And if they charge more for the relative few people who want it, the record label still gets 70% of the revenue. They have to do something that is not dependent on music licensing.
My point still stands. They chose the path of trying to get market share from incumbents in the podcast and audiobook market rather than trying to innovate in their core music business and that has cost them in multiple ways.
I don't even know what the incumbents are. I had never listened to a podcast before they came to Spotify. So I can easily imagine there was a big untapped market of getting people to spend more time with podcasts, which I assume is much cheaper for Spotify than music licensing. So more customers and less royalties -- I can see a potential in that.
Audible for audiobooks is the most obvious there. That's an interesting point about podcasts, I naively assumed most people were familiar with them long before Spotify offered them. I have been using PocketCasts for many years but iTunes has also carried podcasts for a long time.
