It's well known that Spotify is one of the world's largest streaming music services. According to the Q4 2018 results of Spotify, it has gained 96 million Spotify Premium subscribers – a 36% year-on-year increase and the total number of active users per month climbed 29% to 207 million.
At the beginning of this year, Spotify has announced that it will be preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts and contribute to building a powerful podcasting empire. So it turns out it's true as Spotify paid nearly $340 million to make podcast push with podcast startups Gimlet Media and Anchor acquisitions in 2019.
The Spotify Founder and CEO Daniel EK wrote in a blog post titled 'Audio First', "We believe it is a safe assumption that, over time, more than 29% of all Spotify listening will be non-music content, like podcasts. This means the potential to grow much faster with more original programming."
After Spotify acquired Gimlet Media and Anchor, EK announced, "These acquisitions will make us accelerate to become the world's leading audio platform, enable users around the world to get the best podcast content, improve the quality of listening experience as well as enhance the Spotify brand."
Everything We Know about Gimlet Media & Anchor
Headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, Gimlet Media is one of the leading digital podcast companies, focused on producing narrative podcasts. It has a range of popular shows that focus on everything from entrepreneurship to science, including Startup, Homecoming and Reply All.
Founded in 2015, Anchor offers the best way and tools for podcast producers to make your exclusive podcasts for free. With excellent tools, the beginners and professionals can create and host unlimited episodes in this end-to-end podcasting platform. Anchor also provides distribution and monetization options for users to distribute your shows to podcasting apps quickly and easily.
How to Free Download Spotify Podcasts for Offline Listening
There are so many Spotify music downloaders and converters in the market that can download and convert Spotify songs, playlists and albums to MP3, FLAC and other audio files. How about downloading podcasts on Spotify?
In the wake of purchasing two podcast startups, including Gimlet Media and Anchor, Spotify has been focusing on podcast industry this year. In order to keep up with Spotify's development trend, AudFree Spotify Music Downloader has updated it to be compatible with Spotify podcast currently, which can download and convert podcasts offline with free Spotify account.
Let's see the detailed tutorial on how to download Spotify podcasts to MP3 as below by using this innovative Spotify podcast downloader.
Step 1. Download, install and register AudFree Spotify Music Downloader on your Mac or Windows computer. Just simply touch the shortcut icon to launch it from your computer desktop, and you will see Spotify app will be launched automatically.
Step 2. There are two ways for you to add Spotify podcasts to this software. You can directly drag and drop podcasts from Spotify to this software or copy and paste the URL of Spotify podcasts to the search box of AudFree software and click the '+' button to load files.
Step 3. Navigate to the top right menu bar and choose 'Preferences' > 'Convert' button, the setting window will pop up. You can begin to define output format as MP3, FLAC or other common audio formats as you like and customize the output audio quality by changing the Spotify bitrate and sample rate, etc.
Step 4. Hit on the 'Convert' button at the bottom-right corner of the main interface, and then AudFree Spotify Music Downloader will download Spotify podcasts to MP3 and save them as local files on your computer. After conversion, you can locate MP3 podcasts by clicking the 'file' button.
Let's look forward to Spotify's unique podcasts and listen to podcasts offline on any device.
Alex Wilson
Staff Editor
