Exec sees Spotify as podcast platform
When Dawn Ostroff began working the graveyard shift at a Miami radio station, her parents assumed her career in radio would be shortlived. The college student was awkward reading the news, but she honed her skills and kept her job. Four decades later, Ostroff is transforming the next generation of radio for the world’s largest musicstreaming subscription company.
Since she was tapped as Spotify’s chief content officer about a year ago, Ostroff has been charged with building an arsenal of podcasts to catapult the Swedish business into a marketleading position, not just in music but also in audio storytelling. Under her watch, the number of podcasts available on Spotify has grown to more than 450,000 titles, up from 185,000 in February.
The company, with offices in New York and Los Angeles, has earmarked up to $500 million this year to buy podcastrelated businesses, and already Ostroff has snapped up Gimlet Media and Parcast to create exclusive content. Next year, Ostroff says, the plan is to have “hundreds and hundreds” of new original podcast series in production or available on the service.
“Becoming the most listened to audio network means that we needed to expand from just being a music platform to incorporating other types of audio, entertainment and information,” Ostroff said in an interview from Sweden. “Podcasts have started to really take off.”
Spotify has 232 million monthly active users, and nearly half are subscribers with regular subscriptions at $9.99 a month. Already, tens of millions of people listen to podcasts on Spotify, the company said. Popular podcasts include Spotify exclusives such as the music and pop
“If you’re Spotify, why would you want to limit yourself just to music?” Rich Greenfield, media and tech analyst
culture series “The Joe Budden Podcast” and Germanlanguage comedy show “Fest & Flauschig,” as well as those that are not exclusive to Spotify, such as the truecrime comedy show “My Favorite Murder.”
Why the push? Ostroff believes podcasts can attract new listeners and increase the amount of time people spend on Spotify. Users can listen to audio stories can be accessed on different devices while they are multitasking.
“There is a dramatic expansion in the amount of time where you’re capable of ingesting audio,” said media and tech analyst Rich Greenfield. “If you’re Spotify, why would you want to limit yourself just to music?”
Podcasts are especially popular with Millennials, people ages 25 to 34, with onethird of the podcast listeners in that age group, downloading at least five podcasts a week, according to research from Adobe Analytics. Spotify expects that eventually, roughly 20% of listening on its platform will be nonmusic.
“My motto has always been to follow young people and understand why they are going in a certain direction,” said Ostroff, 59, who works in New York City and oversees a team of about 1,000 people.
But Spotify has significant competition from Apple, which has offered podcasts since 2005. Many discover podcasts through Apple’s app, which supplies more than 750,000 shows. There is no subscription fee for the Apple app, and the Cupertino company has yet to release original productions, although Ostroff is aware of the rumors.
Apple also competes with Spotify through Apple Music, which has more than 60 million people who use the service worldwide.
Other competitors include rival Pandora and venture capitalbacked startups like Luminary that have also created libraries of exclusive content.
Greenfield says Spotify must ensure that its users have the best experience finding and listening to podcasts, and supply shows that can’t be found elsewhere.
“They have to find content so good that you switch over,” Greenfield said.
Ostroff was raised in New York City. Her dad worked as a concert promoter and her mom owned a baby items store. She began her career in Miami while attending college there and working at WINZ radio station. Despite early struggles, Ostroff persisted and became a broadcast journalist, covering local news, but she soon decided that it wasn’t for her.
“News was really a very hard way to make a living,” she said, citing the pressure of daily reporting. She moved to Los Angeles and worked in entertainment. “I laughed a lot, and I didn’t have that same sense of responsibility, but I did really enjoy the creativity and the ability to tell stories.”
Ostroff rose through the ranks in Hollywood, working at Disney, Fox, Lifetime, UPN and the CW network. She led Lifetime Entertainment from 1996 to 2002, when it became a toprated cable network.
As president of the UPN Network from 2002 to 2006, Ostroff developed hit shows such as “America’s Next Top Model,” a reality series that has run for 24 seasons.
At the CW, Ostroff helped the company capture young audiences when illegal downloading of shows on the internet was rampant.
“It was the exact moment when young audiences were starting to migrate to digital platforms,” said Dana Walden, chairman of Disney Television Studios & ABC Entertainment, who is Ostroff ’s friend and former coworker at Fox. “There are a lot of programmers and executives at that point who would have bailed on that strategy.”
But Ostroff leaned into moving shows online. She decided to make episodes of the teen drama series “Gossip Girl” available on iTunes before they aired on the CW.
Walden says moves like that played a key role in the CW network landing a lucrative deal in 2011 to distribute its shows on Netflix, which made the network profitable. It is estimated that Netflix paid $600,000 per “Gossip Girl” episode.
“It was 100% the result of her commitment to programming for young audiences, and offering a genuine alternative” to traditional TV, Walden said.
After the CW, Ostroff became president at Condé Nast Entertainment, where she built the company’s digital video business and oversaw its film and TV operations. The digital video unit produced more than 5,000 videos per year, attracting more than 1 billion views each month. She took content from Condé Nast publications to create TV shows and movies even as the publishing company struggled.
Spotify cofounder and CEO Daniel Ek asked to meet with Ostroff after speaking with his staff about her work at Condé Nast. He shared his plans to make Spotify the world’s largest audio service and offered her a job. Ostroff she joined Spotify in August 2018. Although she oversees content partnerships in music and video, expanding the podcast library has been a top priority.
Spotify is producing original podcasts, landing exclusives and making it easier for podcast production companies to upload programs.
Ostroff was instrumental in this year’s key acquisitions, including Gimlet Media and Parcast.
“This is a bold move to get in the game,” said Greenfield, who is also an investor in independent podcast production company Wondery. “It signals to the entire podcast world that they are serious.”
Gimlet executives believed joining Spotify would allow them to gather more data on listeners and make it easier for people to discover their podcasts, said Matt Lieber, Gimlet’s cofounder and managing director.
Today, Gimlet is working on new productions, including investigative stories and fictional works. A 2018 podcast called “Sandra,” which is about the world of digital assistants and featured Kristen Wiig’s voice in the English version, will be reimagined for German, Portuguese and Spanish audiences.
Lieber said Spotify and Ostroff have allowed Gimlet to pursue ambitious projects.
Ostroff said she’s looking for content that is “really going to be loud” so it brings in the largest number of users who will sign up and spend more time listening to it.
“The amount of content that we can make is endless,” Ostroff said.
There will be tieins to the music side of the business. Spotify already has podcasts that delve into music history, such as, “Stay Free: The Story of The Clash,” that was released this year and explained the story behind the punk rock band. She’s also talked to musical artists who have never done a podcast before.
“If you think about it, it’s another way for artists to connect with their fans, but connect with them in a way that they may have not seen before,” Ostroff said.
Ostroff scored a coup when Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground, said it would make podcasts for Spotify.
An attorney representing the Obamas approached Ostroff to chat about audio storytelling and seemed intrigued by the idea of connecting Spotify users with music and podcast creators, she said.