Spotify is making moves to lure more gaming fans to its platform, with the announcement of a new original podcast dedicated to dominant esports game League of Legends.
It’s part of a partnership announced on Monday between the music streaming service and League of Legends developer Riot Games, which will run over the next few years and involve a special branded-up hub on Spotify that hosts gaming music playlists, live event audio, and podcast series.
Spotify and Riot are actually planning to launch multiple podcasts related to the enormously popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, with the first a nine-part series of interviews and previous game highlights called Untold Stories: Top Moments from Worlds, leading up to the 2020 League of Legends World Championship which kicks off Sept. 25.
It’s not completely new ground for Spotify, as the official League of Legends soundtrack clocks up over 4.8 million Spotify listeners per month. But it’s now the exclusive audio streaming partner for LoL’s global events, which is extremely lucrative ground to nab extra ears — the 2019 World Championship saw 100 million viewers, including a peak of 44 million concurrent viewers. But it’s not just about the games themselves; over the five weeks, fans consumed more than 1 billion hours of content.
It’s also a smart move from the music streaming platform which has been going hard on its successful podcast strategy within the last year, championing original content and launching its own podcast charts. In 2019, Spotify partnered up with the Obamas’ production company — Michelle Obama’s own podcast launched exclusively on the platform in July 2020 — and bought leading podcast companies like Gimlet, Anchor, Parcast, and The Ringer. Now, Spotify says its podcast listeners have doubled since last year, and there are over 1 million podcasts on the platform. Even big media companies like BBC and NPR have joined the party.
Why not add millions of hardcore LoL fans to the pile while you’re at it?