Podcasts were nice and free because it wasn't a big industry. It's like the Internet before ads. Nice, cozy, but hardly a place to make a living. Spotify wanted

Podcasts were nice and free because it wasn't a big industry. It's like the Internet before ads. Nice, cozy, but hardly a place to make a living. Spotify wanted to do for podcasts what YouTube did for videos. I understand it's more complicated, since the growth of YouTube correlated with growing connection speeds that made watching videos online possible at all.