No one realizes that for Spotify, the weight of podcasts is growing in the final design of the service for users. Just a few days ago, we reiterated that in terms of music offerings, Apple Music exceeded 100 million songs. It is true, as I noted at the time Not only does Apple have a lot of muscle, it also has a close relationship with the music industry for almost two decades, but it is no less true that for a long time and to this day, Spotify has been a reference in the sector.

However, as I say, partly after evaluating usage by their subscribers, and also perhaps to counter what they saw as growing and threatening competition, they decided to still keep music as the main content of the service, focus on podcasts, more or less when we can say that the second great advent of this communication format began to take place. It seemed like a pretty smart move and to this day it seems to have worked very well overall.

A clear example of this can be found in the company’s response to Apple Podcast+, rexpress all the economic benefit to attract more creators who might otherwise opt for Apple’s paid service to monetize their recordings. In this way, at least in my opinion, Spotify appeared to be more interested/interested in strengthening its position against Apple in the podcast market than in the music market. And I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, mind you it’s not a criticism or a compliment, just a reading of the situation.

Of course, this led us to think that the profitability of podcasts was the driving force behind the Swedish company, but today, for the first time, we see a movement that leads us to the fact that not everything is so positive. And it is as we can read in Engadget, Spotify is shutting down 11 original podcastscreated at their Gimlet and Parcast studios, in the first move in the company’s history to close multiple in-house productions at the same time.

Additionally, closings will also lead to layoffs, coded by the company as less than 5% of Spotify’s podcast team, and to which will be added the reassignment of some of the said staff to other podcasts. Additionally, new CEOs have been appointed for both Gimlet and Parcast. Spotify Studios and The Ringer remain untouched for now.

From a purely numerical point of view, we are talking about a movement that makes sense, since of course closed podcasts were not the most popular, and we have to remember that Spotify has more than 500 original and exclusive podcasts. However, the fact that for the first time in its history the company will lay off at least eleven at once prompts us to think that Spotify would consider softening its bet.