To serve relevant ads and, in return, increase its CPM for advertisers, Spotify needs to know its users intimately. This means that Spotify needs its users to spend as much of their digital lives as possible in its walled garden. The quickest way for Spotify to enable this is to build a podcast streaming capability and stream all available podcasts through its music app.
~ Kay Singh from, How Spotify is Killing the Open Podcast Ecosystem
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In the end, Spotify has managed to create a large garden and they’ve enclosed a large portion of the revenue.
The beauty of the Internet—for as long as this remains true—is that it is open. Open technology, open connectivity, open space. That means no wall garden can ever completely contol the thing it encloses. And that’s not even what Spotify wants to do. They’re simply trying to run a business.
And anyone who wants to be an independent podcaster, that too simply goes on.
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