Spotify has become the “go-to” place for music for most people, and it is taking steps to ensure that it also becomes the dominating platform for all your podcast needs. To that end, Spotify, the Swedish music streaming firm, has acquired Podz, a start-up which helps generate preview clips of podcasts, for an undisclosed sum.
According to Spotify, which recently rolled out Greenroom, its live-audio rival of Clubhouse, the acquisition of Podz and its talented team of entrepreneurs, engineers, and designers, will help make the experience even better.
What separates Podz from other services used by podcasters is that it automates the process of finding key moments from episodes using state-of-the-art machine learning trained on over 100,000 hours of audio.
How is it useful, you may ask. A podcast lasts for quite some time, usually about 30-43 minutes. Podz’ “first audio newsfeed” presents its users with 60-second clips from various shows, which can be browsed and discovered much faster than browsing through 30-minute podcasts.
“At Spotify, we are investing to build and scale the world’s best (and most personalized) podcast discovery experience,” the company said. “We believe that Podz’ technology will complement and accelerate Spotify’s focused efforts to drive discovery, deliver listeners the right content at the right time, and accelerate growth of the category worldwide.”
Sweden-based Spotify said that it plans to integrate Podz’ technology into its platform of over 2.6 million podcasts, taking podcast discovery to the next level. According to Spotify, this would make it easier for listeners to find the content they want to listen to, and for creators to be discovered and build a fan base.
Spotify said that it had machine learning experts have been focused on improving audio discovery for almost a decade, adding that the result of the combination of Podz’ technology on its platform would be seen before the end of the year.
Coming to Podz, the start-up recently raised $2.5 million in a pre-series funding round from M13, Charge Ventures, and others. It counts among its investors celebrities like Paris Hilton and Katie Couric.
The podcasting sector is something that has attracted a lot of attention in recent times, with more and more companies investing in podcast streaming. Facebook is looking forward to rolling out its own podcast product soon, while Apple has Apple Podcasts, which is subscription-based.
