What you need to know
- Spotify has opened its podcast subscriptions program to all U.S. podcasters.
- The price points for subscription have been expanded to 20 from the original three options.
- International listeners will have access to subscriber-only content from September 15.
Spotify launched its paid podcast subscriptions for testing back in April with a limited number of creators. The company has now expanded the program, allowing all podcasters in the U.S. to sell subscriptions to their listeners.
The program is available through Anchor, Spotify's podcast creation and distribution platform, and podcasters can offer select episodes as subscriber-only content. Beyond Spotify, they can also publish their content to other platforms through a private RSS feed.
Creators can charge their subscribers a specific amount from 20 different price points, starting as low as $0.49 per month. But before listing all of the price options, Spotify will display three popular tiers, namely $0.99, $4.99 and $9.99. The company said the flexible pricing is based on what it learned during the testing phase. During that period, the streaming service activated premium subscriptions for 100 podcasts.
In addition to those capabilities, podcasters can also download a subscriber list that includes email addresses. The goal is to help increase the engagement between creators and their subscribers in terms of offering more perks.
However, there's no straightforward option inside one of the best podcast apps for Android to subscribe to a podcast like a dedicated button, for example. Instead, Spotify lets creators insert a link to their subscription page in the show notes.
As was the case during the test period, Spotify won't tax creators for their subscription revenues. Instead, they can keep all of their earnings for the next two years. The service will then start taking a 5% cut of the revenues beginning in 2023. On the other hand, Apple takes 30% of revenue from its Podcasts service for the first 12 months and then 15% in the succeeding years.
While the podcast subscriptions service is limited only to creators in the U.S. for now, Spotify plans to roll out subscriber-only content to listeners in other territories from September 15. That said, creators outside the country will have to wait a bit longer before they can gain access to the feature.
