this space.

And that adds several benefits to Spotify. It adds the benefit that it makes our business more defensible, because now it is meaningfully contributing to our advertising story.

It is also so that from a competitive lens when we’ve added this content what we’re seeing is that consumers are not just consuming music on the platform but they’re consuming music and podcasts to a great extent and the number of users on our platform that are consuming podcast keeps growing as well and as that’s happening their retention increases, and as that happening it is impacting our business.

Now what you’re probably asking underneath all of that is that it’s been a drag on the gross margin side so what does that mean for the future. Well - we’ve been making many investments. Some of them have been working greatly and you should expect us to double down on those and some of them not surprisingly haven’t worked out.

There are certain shows that work really really well for us and there shows that didn’t perform as we expected, and I think that’s a sign of maturity that you know you go for the growth first and then you seek the efficiency. But generally what you should expect from us is across the board now to be focused more on that efficiency and creating more leverage and that’s certainly true in podcasting too.

The management changes really had nothing to do with a change of strategy and podcasting - they are more around increasing the speed of decision making and increasing the focus on efficiency across the board. The next era of Spotify is one where we’re adding speed plus efficiency, not just focused on on speed or growth at all costs. That is a big shift, but it is also what we said during the investor day in June.

And now we’re going to have to live up to that and I know some investors don’t believe that we’re serious about it: but hopefully my remarks today show that we are really really focused on driving efficiency going forward.

You can hear this clip in Podnews Extra - find it in your favourite podcast app.