Spotify pivots its Podcast Strategy, and it has great lessons for product leaders
Product-Profitability Fit is the next big thing you should chase after product-market fit.
Spotify has more than 450M users and 45% of users pay for its service. Still, the company has been in losses, with latest being -430M Euros in 2022. Also, it laid off 2% of its workforce (200 people) majorly due to cutdown of its global podcast vertical.
What happens next with Spotify’s podcast product has some deep lessons for product builders in strategy.
So, gear up as we drop some truth bombs.
In today’s paid subscriber only edition of Productify, we have four sections:
1. What is Spotify’s Podcast Strategy Pivot announced in June 2023?
2. Why did the ‘Originals’ content strategy work for Netflix, but did not work for Spotify?
3. Spotify’s great Product Market Fit, but no Product-profitability fit
3. What are strategy lessons for product managers and product leaders from Spotify’s podcast strategy pivot?
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Spotify’s Podcast Strategy Pivot (June 2023)
On June 5 2023, Sahar Elhabashi, VP, Head of Podcast Business gave updates on Spotify’s podcast business through an official update:
Spotify is now the most-used audio podcast platform in most corners of the world and is also the No. 1 podcast publisher in the U.S.
There are now more than 100 million Podcast listeners on Spotify (10x growth)
Since we entered the space, over half a billion people have listened to a podcast on Spotify
Consumption has grown more than 1,400%
Podcast content has increased from 200,000 titles to over 5 million shows on Spotify
165 of Spotify’s Original and Licensed shows hit #1 on our charts across 99 markets in 2022
Podcast ad revenue experienced high double-digit growth from 2021 to 2022