Spotify amps up podcast discovery with new features

Spotify on Wednesday announced a handful of new features designed to give podcasts a more prominent position in its app as it battles with Apple and YouTube to become users’ preferred podcast streaming destination. The company says it will begin recommending podcasts on its Home page and provide a Following feed for staying up-to-date with the latest episodes of your favorite shows. Soon, Spotify will also roll out new tools for podcast creators to recommend content and better engage with their fans in comments. The changes, while relatively minor, are a part of Spotify’s growing efforts to compete with Apple’s Podcasts app and YouTube. The latter has been investing more heavily in podcasts in recent years. This month, for instance, YouTube launched its own weekly top podcast list to challenge Spotify and Apple. That chart highlights some major differences between the platforms in terms of what YouTube’s video viewers prefer to watch. Meanwhile, Spotify has also invested in video po ... Read full article.