The production lines are rolling for Spotify’s recently-acquired podcast studios, Gimlet and Parcast. Yesterday each had a brand new podcast to announce. Gimlet’s is called ‘The Journal’, and is a partnership with the Wall Street Journal for a daily show about “money, business and power”. That daily cycle could be important: it’ll generate useful content that could be chopped up and included in Spotify’s ‘Your Daily Drive’ playlist, as well as any other initiatives that blend music and news content in the future.
And talking of daily podcasts that could be chopped up and delivered in personalised playlists in the future… Parcast’s new daily show is called ‘Horoscope Today’, and it’ll offer horoscopes for each of the 12 star-signs. Which, you could argue, doesn’t make as much sense as a single podcast as it would delivering just the horoscope for a listener’s own star sign as part of ‘Your Daily Drive’ or other personalised playlists. The challenge here, though, is that while Spotify may know someone’s birthday and thus their star sign, it is surely lacking the important data on whether they take horoscopes seriously, or think they’re completely-made-up mumbo-jumbo. Then again, subscribing to ‘Horoscope Today’ would be a pretty strong signal in the former case. In fact, if you believe that Spotify will at some point be doing a lot more around personalised news, sports and other audio content, people’s podcast habits will provide a lot of valuable data on what they’re interested in beyond music – and of course, this data is also useful for ad-targeting.
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Tools: Kaiber
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