Amazon accelerates its Podcast service

In December 2020, Amazon announced that the technology giant acquired the Podcast company, Wondery.

We’re pleased to announce that Wondery has signed an agreement to join Amazon Music. Wondery is an innovative podcast publisher with a track record of creating and producing top-rated podcasts that entertain and educate listeners, including “Dirty John,” “Dr. Death,” “Business Wars,” and “The Shrink Next Door.” Wondery is already delighting listeners with its collection of immersive podcasts, and the company is evolving this entertainment medium into a truly new and exciting experience. When the deal closes, nothing will change for listeners, and they’ll continue to be able to access Wondery podcasts through a variety of providers. With Amazon Music, Wondery will be able to provide even more high-quality, innovative content and continue their mission of bringing a world of entertainment and knowledge to their audiences, wherever they listen.

Amazon Music launched podcasts in September 2020, and together with Wondery, we hope to accelerate the growth and evolution of podcasts by bringing creators, hosts, and immersive experiences to even more listeners across the globe, just as we do with music. This is a pivotal moment to expand the Amazon Music offering beyond music as listener habits evolve. Our commitment to podcasts, our focus on high quality audio with the Amazon Music HD tier, and our recent partnership with Twitch to bring live streaming into the app, make Amazon Music a premiere destination for creators.

Together with Wondery, we will continue to bring more customers to streaming as we expand selection and ensure we are a destination for our customers to find, discover, and listen to the creators and artists they enjoy.

What is Amazon Music?

Based on its homepage, Amazon Music is explained as follows.

We caught up with Tanayia Woolery, an Amazon Music expert, who explains how to enjoy all of the music benefits included in your membership and listen to your favorite artists on demand.

1. Let’s start with the basics. What is Amazon Music? Amazon Music is a streaming service included with your Prime membership at no extra charge. For Prime members it features more than 2 million songs — including thousands of stations and top playlists — all ad-free. What’s more, you can listen offline and with unlimited skips.

2. What’s the first thing I should do to get started? Download the Amazon Music App or go to music.amazon.com to explore your favorite music and start making a playlist. Or, just say, “Alexa, play All Hits on Amazon Music.”

3. What’s the easiest way to enjoy Amazon Music every day? Amazon Music is available on all Amazon Echo devices, along with FireTV, Fire Tablets and many other Alexa-enabled devices. You also can listen on your mobile device or computer. There is a playlist for everything, including cooking, working out, relaxing, working, gaming and dinner parties. Getting started is as easy as opening the Amazon Music App — and with Alexa enabled, saying, “Alexa, play music for working out.”

4. How do I find the artists and albums I like best? Easy, just search or use Alexa across your favorite devices to find the music you love. Head to the search bar at music.amazon.com and type in your favorite artist or song, or simply ask Alexa.

5. Tell me about playlists. How do they work? Not only can you make your own playlists featuring your favorite songs, but our experts at Amazon Music also curate playlists for almost any activity, mood or occasion. There are thousands of playlists, so we’ve got you covered if you don’t have time to create your own. To get started, just say, “Alexa, play The Top 50 Most Played.”

Who is Wondery?

According to its homepage, company profile of Wondery is described in the following way.

Feel The Story

Wondery is the largest independent podcast publisher in the world. Launched in 2016, and known for its immersive podcasts, Wondery became the fastest network to join the Top 10 ranker by Podtrac, propelled by hit shows such as Dr Death, Dirty John, American History Tellers, Business Wars, The Shrink Next Door and Gladiator. Twenty of Wondery’s shows have reached # 1 on Apple Podcasts, and Wondery is the only publisher to have simultaneously claimed the # 1 and # 2 ‘Top New Podcasts” slots on an annual Podtrac ranker.

Podcast is one of key words in 2021

In our other article, we see the news that Spotify acquired Megaphone so that we can see the same trend, which is “Podcast is the next important advertisement sphere”. Due to the pandemic, our behavior is not changed but evolved in our opinion. For example, remote working becomes more popular around the globe and the way of working makes sense not only to keep our social distance but also to balance our work and life. Of course, there are so many jobs that cannot be done by remote working such as factory operators, grocery store clerks and drivers for food delivery services. In addition to this, in many surveys all over the world, some people feel that remote working can increase their productivity, but other people say that it cannot. Therefore, we cannot easily conclude that remote working is the best way of working for everyone. However, our behavior is not the same as pre-pandemic and we cannot help adapting our current situation. In this article, we define this adaptation as our behavioral evolution.

Another example of our behavioral evolution is that we listen sounds such as music or Podcast while doing our work or housework. Let us see more specific situation. When we do remote work, sometimes we want to shut down sounds around us in order to concentrate one our work. At that time, we would like to listen to other sounds like Podcast. This is one reason why Podcast becomes more important for the technology companies and we expect that this trend will not stop from now on. As a result, there might be more news about Podcast in 2021.