Spotify is doing creator memberships, and also AI-generated podcasts

The global podcast industry raked in $9.2 billion last year, surging 27% from 2024. That’s a neat chunk of change–a chunk that’s expected to grow in 2026 and beyond.

And, unsurprisingly, Spotify wants to scoop up as much of it as possible.

At its third annual Investor Day, its VP and Global Head of Podcasts Roman Wasenmüller said the platform’s podcast ambitions are in their second year of profitability.

Spotify was possibly the first major platform to start splashing big cash on podcast development. In 2019, it spent $500 million to acquire Gimlet Media and Anchor, the technological bones; then, a year later, it paid for the flesh that is content, doling out $100 million for an exclusive deal with Joe Rogan. (That deal later renewed for $250 million.) Spotify has also signed deals with other podcasters, and has invested in making video podcasts a significant part of its platform.

Of course, for all this to be a success, Spotify needs its podcast division to mimic the music division: Podcasters, like musicians, need to find enough reasons to upload their content, so Spotify can make money off ads run on that content.

To that end, Spotify is wooing creators with a new product: Memberships. This is exactly what you expect from the name–and exactly like Channel Memberships, the product already wielded by one of Spotify’s top podcast competitors, YouTube.

Per TheWrap, Spotify’s goal with Memberships is to give creators more direct access to their fans on platform. This makes sense, because not only does challenger YouTube have a paywall program where creators can offer VIP access and content, but subscriber site Patreon is the #1 driver of consumer revenue for podcasts.

But what if creators already comfortably have membership programs set up on Patreon etc? No problem: Spotify said those creators can mirror-distribute any paywalled membership content through its portal Spotify Open Access.

Basically, Spotify knows creators’ fans are willing to pay to support shows and access more content. If it can cut into that market and keep creator/fan interactions on-platform, it stands a chance to make more money.

Or does it? We aren’t sure yet if Spotify will take a cut of creators’ subscription revenue. YouTube, Patreon, and more do, though, so there’s precedent for it to take a little for itself. The question is, will its membership program–and the rest of its suite–edge out its growing number of podcast space competitors?

There’s also one more thing to consider. As Spotify makes these efforts to draw in creators, it’s also launching an LLM tool that will generate podcasts for listeners.

Yep: Another announcement today was “Personal Podcasts,” a gen AI thing that Spotify says will “generate short, private, personalized audio directly inside Spotify.”

TheWrap reports Personal Podcasts will let users write prompts, add outside text, PDFs, or links for context, and choose a voice. The LLM will then crunch up all that info and spit out something to listen to. Spotify said it added the generator “after seeing strong demand from users creating custom audio with their own agents and saving it to Spotify.”

So, listeners can choose to explore the millions of podcasts on Spotify’s platform, engage with those creators, and get everyone paid via ad revenue and/or Memberships…or they can listen to an LLM. We’re sure lots of people will do both, but it is a little odd to see Spotify push for creators, only to introduce a generator that could go up against them for traffic.

Personal Podcasts will come out in beta sometime soon, to Premium subscribers in the U.S.

Onstage at Investor Day, Spotify’s co-CEO Gustav Söderström went full-throttle on AI. He said the platform is “entering the era of Generation, where the experience isn’t just selected from a catalog. It’s shaped by each of our users, in real time, around their taste, context and intent.”

“Today, there is no media player for both public and private content–or put differently–there is no media player for the generative era,” he added. “We believe Spotify will become that. Another way of thinking about this generative era is that ‘Computers finally understand English.’ This puts infinite creativity and control in the user’s hands.”