Spotify Acquires Podz, A Discovery Channel Improving Podcast Transcripts

With more than 356 million monthly active users and 158 million paying subscribers as of March 2021, music streaming platform Spotify is one of the biggest platforms in the world.

The music streaming platform has announced its new acquisition of Podz, a discovery channel improving podcast transcripts. The announcement of the acquisition was made via the company’s custom blog spot. The music platform has been working assiduously to improve and strengthen the platform, all in a bid to give users the best experience. The company’s acquisition of Podz is an act to provide support for and improve its booming podcast service. Podz’s AI-powered technology works by automatically generating preview clips of available podcasts and is more advanced than other service podcasters that create their podcast clips manually. Podz automatically creates preview clips by automatically finding keymoments from episodes using machine learning trained on over 100,000 hours of audio.

Spotify stated that integrating Podz with its podcast service would create a fun experience for users as it would be “easier for listeners to find the content they want to listen to, and for creators to be discovered and build a fan base”.The acquisition is aimed generally at improving the platform’s podcast delivery service, and providing users and creators with a fun unique experience that can only be gotten from the platform.

The acquisition comes on the heels of the platform’s announcement of a podcasting subscription. The company announced that this would allow some selected partners to charge their subscribers for content. Spotify also revealed a 5 percent cut of this subscription revenue that would kick off in 2023.

According to Spotify, Podz integration would start as soon as possible and results should be visible before the year comes to a conclusion.The recent integration of Greenroom is also expected to help increase the platform’s listening productivity via podcasts and live audio room chats. The music streaming giant is expected to fully acquire Podz before 2022.

Talking about the latest acquisition of Podz, the company said that “we are investing to build and scale the world’s best (and most personalized) podcast discovery experience. 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 the growth of the category worldwide“.

Spotify has also added other features for personalization and to help users have an experience that’ll leave them coming back for more. Some of these features include options for resizing in-app text, buttons with increased readability, and a beta version for Spotify podcasts transcript. Now, this is where Podz comes in with extra listening pleasure.