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Spotify might bring Anchor podcasting services under its main brand
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 21 December 2022
Spotify is considering reorganising and rebranding its services for podcasters, phasing out the Anchor brand that it acquired back in 2019.
According to TechCrunch, researchers at Spotify have reached out to a number of podcasters who have registered with the firm’s Spotify For Podcasters platform to sound them out about a possible rejig and rebrand.
Currently Spotify For Podcasters allows people whose podcasts are available on the streaming service to access data and analytics about how their programmes are performing on the platform.
Meanwhile, Anchor is a distribution service for podcasters, helping people publish and distribute their podcast programmes more generally, to all podcast apps and platforms, as well as offering monetisation tools for podcasters within the Spotify ecosystem, including the option of selling subscriptions to listeners.
Under the proposed rejig and rebrand, both would become part of a new service called Spotify Creator Studio. It would offer two levels depending on whether a podcast is actually hosted by Spotify – the ‘Hosted’ level replicating Anchor and the ‘Unhosted’ level basically replacing Spotify For Podcasters.
It would definitely make sense for Spotify to bring together its podcasting tools into one place, and having everything available under the Spotify brand also simplifies things.
Although, possibly, keeping Anchor as a separate brand better communicates that using that service doesn’t lock a podcast to just Spotify. Who knows? I guess that’s what this little research exercise is trying to figure out.
And – please note – it is just a research exercise at this point, with no decisions made. Or so says a Spotify spokesperson, who told TechCrunch: “At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of surveys and tests in an effort to improve our user experience”.
“Some of these end up paving the path for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning”, they added. “We have no news to share on future plans at this time”.
