“Spotify is spending a lot of money on podcasts that don’t actually involve any talking.”
White noise podcasts hit 3 million daily listening hours on Spotify by January 2023, and some earn their creators $18,000 a month in ads. Spotify’s own algorithm put them there, because it was told to push talk over music. Now the recordings of rain cost Spotify $38 million a year in gross profit. Spotify officially says the shows are safe, while some of their episodes quietly vanish.