The company’s CEO, Daniel Ek, is investing heavily in podcast production and making a play for radio listening while invoking concerns about excessive “screen time.”
On Wednesday he announced two acquisitions, Gimlet and Anchor, and said the company has other deals in the works. All in, Spotify plans to spend $400 to $500 million on the “emerging podcast marketplace” this year, according to the company’s guidance to investors.
The idea is to expand Spotify’s current offerings — betting that this will help retain existing subscribers and spur new subscribers to sign up.
Ek, portraying video as a trillion dollar market and audio as a $100 billion market, said “I always come back to the same question: Are our eyes really worth 10 times more than our ears? I firmly believe this is not the case.”
“With the world focused on trying to reduce screen time, it opens up a massive audio opportunity,” Ek said in a blog post on Wednesday.
Spotify has been leaning in this direction for the past two…
