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

<p>There isn&apos;t much about Spotify&apos;s explosive growth over the past ten years that Sachin Doshi can&apos;t tell you about in great detail.<br/><br/>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. <br/><br/>As Doshi explains on this <a href='https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/podcast'>Music Business Worldwide Podcast</a> (supported by <a href='http://www.volymusic.com'>Voly Music</a>): &quot;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.&quot;<br/><br/>He was right, of course: now, 13 years on, there are over 500 million paying subscribers to music streaming services worldwide. <br/><br/>Doshi was such a Spotify acolyte that he not only played a key role in the service&apos;s launch in the US in 2011 while working at Universal Music Group – he then left UMG to join Daniel Ek&apos;s company as Spotify&apos;s VP of Content towards the end of that year.<br/><br/>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).<br/><br/>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.<br/><br/>Podimo has been making serious moves in this fast-growing space, including a raise of <a href='https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/podimo-raises-78-million-podcast-funding-1235118042/'>$78 million</a> in a Series B round last year.<br/><br/>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&apos;s biggest tech companies – and whet