Apple Podcasts+

Apple’s podcasting aspirations are murky. As a giant in distribution with a large, affluent customer base, the company oozes with potential. However, Apple has done little to realize it. Over the past two years Spotify has invested half a billion dollars in ad tech, content creators, production companies, and publishing platforms. Meanwhile, Apple has stood still.

Contours of the company’s plans emerged earlier this month when The Information reported that it was launching a subscription podcast service (the article is behind a paywall but Nick Quah has a good overview). While there’s no firm timeline, Apple is in discussions with content creators. To date, the company has nibbled around the edges of original content with Apple TV+ and podcasts like Apple News Today. A paid podcast subscription is another step in this direction.

The Power of Defaults

No one has cracked a subscription podcast business model yet. Should it try, Apple has a number of advantages.

Subscription businesses live and die by their ability to profitably acquire customers. While Luminary and Wondery have to acquire users from scratch, Apple has a juicy captive audience: an install base of 1.65 billion devices, including over 1 billion iPhones. This is a boon for discovery and distribution. Few businesses can match Apple’s organic reach.

Every month I errantly click on my Macbook’s Apple News icon at least once. Multiply that by a few hundred million Mac users and you’re talking about billions of free clicks per year. Fat fingers aside, Apple has an intentional toolkit for promoting its services. For example, it controls what apps come pre-installed on Apple devices. Consequently, its hardware comes loaded with Apple Music, Podcasts, and a kitchen sink of other Apple apps. Defaults matter and Apple controls the defaults. That’s powerful. This week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg teed off against the company, saying that:

“We increasingly see Apple as one of our biggest competitors. iMessage is a key linchpin of their ecosystem. It comes pre-installed on every iPhone, and they preferenced it with private APIs and permissions, which is why iMessage is the most used messaging service in the US. And now we’re seeing Apple’s business depend more on gaining share in apps and services against us and other developers. So Apple has every incentive to use their dominant platform position to interfere with how our apps and other apps work, which they regularly do…