Spotify paid $ 100 million in podcasters while Creator Wars Heat Up

Spotify has paid more than $ 100 million to Podcast publishers and creators since January, the company told the New York Times’s Dealbook.

Payment is the result of a program introduced in 2025 which opened new sources of income on eligible hosts. But it is also an attempt to draw more creators (and their audience) to Spotify, because the climb of the video podcasting led a lot to YouTube.

The video came to dominate podcasting. More than half of Americans over 12 have watched a video podcast – but mainly on YouTube, according to an Edison research report from January. The service claims to reach a billion podcast consumers each month, making it the dominant platform for podcasts – a king of the media and a Kingmaker – and leaving audio platforms only as Spotify and Apple podcasts in dust. (Spotify introduced video podcasts in 2019.)

Compared to YouTube, Spotify has become a Podcast Unsider, with around 170 million monthly podcast listeners among its total audience of 675 million. An indication of the measure to which Spotify must go to make up for the best player: YouTube paid more than $ 70 billion to creators and media companies from 2021 to 2024.

The company publishes profits on Tuesday and is expected to earn around 540 million euros in income before 4.2 billion euros in sales, according to S&P Capital IQ.

But Spotify, which is registered on the New York Stock Exchange but which is based in Stockholm, remains a major player in the industry thanks in part to his list of talents – he distributes and sells advertising for the biggest podcast in the world, “The Joe Rogan experience”. And he completed his first full year of profitability in 2024. (Mr. Rogan’s podcasts are also available on Youtube.)