Spotify has announced its acquisition of startup company Podz. The music streaming company revealed the news and stated that the purchase of Podz was made in order to take advantage of its AI background and improve the discoverability of podcasts on the streaming service.
In a blog post, the acquisition of Podz was confirmed by Spotify. Podz is a startup company that focuses on creating AI tech that automatically generates 60-second clips of the best moments of a podcast. This automation significantly assists creators as the alternative is to scrub through an episode to find those key moments.
Spotify has had machine learning experts focused on improving audio discovery for almost a decade, but there is more work to be done. We believe that Podz’ technology will complement and accelerate Spotify’s focused efforts to drive discovery, deliver listeners the right content at the right time, and accelerate growth of the category worldwide.
Spotify seeks to utilize Podz’s state-of-the-art machine learning technology to help support its 2.6 million podcasts. The company hopes to elevate its work in music discoverability and investments in podcast recommendations to make it easier for listeners to find new content as well as the content they are searching for. This in turn will help podcasters reach a new audience organically through Spotify.
The rise in competition between podcast services is only getting more fierce. This week, Facebook announced that it would be implementing podcast publishing on the social media platform. Content creators will soon be able to link their RSS feeds to their page. In addition, Apple rolled out its podcast subscriptions, which enable creators to supply perks and additional content to listeners who subscribe through Apple’s podcast platform.
There’s no exact timeline on when Spotify’s integration of Podz’s technology will be seen. The company does note that “elements of that work” can start to be seen by the end of 2021.
