Facebook is going on all in on audio right as Clubhouse’s reign is coming down. Just last week, the tech giant announced new products and features it’s working on.
Today, they began rolling a Spotify mini-player feature on its app. This feature lets users stream their favourite podcasts and music from Spotify right within the Facebook app.
But that’s not all. Facebook is now going directly against podcasts apps including Spotify, Apple and Google with a new in-app podcast player.
This is not surprising as its New Product Experimentation Team had been reported to be working on new products such as apps and programs for newsletter tools, travel, workplace services and podcasts in its bid to remain relevant 15 years after launching.
It’s worth noting that this new in-app podcast player is separate from the mini-player.
The Verge reports that the in-app player will let creatives distribute their podcasts through their Facebook page either by an RSS feed or directly uploading on Facebook using its set of new audio creation tools.
According to Facebook, more than 170 million people are already connected to hundreds of thousands of podcast pages on its platform while more than 35 million people are members of fan groups around podcasts.
Facebook now wants this podcast audience to not leave the app and head to other dedicated podcast apps to listen to their favorite shows but rather use in-app player they’re working on that is expected to roll out within the next few months.
Also, Facebook will get acces to consumer data regarding their podcast listening behaviour and shows being listened to and target the listeners with ad products and share the revenue with the podcast creators/hosts.
Facebook could also opt to let podcast creators have a subscription paywall for them to earn revenue too.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out in the coming months since Spotify has 2.2 million podcast titles while Apple has 500,000 podcasts. Spotify is also working on bringing video podcasts on its app.
