New synergies between the podcast and music industries: Spotify plays the rhythm

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyse the synergies established between the podcast industry and the music industry (mainly labels and publishers). To this end, it examined the strategies of majors and indies in the development of specific series and services, the acquisition of production companies and the establishment of agreements with the large platforms and advertisers and developed a taxonomy of the content generated by these companies. These strategies have several objectives that will be studied from the political economy of cultural and media industries point of view: the promotion of artists, the exploitation of the historical catalogue in a transmedia development that puts songs into circulation generating income from reproduction and public communication rights and, of course, the opening of new businesses that generate profits from the two fundamental income channels: data and advertising. Consequently, the music companies managing audio objects and generating contents that compete in the new paradigm.