Acast locks in content sharing deal with Spotify
Audio and podcasting company Acast has now made its content available through Spotify.
Acast podcasts including My Dad Wrote a Porno and The Osher Gunsberg Podcast, can now be accessed through Spotify, should the podcaster and content creator choose.
Spotify’s podcast portfolio is set to increase by thousands
Content creators will now be able to select a button through Acast’s Create podcast management platform, allowing the shows to appear within Spotify. As a result, podcasters will also have access to data and listening behaviour of shows on Spotify through Acast’s system.
Acast’s country manager for Australia, Henrik Isaksson, said the deal was a huge opportunity for brands and podcasters, telling Mumbrella technology issues was the main reason why the deal had not been done sooner.
“Spotify is the leading music streaming service, without a doubt in my opinion. First of all we know that they have a massive audience, not just in Australia, but globally. The second thing is that Spotify have been lacking good audio content like this. Both businesses agreed that this had to be done. There had been tech issues in the past, that’s why it’s taken so long to do this,” Isaksson said.
Listeners will be able to search for the Acast podcasts they choose through Spotify, as they would with music. Isaksson is expecting growth in listenership for Acast and ‘stickiness’ for Spotify.
Acast wants to be more accessible to consumers
“A lot of the conversations in Australia in the last 12 months have been ‘When will podcasting become mainstream? If you look at the UK or US podcasting, it’s been around for ages but it’s also been a mainstream type medium for ages. They’ve never really had this issue, and this is what Australia needs. It’s all about accessibility and making sure the content is available,” he explained.
Isaksson was unable to comment as to how Spotify would monetise the content or audiences Acast will push through. However he confirmed advertisers which are integrated into the content – for example an ad on The Osher Gunsberg Podcast – would appear in the free and premium versions of Spotify.
“As far as I know, there isn’t money changing hands. That’s not the reason we are doing it,” he added.
“We know that a lot of listeners use Spotify and our content should be available on all platforms. We haven’t had the technology to date to make it happen, but now we do, and now we can pass back that valuable data to publishers and content providers that we promised them when we work with them.
“Having the first-party data that Spotify have is obviously super valuable and it’s also something that will benefit not just advertisers and content creators, knowing not only who but where they listen and what they listen to.”
Spotify is a ‘fantastic environment for brands’, says Isaksson
Isaksson said Acast is currently looking at how to curate podcast content for listeners, as Spotify does with ‘Discover Weekly’ and other playlists. But in the meantime, the deal is about mass audience reach.
“This is one fundamental step the right way. The other thing is that Spotify is a fantastic environment for brands. I worked there for a long time and I’ve been preaching this for ages, but it’s a really good environment for brands. Lots of good things, it’s not just the growth and the audience numbers but it’s also a great environment,” he said.
The representation and selling of Acast podcasting inventory is done through Nova Entertainment, a deal which was struck a year ago. Spotify’s latest foray into podcasting comes seven years after Spotify first entered the Australian market.
So let me get this right, acast made a button so its podcast users can upload their content to Spotify, something everyone can do now.
This isn’t news!
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This isn’t news at all. Australian owned Whooshkaa and Omny have had this for a while.
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Fake news creates negative views – quote that
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The title should have read ‘Spotify licenses Acast content as it seeks to increase its spoken word offering’.
The point being that as Spotify increases their spoken word library, they also reduce the USP of radio… local, spoken content.
The fact that Spotify aren’t pushing this angle hard doesn’t mean the radio networks don’t have something to worry about.
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This is actually pretty cool, so you can buy ads in Acast content that are heard on Spotify? That sounds like a decent step forward for podcasting!
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