How Spotify's podcast bet went wrong
&gt; By 2021, Spotify had paid to sign some of the biggest names in podcasting, and it was ready to start squeezing its competitors… Now, Spotify chief content officer Dawn Ostroff — a TV veteran most famous for bringing Gossip Girl to the CW — was ready to stop many of these creators and companies from sharing podcasts on Apple and Amazon, and keep the content exclusively on Spotify.<p>I have noticed Spotify trying to funnel a decentralized podcasting ecosystem based on RSS into their own walled garden, with some pretty big plays -- it would be really encouraging if they fail at this! I sure hope so. And that nobody else can pull it off either.<p>&gt; The company saw podcasting as a rapidly growing space without middlemen.<p>Anyone else see the irony there? <i>Without</i> middlemen?  Spotify was trying to cement itself as the middleman in as much podcasting as possible, right? Or maybe it&#x27;s not irony, it&#x27;s exactly that, Spotify saw a space without middleman and thus an opportunity to lock itself in as the middleman.<p>Of course it&#x27;s not over yet, and Spotify remains in the game, along with others trying to capture podcasting in walled gardens.<p>&gt; The company said in 2021 that it overtook Apple as the biggest platform in podcasts, and the company is similarly neck-and-neck with SiriusXM as the biggest podcast network, making the company both one of the biggest producers of podcasts and the place where most people listen to them