Sachin Doshi, CCO, Podimo: 'Podcasts are no threat to the music business.' (The MBW Podcast)

There isn't much about Spotify's explosive growth over the past ten years that Sachin Doshi can't tell you about in great detail.Doshi was working in business development at Universal Music Group in New York in early 2008, when Daniel Ek left him with a demo of the platform. As Doshi explains on this Music Business Worldwide Podcast (supported by Voly Music): "Both from a pure concept perspective, and the execution that Spotify was bringing to the market, I genuinely believed it would scale... I was pitching internally at Universal this idea that like music subscription should become a household utility like cable."He was right, of course: now, 13 years on, there are over 500 million paying subscribers to music streaming services worldwide. Doshi was such a Spotify acolyte that he not only played a key role in the service's launch in the US in 2011 while working at Universal Music Group – he then left UMG to join Daniel Ek's company as Spotify's VP of Content towards the end of that year.Doshi eventually departed Spotify in 2016 to co-found the ad-free news subscription app, Scroll, which grew to the point it was acquired by Twitter last year (2021).This month (January 2022), Doshi was unveiled as the new Chief Content Officer (CCO) at Podimo, a Denmark-based podcast and audiobook subscription platform that competes with other providers such as Spotify, Apple, and Luminary.Podimo has been making serious moves in this fast-growing space, including a raise of $78 million in a Series B round last year.On this podcast, MBW quizzes Doshi about the rise of Spotify, the stagnation of music streaming pricing, the potential of Podimo to rival some of the world's biggest tech companies – and whether the music business should be scared of the rapid growth in podcasting's global reach.The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music, the new bespoke financial management platform for people in the music business.The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.