Photo Credit: mxmtoon
Spotify has announced the launch of a new 12-episode music podcast following mxmtoon, who has over 3 million monthly listeners on the platform.
21 Days is a new audio-diary style podcast that follows three weeks in the young singer’s life. The artist is working on her forthcoming self-released album, the masquerade. The series is designed to help draw attention to the album’s release on September 19th.
Mxmtoon — real name Maia — has developed quite a following online. She has over 3 million monthly listeners on Spotify. She also has over 341,000 Instagram followers and lots of engagement on TikTok.
Mxmtoon’s engagement with her audience is grassroots, without any big push from the music industry.
Spotify’s Head of Creative Development Liz Gateley says it’s doubling down on music-oriented podcasts.
“She obviously has lots of followers already, but that’s not enough. The person had to be the right human too, and we felt she had both.”
The podcast is an audio diary narrated by mxmtoon. It also includes an interview with her family, friends, and collaborators. Much of mxmtoon’s online fanbase trends on the younger side. She’s also notoriously private and says she struggled opening up to having microphones and recording equipment around constantly.
The podcast is just one more notch on Spotify’s podcasting belt. Recently the company confirmed it plans to spend over $500M on podcasts this year. Spotify also overhauled the app to make podcasts more prominent for listeners to find.
Podcast advertising revenue has skyrocketed while music subscription growth is flattening or even trending downward in established markets. Analysts expect Spotify’s podcast arm could generate an additional $250 million in annual revenue.
Spotify’s continual focus on exclusive content in the form of podcasts is taking direct shots at Apple. Podcasting was born on iTunes but has become much more as the format has grown. Spotify aims to take more of the podcasting pie, though notably, Apple isn’t merging music and podcasts in the same way — and frankly, thinks it’s a bad idea.
“You do not listen to a podcast, then a piece of music, and then a podcast,” top Apple exec Eddy Cue recently declared. “Experience has shown us that running in separate applications works great on iOS.”
damn her music really sucks.