My co-founder Ricky wrote about why he switched over to Spotify for podcasts. I initially was reluctant to switch over to Spotify for podcasts because they seemed like an afterthought/second-class media there. There’s also all the usual arguments in favor of keeping things open, but I can see the power of a closed ecosystem being able to improve the experience for both podcast listeners and hosts. With the RSS spec, hosts can at most know how many times their episodes were downloaded, which just isn’t very useful.

The recent addition of mixed music + podcasts playlists to Spotify, including the personalized The Get Up morning show, shows some of the potential of having podcasts side-by-side with music. I’m excited for Spotify to recommend podcasts to me, but I’d also like to know which episodes of specific podcasts my friends love! So we built just that! Think of it as a more social and more in-depth Wrapped for Podcasts!

Compare your podcasts to mine using this fun project that Ricky and I made for discovering new Podcasts from friends!

Oh, and if you don’t yet use Spotify, I actually also wrote a utility for “importing” an OPML file and following all those shows for you on Spotify! Let me know if that sounds interesting to you!