Let other media behemoths battle for eyeballs; Spotify is going after the world’s eardrums. “Everyone underestimates audio. It should be a multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry,” Ek says. “Audio is ours to win.”
Much of the audio world remains fragmented and shockingly analog. Radio, a 135-year-old technology, has proven more resilient than Keith Richards. Each day the old-school medium reaches an estimated 3 billion people, and each year it pulls in ad revenue topping $30 billion, according to advertising research firm WARC. “In the U.S. alone, two thirds of all audio ad spending still goes to terrestrial radio,” Ek says. “That’s a massive amount of revenue that needs to shift online.”
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