Spotify announced yesterday that they will be enabling podcasters to create subscription options for listeners, a direct hit to Patreon. They are recognizing the need for more monetization options for content creators beyond advertising. You have to wonder, at what point will the market get tired of subscriptions...

Another interesting announcement was a deep integration with Wordpress, to make it easy for blogs to be transcribed into audio form for podcast distribution, or to transcribe podcast episodes into a text-based blog post. Interesting tools, especially the latter. However, the last thing I want to hear is a mechanical voice reading a blog post for me, but it could be good for vision impaired audiences (if they don't already have text to voice capability already?)