How Spotify revolutionized podcast discovery

"You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometime you find / You get what you need" – You Can't Always Get What You Want, The Rolling Stones

Hi, and welcome back to Reframing. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about how to evolve this newsletter. I have decided to create fewer essays that go into greater depth about more popular topics and incorporate more visuals. I’ve found myself getting fatigued by the volume of newsletters in my inbox, so I want to focus on creating higher quality articles instead of publishing more frequently.

In the future, I’ll publish Reframing once every 2-3 weeks on Saturdays. I have a lot of exciting topics planned, so I hope you’ll stick around.

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Spotify is exceedingly good at podcast discovery. To illustrate, here’s a comparison between the search results for Stripe co-founder John Collison between it and the incumbent Apple Podcasts.

If you were to do this search yourself, the first thing you’d notice is that Spotify returns search results almost instantly while Apple Podcasts mulls over it for a few seconds. The next thing you’d observe is how compact Spotify’s layout is – it uses roughly half the real estate of Apple Podcasts to show the same number of results. So far, so good, but these are just cosmetic differences. Examining the search results themselves is where the two apps differentiate themselves.

Apple Podcasts prioritizes video for some strange reason, so first up is a 2015 video interview. The next two results are an original episode from 2018 and its rerun in 2020 on the same podcast. The most recent podcast episode only shows up in the 4th position, and without custom episode artwork. Most worryingly, the next two results (and more after) are irrelevant since they are the results of a hail-mary fuzzy search attempt to fill the page.

Contrast this with Spotify, whose algorithm takes podcast popularity and episode recency into account. An episode from the most popular podcast is first, followed by the most recent episode from a less popular podcast and so on. Most importantly, Spotify manages to find podcast episodes that Apple Podcasts missed, and so there are no irrelevant search results. Spotify also chooses to ignore publication dates and show notes; I’d assume that their data showed them that audiences don’t care about this in search results.

Both platforms have access to the same training metadata in the form of a standard podcast directory, so why is Spotify’s search model far superior to that of Apple Podcasts? I think a big part of the answer comes down to how each platform is performing their search.

If we were to create a matrix to represent which guests have been on which podcasts, it might look something like this (cells marked as 1 indicate that a particular guest has been on a specific podcast at least once):

Apple Podcasts’ algorithm gives far more weight to podcasts than their guests in search results; there’s an entire “Shows” section for relevant podcasts before the “Episodes” section shown above. Spotify doesn’t make these assumptions and shows podcast episodes from the get-go. In the matrix above, Apple Podcasts is primarily searching row-wise, whereas Spotify can search column-wise due to their superior indexing across the entire search space.

Translated to the music industry Apple Podcasts’ approach favors searching across albums instead of songs, which is ironic given that Apple was a pioneer in unbundling albums by selling songs for 99c apiece.

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Now let’s say that you’re able to find an episode you like and finish listening to it. What does each app recommend you do next in the footer?

Both apps recommend checking out more episodes of the given podcast, but that’s where the similarities end. Apple Podcasts emphasizes the “Hosts & Guests” section, but the content presented after clicking on it is hit-or-miss. Apple also tries to send you away by providing a link to the episode’s web page. On the other hand, Spotify tries to keep you in the app by surfacing relevant recommendations from other podcasts that you can begin playing instantly.

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Spotify is so far ahead of the competition when it comes to podcast discovery that no other app even comes close. It has fewer bells and whistles than its peers, but it turns out that I didn’t need them, and now I can’t imagine switching away.