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Business News Digital Media
Spotify acquires sports podcast network The Ringer
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 6 February 2020
Spotify is growing its sports vertical, everyone. I’d see a doctor about that myself. But Spotify seems to think that its sports vertical growing is an entirely good thing. Basically, the news is that the streaming firm’s done a deal to acquire “leading creator of sports, entertainment and pop culture content” The Ringer. Yeah, it’s yet another podcasting acquisition.
Founded by Bill Simmons in 2016, The Ringer has quickly grown a business around sports podcasting, but also branches out into other areas of entertainment at times, such as its ‘Game Of Thrones’ podcast, ‘Talk The Thrones’.
“We look forward to putting the full power of Spotify behind The Ringer as they drive our global sports strategy”, says Spotify Chief Content Officer Dawn Ostroff.
She adds: “As we set out to expand our sports and entertainment offerings, we wanted a best-in-class editorial team. Bill Simmons is one of the brightest minds in the game and he has successfully innovated as a writer and content creator across mediums and platforms. The Ringer’s proven track record of creating distinctive cultural content as well as discovering and developing top tier talent will make them a formidable asset for Spotify”.
Simmons himself says: “Spotify has the unique ability to truly supercharge both content and creator talent across genres. We spent the last few years building a world-class sports and pop culture multimedia digital company and believe Spotify can take us to another level”.
“We couldn’t be more excited to unlock Spotify’s power of scale and discovery, introduce The Ringer to a new global audience and build the world’s flagship sports audio network”, he goes on. “We’re joining one of the best media companies in the world. It’s an incredible day for us”.
So, he’s very excited. And rightly so – it’s all very exciting. I mean, I assume it is. I know nothing about sport and the idea of listening to a podcast about a TV show makes no sense to me. But what do I know? I’m sure it is very exciting indeed.
Just in case it’s not, Spotify has also announced that it now has 271 million users, including 124 million paying subscribers. Those are certainly numbers. Exciting numbers, right? It also just announced that it made a quarterly loss at the end last year. So much excitement.
