I always come back to the same question: Are our eyes really worth 10 times more than our ears?” wrote Ek. And the music and radio industry is worth around a hundred billion dollars. “Consumers spend roughly the same amount of time on video as they do on audio.

“We’re not commenting on that today, because we have other transactions in the works, and I don’t want transactions that are closing to maybe bleed over into transactions that we’re negotiating,” he said.ĬEO Daniel Ek did publish a blog post outlining the grand strategy behind these acquisitions: Spotify’s push in to podcasting. Update: CFO Barry McCarthy said the acquisitions are cash-based, but declined to reveal the values. The value of the acquisitions has not yet been announced (Spotify may be pressed on that in its earnings call this afternoon, following the announcement of its Q4 financials.)

But Spotify is also buying a second company, Anchor, which makes an app that people can use to create their own podcasts. Rumours that Spotify was about to shell out $200m-plus on podcast production company Gimlet Media were correct: the acquisition was announced today.

Spotify buy anchor