Skip to main content

Spotify’s latest experiment is designed to boost podcast discovery

Spotify is no stranger to podcasting. In fact, the company has been investing heavily in the medium for a while, and now owns some impressive podcasting assets. But new podcasts, much like music or indeed any other form of audio content, can be difficult to discover. To tackle this, Spotify is conducting another one of its famous experiments, by creating human-curated podcast playlists.

The new feature is available to just 5% of subscribers in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Mexico, Sweden, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina, according to The Verge. Five podcasts playlists will start showing up on Tuesday, June 4. They’ll cover comedy, true crime, “geek culture,” “walking (motivational),” and “relaxing (mindfulness).”

Recommended Videos

Spotify has a deep collection of podcasts on tap, but finding them is currently a bit hit-or-miss. You can search for a podcast that you already know, or you can browse the entire catalog by genre, but the kind of personalized recommendations that Spotify is known for (e.g., Discover Weekly) hasn’t been adapted to podcasts as a format … yet. The curated podcast playlists are a way for the company to gather an initial batch of data from listeners: What do they like? What do the subscribe to after you offer them something new?

“This test aims to make it easier for users to discover new podcasts while giving creators another mechanism to connect with new fans,” Spotify told Engadget. It’s also very much part of Spotify’s continued efforts to understand its listeners’ preferences. In May 2019, the company revealed that it was going to distribute a gadget called Car Thing to a small number of users. Car Thing — and a possible follow-up device known as Home Thing — are designed to give Spotify even deeper insights around what people want to listen to during specific times of day, and while driving.

Car Thing is intended to be primarily voice-controlled, which makes sense from a hands-free point of view, but it may enable Spotify to deepen two more podcast-related experiments: Interactive voice ads, and voice messages that connect podcast listeners with podcast creators.

If Spotify’s podcast playlists prove a popular way for people to discover new shows, it may not be long before people are assembling their own podcast playlists — perhaps as a social activity via yet another of the company’s experiments: Social Listening.

Simon Cohen
Simon Cohen is a contributing editor to Digital Trends' Audio/Video section, where he obsesses over the latest wireless…
Plex streamlines its media experience with dedicated Photos app
Plex Photos mobile app.

Plex is taking steps to make its app experience more streamlined. Starting today, users can download the Plex Photos app beta for iOS and Android as a dedicated way of accessing just their personal collection of photos. Over time, the main Plex app will become exclusively focused on movies, TV shows, discovery, and its recently added social media community.  The company will continue to develop the Plexamp app as a dedicated way to access music from a Plex Media Server.

Initially, Plex Photos will be limited to mobile devices, but the plan is to add support for more devices by 2025. By that time, the company is aiming to remove photos and music access from the main Plex app.

Read more
Tidal vs. Spotify: Which music streaming service has the features you need?
Tidal home page on iPhone.

If you in the midst of choosing which music streaming service is best for you, when comparing Spotify and Tidal, price is an important, but not the only, factor to consider. Spotify stands out with its flexible subscription options, offering individual, family, and student plans, each with its own unique benefits. In contrast, Tidal offers various subscription plans, too, but Tidal's calling card is that it includes premium and hi-fi options, with the hi-fi plan providing access to lossless, hi-res audio. Spotify does not offer this ... yet.

Spotify uses the Ogg Vorbis and AAC audio formats for streaming, delivering audio at varying bitrates. At the same time, Tidal's hi-fi subscription offers lossless, CD-quality audio and hi-res audio files in FLAC and HiRes FLAC formats.

Read more
SiriusXM launches Podcasts+ within Apple Podcasts
The SiriusXM Podcasts Plus subscription in the Apple Podcasts app on an iPhone.

Let us preface this piece with the following: The word "podcast," which was originally intended to refer to a series of content beamed out into the world via an open standard, now has no meaning. That said, SiriusXM — the satellite radio company that's grown far beyond merely bouncing audio signals to space and back — has just announced SiriusXM Podcasts+.

The awkwardly named subscription service lives within Apple Podcasts and will be available starting August 5, for $6 a month or $45 a year. In exchange for that fee, you'll get ad-free episodes of shows from the SmartLess Media library, the Freakonomics Radio Network, and select shows from the Last Podcast Network.

Read more