Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 196, published February 19, 2019.
Sort-of reader mailbag: Spotify edition. It’s Spotify Day +13. My inbox has pretty much started to chill after all the news, which has given me some time to sift through and check out what’s been occupying the Hot Pod hive mind. And from where I sit, there were two threads that stood out.
The first thread is the prevalence of an understandable, but imprecise, assumption: that, by virtue of its spendy acquisitions, we’re looking at an inevitable future in which Spotify is the new dominant — or even monopoly — power over the whole podcast industry. Which is to say, it’s only a matter of time before the Swedish platform usurps Apple’s position as the steward of podcasting, eschews Cupertino’s traditionally hands-off approach that’s allowed the medium to flourish on its own terms, and reshapes the industry on the basis of its own corporate needs.
That’s getting a…
