Spotify is pushing hard in podcasts, and research firm eMarketer has predicted that this will pay off in 2020 with the company overtaking Apple for US podcast listeners.
“This year 28.2 million people will listen to podcasts on Spotify at least monthly, while 28.0 million will listen via Apple Podcasts,” claimed its report. eMarketer thinks the gap will widen after this year too: by 2023 it expects Spotify to have 37.5 million podcast listeners in the US compared to Apple’s 28.8 million.
Spotify hasn’t broken out its US podcast audience so far, although it does provide global figures. At the end of last year 25% of Spotify’s monthly active users were listening to podcasts: more than 86 million people. If that 25% figure applied to Spotify’s MAUs in North America, as revealed in its latest financials, that would be around 20.7 million people, which meshes well with eMarketer’s US-only estimate of 19.9 million at the end of 2020.
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