Back in April, Spotify announced that it would counter Apple’s new Podcasts Subscriptions platform with its own support for allowing creators to offer subscriptions to their shows. The feature launched earlier this year to select creators, and now Spotify has announced that it is expanding the platform to all US podcasters.
In a blog post today, Spotify announced that Podcast Subscriptions are now rolling out to all podcasters based in the United States. The Podcast Subscriptions feature of Spotify is powered by Anchor. The company says that creators can mark episodes as subscriber-only and publish them to Spotify and other platforms in the Anchor interface.
Spotify also detailed two updates that it is making “based on learnings during the testing period”:
- We will be expanding the number of pricing points to 20 options that can be chosen by the creator, offering increased flexibility.
- We now offer the ability for creators to download a list of contact addresses for their subscribers so they can further engage with their subscriber bases and offer even more benefits.
Spotify is not taking a cut of podcast subscription revenue until 2023, at which point it will begin taking 5%. The company is also not supporting in-app purchases on the iPhone and iPad, allowing it to avoid paying Apple a 30% cut of subscriptions. Instead, users will have to navigate to an external website to sign up for a podcast subscriptions.
Spotify adds:
Podcast Subscriptions will continue to evolve and grow as we learn from creators who succeed with this model. We plan to expand internationally very soon: Starting on September 15, international listeners will gain access to subscriber-only content, and shortly after we’ll make the feature available to creators around the world—so stay tuned.
Apple Podcasts Subscriptions launched earlier this year and has been met with mixed reactions from podcasters so far. 9to5Mac readers familiar with our weekly 9to5Mac Happy Hour podcast (co-hosted by Benjamin Mayo and Zac Hall) can find our ad-free, higher-quality version of each episode for $4.99/month or $49.99/year on Apple Podcasts Subscriptions.
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