By: Nick Gambino
With Spotify’s newest feature rollout, creators now have more ways than ever to monetize their podcasts. They can now offer subscription podcasts to listeners for a fee and provide those paid subscribers exclusive episodes and more.
If this sounds familiar it’s because Spotify started testing this subscription model with podcast creators back in April, but it was a smattering of only 100 shows. Now, they’re widening the availability of subscriptions to all U.S. creators with international users gaining access to this feature sometime soon.
“In the testing period since, we’ve activated over 100 podcasts and found that shows across genres and content styles have a massive opportunity to build paying subscriber bases,” Spotify said in a blog post announcing the expansion. “Now, we’re ready to expand this model to everyone.”
Creators will be able to use Spotify’s podcast creation platform, Anchor, to mark which episodes they want to be subscriber-only. This will create a private RSS feed for their exclusive paid content which they can publish on Spotify as well as other platforms.
Testing it since April allowed them to make some updates and tweaks for the wide rollout. There are 20 different pricing options now available to podcasts, making it more flexible for both the creator and the subscriber.
As part of this monetization feature, they’ll also be able to get subscribers’ email addresses to capture identities and stay in contact with their listeners, something that’s proven difficult outside of social media.
To kick it off with some goodwill that will hopefully steal some business away from Apple Podcasts, Spotify is allowing creators to keep 100% of the subscription revenue until 2023. I would expect something like a 60/40 split when this grace period ends, but they’re only taking 5% on revenue from subscriptions at that point. That’s really not bad at all.
Spotify has been making big moves in its climb up Podcast Mountain in the last couple of years, giving big paydays to large podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience and Armchair Expert. With Apple currently the king, it’s things like this new paid subscriber feature that’ll help Spotify continue to be a real threat.
