More NPR shows will roll out their own Plus versions in the weeks ahead.Ī Wall Street Journal article on Friday broke the news that Spotify’s paid subscriptions would arrive this week. In this case, listeners aren’t getting bonus material, but they’re supporting NPR. Planet Money Plus) and will live alongside the free feeds. These shows will be branded as “Plus” (e.g. NPR will publish five shows - How I Built This with Guy Raz, Short Wave, It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders, Code Switch and Planet Money - that will be sponsor-free for paid subscribers starting on May 4. However, larger podcasts may take a different approach.įor example, Spotify has inked a deal with NPR for paid subscriptions which involves entire paid feeds. While Spotify will allow Anchor creators to mark entire feeds as paid, if they choose, it believes the lure of the free episodes to first attract listeners is a smarter idea. The cost to subscribe is determined by the creator, but will be one of thee tiers: $2.99, $4.99 or $7.99 per month. Early adopters include Wild Thing Tiny Leap, Big Changes and The Mindful Minute. These paid episodes will appear in the podcast’s main feed, where they’re marked with a lock icon on the Play button. The first group of 12 creators will now begin publishing the paid, subscriber-only bonus episodes to their feeds, which will be discoverable and searchable just like any other podcast episode on the platform.

Last week, Apple announced its own plan for paid podcast subscriptions through its Apple Podcasts platform, still a top destination for podcasts today.īut one key difference between Spotify’s efforts and Apple’s plan is how subscription revenue is shared. The launch comes at a time when the market for podcasts, and paid podcasts in particular, is heating up.

The service was initially tested with a dozen independent creators, and is now expanding to creators who had previously registered for the waitlist.įor the time being, Spotify is only opening up paid subscriptions to creators in the U.S., but it aims to expand internationally in the months ahead, it says.

Through Spotify’s podcast creation tool Anchor, podcasters will be able to mark select episodes as subscriber-only content, then publish them to Spotify and other platforms. Spotify today is officially rolling out paid podcast subscriptions, after first unveiling its new subscription platform at the company’s “Stream On” event in February.

Anchor to spotify