Apple serves a vast majority of podcast listeners through its Podcasts app so it wouldn’t be surprising if the company wanted to leverage that to not only retain that chunk of the market but also bring in more people. To that end, it’s likely that Apple might start throwing money around to pick up exclusive rights to original podcasts.
Bloomberg reports that Apple has contacted media companies to talk about securing exclusive rights of orginal podcasts. This isn’t surprising as Spotify and Stitcher, two of Apple’s biggest competitors in the podcasting market, already have their own exclusive programming.
Spotify, for example, recently signed an exclusive deal for podcasts with Higher Ground which is the production company of President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. So it absolutely makes sense for Apple to do have exclusive programming as well.
The report mentions that Apple hasn’t outlined a clear strategy for this yet but it plans to go for the kind of deals that it didn’t make before. The company didn’t fund podcasts previously so as to avoid the perception that it was playing favorites. However, with the company now focusing on creating a lot of original content, it would understandably revisit its position on exclusive podcasts too.
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