Finance Podcasts on Spotify — A Closer Look
It is never a bad time to take control of your finances, but with a pandemic and the ensuing economic slowdown, this would probably be the best time. How do most millennials go about doing it, though? There’s no dearth of market analysts and personal finance advisors out there, but wouldn’t it be ideal if financial awareness became a habit through daily routine? So, podcasts are one of the best ways to get the message across and it gets better when the podcast comes from a platform like Spotify, as it makes the habit formation much easier.
For this analytical project, I decided to look at personal finance podcasts on Spotify available on the Indian market. I attempted to answer the following questions from the data gathered:
- Which podcasts have maximum episodes? (since there’s no metric available on the API to measure their popularity)
- In the subset of these podcasts, what are the typical episode durations like?
- How frequently do these podcasts discuss terms like ‘bitcoin’ and ‘cryptocurrency’?
To get started, I made use of the Spotify API, which is provided free of cost (with certain restrictions of course) when you sign up for a developer account with the platform.
When it comes to downloading metadata for Spotify podcasts though, there’s a caveat, as you may have guessed from above — unlike music tracks or albums, the podcast/show API endpoints do not have any popularity/subscriber count metric. Hence I decided to focus on episode numbers, durations and descriptions. For more on the API usage, read the docs here. I used the Spotipy Python package to act as a wrapper for the API calls.
Using the GET requests for the endpoints, the data was downloaded. To get several shows, the API endpoint is:
https://api.spotify.com/v1/episodesTo get episodes of many shows or of a show with the ID:
https://api.spotify.com/v1/episodeshttps://api.spotify.com/v1/shows/{id}/episodes
The Spotify API limits the calls to 2,000, with offsets of 50. Hence, I used the while loop (the not so beloved Python cousin of the for loop) to start at 1,950 with increments of 50, appending each relevant variable (primarily episode date, duration and ID to match with show later on) to empty list containers. Thanks to Sam Brady for the starter code on this.
The querying could take a bit so…
We end up with a dataframe with a decent number of data points, for shows and their episodes.
Time to start cleaning the data. After filtering for episodes in English, mapping the shows to their episodes and formatting the episode durations in minutes, we end up with ‘Ben’, Motley Fool and Alexis Bussetti as the top publishers. Mean episode durations on the other hand, is 32 minutes.
After filtering for shows with at least 200 episodes or more, the winners are Optimal Finance Daily and Clark Howard Daily. And I bumped Radical Personal Finance into the third spot since Simple Programmer Podcast seemed to be more of a career-oriented podcast with occasional descriptions of personal finance (and good SEO skills). Finally, the chosen three have a mean of 2,423 episodes between them, while the total episode count of this subset is around 39% of the total.
So, as a next step I filtered for these three podcasts as mentioned above to analyse their episode durations. The first thing that jumps out here is how Radical Finance tends to have episode durations in the 35–50 minute range (with 35 minutes being the median of all three shows’ episode durations), compared to Optimal Finance and The Clark Howard Daily whose episode durations are do not cross the 15-minute mark. On the other hand, June seems to be a lean month for Radical in terms of episode duration.
When it comes to episodes and days of the week, Optimal Finance looks like a six-days a week show with bite-size episodes, whereas the other continue through to Sunday with longer durations. (0 being Monday and 6 being Sunday)
As for the episodes through the years, Radical Personal Finance seems to be around since 2013, while Optimal started from 2016 and Clark Howard the year after.
Coming to the final question of episode descriptions, a preliminary wordcloud of the text would look like:
As for the selected shows discussing topics like ‘bitcoin’ and ‘cryptocurrency’, I filtered their episode descriptions with these two search terms. Turns out not too many of episodes have been discussing these topics, though Radical Personal Finance keeps up its trend of having longer episode durations.
Conclusion
Like any other platform, Spotify offers a plethora of options when it comes to podcasts on personal finance. And the most significant result of my analysis was the spectrum of episode durations of shows offered by publishers. For the busy professional with not a lot of time to spare on weekdays, there are mini episodes available from Optimal Finance (so what if she’s WFH in jammies — she still has a schedule to maintain). On the other hand, she has the option of listening in to detailed analyses with longer episode durations on the Clark Howard Podcast or Radical Personal Finance. And these are just three shows among the many across publishers and podcast platforms. Podcasts, like vlogs and blogs, offer independent content creators the spaces for expression they desire, along with the ability to monetise their creations. Platforms like Spotify have amplified the voice of these creators, and the recent acquisition of Joe Rogan’s podcast by Spotify and SiriusXM’s acquisition of Stitcher — another very popular podcast platform — only goes to show the extent to which major media companies are willing to bet on successful content creators and platforms.
So, if you’re a creator looking to test the waters with your ideas on any topic (and not just finance), now might be a good time than ever to pick up the microphone.
Check out the code for my project here.
