The Audio Wars: Buyer-verse Expansion (Pt 2)

Today's episode is part 2 of our Audio Wars coverage. Since 2018 we've tracked over 30 M&A deals on our industry Audio M&A Watch List, like Amazon / Wondery and SiriusXM / Stitcher. There's also been numerous talent and IP licensing deals like Amazon / Smartless and Spotify / Call Her Daddy, as well as upstart fundraisings for companies like MeetCute, BlueWire, and Headgum. Why? Because we're in the Audio Wars, where music streamers are aggressively spending to capture growing listener consumption, and podcasts are proving to be one of the most powerful assets for user acquisition and retention...just like the video streamer wars! In this 14 minute part 2 episode, Chris and Andrew quickly recap the rends around spoken word audio, and then discuss four new buyer groups that will further drive market activity; smart speaker manufacturers, social media platforms, traditional Hollywood and OTT streamers, and sports media and betting operators.Subscribe to our newsletter. We explore the intersection of media, technology, and commerce: sign-up linkLearn more about our market research and executive advisory: RockWater websiteEmail us: [e-mail]--EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Chris Erwin:So Andrew, I think last week we recorded Audio Wars, part one, and there is a lot more that we wanted to get into, but we realized, we're going over our 15 minute limit and we're going to probably have to cut this one into two. Andrew Cohen:This is our first sequel. So maybe the beginning of more sequels to come, but definitely once you get us to started on audio, it's tough to keep us under 15 minutes. Chris Erwin:Yeah. Exciting development for the RockWater Roundup. All right. So yeah, last week, a quick recap, as we were talking about the audio wars, where we had written about this on our blog, which is on our website, that we're seeing a lot of capital flows, M&A exclusive licensing deals, venture investments in the audio space. So Spotify buying Locker Room in March of this year, Amazon buying Wondery, Sirius XM, buying Stitcher, exclusive licensing deals for SmartLess and Call Her Daddy, just a lot more. So we talked about, and you did a good job, Andrew explaining why is this happening? And we made parallels into the video streaming wars where there's a land grab for audio listeners. So as audio listenership is going up, a lot of the major platforms are spending aggressively to capture market share. And in addition, I think a lot of platforms, including the social networks like Facebook, like others are looking at audio to create additional stickiness and user engagement on their platforms. Chris Erwin:So it's driving a lot of activity. But something that we often talk about with our clients is we get asked, well, hey, there's all this capital flows right now, but is this going to start to Peter out over the next like couple years? Like, are we in peak podcasts? And it's funny because I've been covering the audio space for multiple years now, I've heard peak podcasts for like more than half a decade. And I think Andrew, that we agree that this is definitely not the case. We think that the audio space is growing a lot more, buyers are going to emerge and we have some specific ideas about that, which we're going to get into now. Andrew Cohen:Absolutely. Yeah, no, this is, if anything, it's just the early innings and the audio wars, I think were the impetus that started off a lot of this capital flow, but it's not like once that kind of land grab is settled, the bubble is going to burst. Because we're already beginning to see new waves of buyers emerge and investors. And definitely think that the audio wars might have been wave one, but we definitely think that wave two, three, four, and who knows how many others are going to follow. Chris Erwin:Exactly. So I think you've broken out there's four different categories of buyers that we're going to get into today. Right? Want to give a quick preview? Andrew Cohen:Yeah. So these are just four. Definitely think that there's even more than this. Even just this week Substack and WordPress got into the audio game. So there's tons of different types of players and stakeholders that a year ago, you would've never thought would be intersecting with audio that are now investing heavily in this space. But four that we're going to talk about today is smart speaker manufacturers, social media platforms, Hollywood and traditional media, and sports, both sports broadcasters teams and sports betting operators, but let's get into it. I know Chris, we've been big on the rise of microcasts, following tailwinds of the boom of smart speakers and how smart speakers might trigger kind of what we're calling the at-homeiffication of audio and the birth of microcasts. So clearly we're big on microcast. We're on one as we speak. So this might get meta, but what do you think, why are smart speakers so exciting in terms of what it can do for audio? Chris Erwin:So, yeah, this is ...