Podcasts are nothing new and have been around for quite a while. They start with children audiobooks but can be news, documentations, stories or wherever your imagination can take you. Since 2020 there has been a huge increase in demand for podcasts, over 155 million people listen to podcasts every week. Across all platforms, there are 29 million different podcast producers available of which 700k are still active Most podcasts are listened too by people between 25-22. In May 2020 Joe Rogan, a famous podcast producer, known for interviews ranging from Elon Musk to Kevin Hart, announced that he would be engaging in a 100-million-dollar deal with Spotify to offer his content exclusively on their platform. This marks the beginning of a competitive market where podcasts are no longer available on all platforms but limited to a platform or two forcing customers to subscribe in order to access their content.
Similar to the movie-streaming industry dominated by Disney plus, Netflix, and Amazon Prime the podcast industry is bound to enter a market where the winner takes in all.
There are 6 main players to watch out for in this industry, and all of them have one thing in common. Namely that they have and ecosystem-based business model, which does not only consist of podcasts but also entails music or other products such as apps or premium shipping (Amazon), which is sold to customers in a bundle. These main players are Amazon Music, Apple music, Deezer, Luminary and Spotify.
One company to keep an eye out for is Alphabet-owned YouTube. With its billions of users, it also offers podcasts but only in combination with videos, if YouTube had a sincere interest in entering the industry, they would oppose a strong threat to all other players. Not only do they offer a social media medium for all established content creators, but they also offer music subscriptions and as an ecosystem have the perfect requirements to be successful in this field.
If these huge companies end up entering a head on head contest against one another in an attempt to secure the most successful podcasts and force you into a subscription, only few of them would survive.
To visualize what it might look like take a look at what can be seen in the Movie-streaming industry, namely, content that is exclusive to a platform, (f.e. Disney Plus, Netflix and Amazon Prime) forcing customers to make subscriptions to platforms in order to access the podcasts of their choice.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/22/18510897/luminary-podcast-app-launch-the-daily-gimlet-media-spotify
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18524296/podcast-wars-apple-luminary-spotify-nick-quah-hot-pod-interview-vergecast
