Spotify’s New Creator Exec on Mission to Woo Millions of Podcasters

In the latest in a series of management changes, Spotify has appointed a new executive in charge of the company’s creator and talk content.

As Bloomberg News reported Monday (June 6), Maya Prohovnik, who had mostly recently served as director of research and development for talk content, has been promoted to this new position, according to people familiar with the matter.

She will replace Michael Mignano, who announced his plans to step down last month in May, and will oversee Spotify’s efforts to woo creators such as podcasters, and launch features designed to attract them to the platform.

That means managing the company’s live audio product, video podcasting operations, and Anchor, its podcast hosting/creation service.

Read more: Spotify Touts Growth in Users, Subscribers, Podcasts

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has said he wants to have 50 million creators on the platform, a big leap from the 11 million reported in February.

Bloomberg pointed out that Prohovnik’s promotion comes just a few weeks after other reshuffling in company leadership: TheRinger’s Bill Simmons, Julia McNamara and Max Cutler, the founder of podcast network Parcast, were promoted to operate various parts of the company’s content strategy.

Spotify shares have fallen 51% so far this year and traded at an all-time low last month as investors began wondering if the company’s podcast strategy will bear fruit.

In its earnings report released in April, Spotify said it saw double-digit growth in the number of subscribers and monthly active users.

According to the report, Spotify’s monthly active user (MAU) base climbed 19% year-over-year to 422 million, or 419 million excluding a one-time benefit of 3 million users.

Spotify said it believes that number originated with a brief service outage in March that caused users to be signed out of its service involuntarily. Some of those users set up new accounts, leading to about 3 million additional MAUs.