On the Challenges of Podcast Search at Spotify

Mi Tian, Claudia Hauff, Praveen Chandar

Abstract: Online music streaming is enjoying ever-growing popularity in the last decades, enabled by the abundance of music content in digital format and online streaming services. In the recent years, podcasts, as a talk-focused media format, have witnessed a rapid growth among listeners. Podcasts come in many forms and sizes. They range from 20-minute daily meditation sessions, weekly recaps of global news, interviews with celebrities, and hosts bantering with each other for hours.More and more streaming services are now expanding their catalogs to support both music and podcasts on the same platform, such as Amazon Music, Pandora and Spotify. This setup requires an effective aggregated search system to assemble information from heterogeneous information sources and content types (e.g., artist profiles, playlists, podcast shows, etc.) into one result interface in order to support diverse information needs.