Second, Anchor is charging less than Apple is the announcement states:įor the next two years, this program will come at no cost to the creator, meaning that participating creators receive 100% of their subscriber revenues (excluding payment transaction fees).

Spotify filed a complaint to the EU two years ago, and the EU is expected to charge Apple with anti-competitive behavior this week. This is, needless to say, a rather stark example of Apple leveraging its control of the App Store to give itself an advantage in a new market the obvious analogy is Apple Music, which has the same advantage relative to Spotify itself. 1 Apple, meanwhile, can put a subscribe button front-and-center:

Spotify can’t put a “Subscribe” button in its app due to Apple’s App Store rules, which means that Anchor podcasters have to hope a would-be subscriber finds their way to the Anchor website. However, Anchor is different in three important ways:įirst, subscribing to an Anchor show on Spotify is a clumsier process than it is on Apple note these images from the announcement: At first glance this seems similar to Apple’s offering: use their subscription service to offer paid podcasts on their app. The first implication of this is exactly what you might expect: podcasters who use Spotify’s Anchor service for hosting their podcasts can now create subscriber-only podcasts on Spotify. Spotify’s first announcement was teased during its Stream On event last month: paid podcasts via Anchor. Plus, a special announcement about Exponent.

Second, last year I used the launch of Dithering to criticize the way that Spotify was closed off from the open web these announcements change that significantly.

the App Store Spotify’s podcast announcements this week are interesting in the context of both.

First, last week I wrote about Podcast Subscriptions vs.

Just for comparison, Ed Sheeran is at 68.2 million listeners, Shawn Mendes at 58.6 million, Taylor Swift has 43.2 million monthly listeners. Most artists' number of listeners is up, so that's great. What did we learn? More people listened to rock and metal this month than they did last month.

Stats for spotify last 4 weeks