“I don’t know what happens to news and I don’t know what happens to sports,” mused Spotify’s then-CFO Barry McCarthy in 2018, when talking about how the music streaming service wanted to take on traditional radio.
Since then it’s become very clear what happens to news and to sports in Spotify’s strategy: it gets them from podcasts, including putting clips from those shows into personalised ‘mixed media’ playlists with music – ‘Daily Sports‘ and ‘Your Daily Drive‘.
Something else that’s popular with radio listeners, though, are soap operas. So this ‘Spotify spoils the Archers party with rival soap opera‘ story in The Times is intriguing, albeit with a very British focus.
“Spotify is developing a daily soap opera podcast that could represent the most significant challenge to The Archers in the Radio 4 show’s 70-year history,” claimed the article, suggesting that the drama show will launch “as early as next year”. By their nature, soap operas tend to be highly localised though: we’ll be interested to see if this is a UK-only thing, or if Spotify is looking to develop a format that can be remade elsewhere in the world.
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