Spotify shuts down its podcast studio

Spotify is dissolving its founding podcast studio and laying off part of the team. The Studio 4, or Spotify Studios as mentioned externally, consisted of 10 to 15 employees and produced shows like Dissect and Chapo: Kingpin on Trial. Spotify called affected employees on Friday and said their last days would be January 21. They will receive two months of compensation. Some employees were reassigned while others were laid off and signed up for the Spotify job board. The studio's director, Gina Delvac, was also fired.

Spotify declined to comment. However, in a note to Spotify staff obtained by The Verge, Julie McNamara, US director of video and studies, acknowledged the layoffs and said closing the studio would allow the company to "move faster and make more significant progress and facilitate more effective collaboration across our organization."

For a company that shares news of its podcasting efforts anywhere, it can, Studio 4 rarely, if ever, appeared in the press. (I only documented one public use). However, Studio 4 occasionally appears in earnings reports as Spotify Studios. It was the first podcasting studio created by Spotify and consisted of all employees who worked on podcasting prior to the company's major network acquisitions. Additional employees were subsequently hired, but the initial group helped test the podcasting business model and listener interest with shows like Amy Schumer Presents: 3 Girls 1 Keith, says a former employee who asked not to be identified due to work at the course in the industry.

Since the inception of Studio 4, Spotify has spent millions not only buying new studios and networks, but also landing high-profile deals with podcasting big names like Joe Rogan, Call Her Daddy's Alex Cooper, and Dax Shepard of Armchair Expert. It also focused heavily on its ad tech with the acquisition of hosting company Megaphone, which was the centrepiece of most of the company's announcements last year. However, Spotify has not shared numbers on how its acquired entities are doing.

Although Spotify says there are more podcasts than ever on its platform, an August Business Insider report said Gimlet itself has struggled to grow within the tech company due to "unclear strategy" and "internal tensions." It had the lowest numbers of the four studios in terms of hours of consumption in leaked metrics for September 2020. Meanwhile, a Verge report found that Spotify's licensed exclusives, specifically the Joe Rogan show, may have missed a significant part of your audience in the change to the platform.

For now, Spotify has not said how the partner shows will be produced in the future and what will happen to the shows currently in production. However, the Dissect team took to Twitter after this story was posted to say that the show will continue to be produced with Spotify. Obviously, the original programming will also live within the three networks that Spotify bought, but the closure of Studio 4 shows that Spotify was unable to build a fully independent production team from scratch.