Obamas team up with Spotify to lend voices for podcasts

Former US President and First Lady Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have teamed their production company Higher Ground with music streaming giant Spotify to produce and distribute exclusive podcasts in their own voices for Spotify users across the globe.

The multi-year agreement would be with Higher Ground Audio, an expansion of the Higher Ground production company, that would oversee the move into podcasts, Spotify wrote in a post on Thursday.

Under the Higher Ground partnership, the Obamas would develop, produce and lend their voices to select podcasts, connecting them to listeners around the world on wide-ranging topics.

"We are thrilled that not only will the Obamas be producing content, but that they will be lending their voices to this effort," said Dawn Ostroff, Chief Content Officer, Spotify.

Launched in 2018, Obamas' Higher Ground began with an initial partnership with Netflix, aiming to create compelling content to entertain and inspire the viewers.

"Podcasts offer an extraordinary opportunity to foster productive dialogue, make people smile and make people think, and, hopefully, bring us all a little closer together," Barack Obama said in a statement.

The announcement comes just months after the music streaming giant acquired podcast producer Gimlet and podcast tool-maker Anchor to keep generating original content.

Earlier in June, Spotify started testing the creation of curated playlists of podcast episodes revolving around specific genres in order to help creators find a bigger audience.

As part of the test, five playlists under comedy, true crime, geek culture, walking (motivational) and relaxing (mindfulness) would start showing up to around five per cent of the Spotify users in the UK, US, Canada, Mexico, Sweden, Colombia, Chile and Argentina.

Spotify has more than 217 million monthly active users and it recently surpassed the 100 million mark in terms of Premium subscribers.

The music streaming giant offers its services in several countries across Asia, Europe, US, Africa and Middle Eastern regions.