In a little more than a year since Spotify acquired Stockholm-based Soundtrap, a relatively small company creating a suite of music and podcast recording tools, the alliance has birthed a new product-a cloud-based podcast creation and recording tool. The entire team of Soundtrap had joined Spotify, including founders Björn Melinder, Fredrik Posse, Gabriel Sjöberg, and Per Emanuelsson.
Soundtrap’s newest creation is Soundtrap for Storytellers, a cloud-based app for podcast production. Charlie Hellman, head of Spotify’s creator marketplace, says that the new product will streamline the publishing process. “Soundtrap was created to redefine … music making, and now we’re bringing that same expertise to podcast creation with Soundtrap for Storytellers,” he said. “The platform itself was built around solving some of the biggest pain points for podcasters — editing, transcribing, remote interviewing and adding sound effects — and providing one streamlined platform that contains every part of the podcast creation process.”
It is a user-friendly, collaborative toolset accessible via desktop, with a select set of recording and editing features available on iOS and Android. In many ways, Soundtrap for Storytellers is an evolution of Soundtrap’s existing services, which lets users’ record, edit, and publish audio, solo or with others across iOS, Android, Chromebook, Linux, Mac, and Windows. Co-founder Emanuelsson says that Soundtrap for Storytellers was built from the ground up to address podcast creators’ pain points. “The Soundtrap team has done a fantastic job with this new product. Part of Spotify’s mission is to grow the number of creators able to build podcasts worldwide,” he said. “Soundtrap for Storytellers gives podcast creators incredible editing capabilities, collaboration in real time, and the ability to publish their podcast to Spotify.”
Soundtrap for Storytellers offers an editing studio from which podcasters can transcribe and edit spoken-word audio files (in English at launch). A remote interview component enables creators to invite multiple guests to talk, record (on separate tracks), and work on the same podcast by joining a session from a unique URL. Meanwhile, a library of sound effects, instruments, and loops lets authors create their own intro and outro music, and a discoverability tool optimizes podcast transcripts for SEO.
The new product is the part of a smart strategy, given the increasing role played by podcast production and listenership over the past few years. An Edison Research report into podcast listening trends found that 26% of people in the U.S. consumed at least one podcast each month in 2018. This is a two-percentage-point increase in the previous year. The marketing industry has utilized the trend completely, and leveraged video content to a very high level.
