Spotify CEO Daniel Ek was telling analysts earlier this week that his company would be unafraid of shutting things down even if they “sorta work”.
One of those things appears to be ‘Music + Talk’ podcasts. This is a format introduced by Spotify in 2020 as a way for people to record music-focused podcasts, including full tracks drawn from its licensed catalogue.
The resulting shows generated royalty-bearing streams for every listener, and rolled out to more countries in 2021. Now the format is being retired as part of wider changes to Spotify’s podcast creation process.
“To better optimize the needs of creators today, we are refocusing our attention — and resources — from some of our legacy tooling to the next generation of podcast innovations,” is how the company described that.
“As part of that shift, we are discontinuing our web and mobile native creation tools, including recording and editing tools as well as our ‘Music + Talk’ format (an experimental feature that allowed podcasters to include full licensed music tracks in their podcast episodes on Spotify), beginning this June.”
The description of ‘Music + Talk’ as “experimental” is a sign that it never quite took off in popularity.
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