Spotify acquires Podz: a small step in better podcast discoverability
You’ve written the script, recorded the episode and mastered the edit. Now the episode is live, you just need one thing: listeners. Unless you’ve already got an audience to tap into or a budget to spend on marketing, you’re relying on some extremely unreliable factors for discoverability: algorithms, word of mouth and social media.
We get asked it again and again. “How can I grow my audience?” Unfortunately, the answer isn’t always straight forward.
There’s one thing we can all usually agree upon though; show discoverability should be a lot easier is within podcasting apps themselves. Although Apple Podcasts has the ‘Browse’ tab where they feature shows they love, Pocket Casts has the ‘Discover’ tab where they highlight a bunch of shows, and other podcasting apps have similar pages, these are often primitive and feature the same podcasts week after week, month after month. Most apps choose to show which shows are trending, in the top charts, or most popular in various categories… however this overwhelmingly favours established podcasts and often doesn’t give the new folk on the block a look in.
Roll on the news this week: Spotify has acquired Podz, an AI-powered podcast discoverability startup who describe themselves as an ‘audio newsfeed.’ According to TechCrunch, Podz automates the process of finding key moments from episodes using machine learning trained on over 100,000 hours of audio. Spotify says they plan to integrate Podz’ technology into their platform before the end of the year as this will make it “easier for listeners to find the content they want to listen to, and for creators to be discovered and build a fan base.”
Podz says users on its platform typically follow up to 30 podcasts, up from an average of seven - which is music (or your audio content of choice) to the ears of podcasts producers who have been desperately wanting better findability features.
Hopefully other platforms will take inspiration and develop similar tools to Podz to boost podcast subscribers, as well as diversifying the shows editors pick to feature. Anything to help new and exciting shows take on the well established weekly players.
Need help getting your podcast discovered? Etto are experts. Drop us a line to find out more.
