Spotify is the single biggest audio platform out there, and it has long expanded beyond music. Love it or hate it, the company's push into podcasts was and is financially viable, even if it means that your favorite podcasts are locked to Spotify and no longer available on your favorite podcast player. As part of its Q2 2022 earning call, it becomes clear that Spotify is still looking to grow further, and its push into audiobook content is taking shape.
Despite global economic downturn and many companies now looking to save money rather than grow at any cost, Spotify still has its sight set on gaining more subscribers. That's reflected by the impressive growth of its monthly active users (19% more than last year's Q2) at the expense of profit. It lost roughly $197 million this quarter. However, this is still better than what it predicted, and an upward trend towards profitability at that.
Despite Spotify's positive outlook, the new economic reality also seems to make clear that the company has to say goodbye to some quirky experiments. During the call, it announced that it discontinued Car Thing, its experimental heads-up unit for cars that serves as a touchscreen to control nothing but your Spotify content while driving. It's a device with a very limited scope and questionable utility in the first place, so its loss will be something that Spotify subscribers can easily cope with.
Spotify wants to remain the biggest audio platform all while growing, so its recent acquisitions in the audiobook market make sense. It already made its intention to purchase Findaway public earlier this year when it announced its push into audiobooks, and now, the deal is closed. Findaway is a platform for audiobook authors, publishers, and consumers, and Spotify hopes it will jumpstart its entry in the audiobook market. The company also revealed another acquisition in this call: Sonantic. The AI voice platform is a sophisticated text-to-speech machine, and it might just help Spotify turn loads of written content into audiobooks without all the costs associated with producing audio.
While you might wish that Spotify returns to its roots as a music-only company, this is surely not bound to happen. We are only left to hope that the company will not neglect music in its quest for other endeavors. In any case, it's a good idea to stay up to date with all the Spotify tricks and features out there to get the most out of the platform.