Editor’s note: Hot Pod is a weekly newsletter on the podcasting industry written by Nick Quah; we happily share it with Nieman Lab readers each Tuesday.
Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 223, dated August 27, 2019.
Supply side. Predicting the future is a fool’s game, but then again, I’m at least half a fool. On that note, here’s a future I’ve been mulling over: one in which Apple is no longer the overwhelming end-all of podcast distribution, and where podcast listening is broadly spread across Apple, Spotify, a rainbow of podcast apps, and maybe Pandora.
Barring catastrophe, this outcome feels very probable to me. The questions that remain, then, mostly have to do with details: what the exact market share composition will shape up to be, and the specific story of how each player will get there.
We saw a requisite scene-setting development in that latter story last week, when both Spotify and Pandora trumpeted their efforts to siphon more…
