Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Wednesday, February 6th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, podcasting has its biggest news day ever, some pretty big executive shakeups, the new

emojies for 2019, and how to steal a million dollars from an ATM without

anyone noticing. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

My general tendency is to not report on podcasting news for fear y'all might think that I was

being too inside baseball. But hey, this is the biggest news ever in the

podcasting industry. It involves a major tech player in the form of Spotify,

making the biggest acquisition in its history, and this has been the lead story at the top of the page on

tech meme all day. So so over the weekend rumors started swirling that

Spotify was purchasing podcast company Gimlet Media for what sources said was around

$230 million.

Well, today, this was confirmed by Spotify itself,

though the price was not confirmed,

and Spotify threw a curveball by also announcing it had acquired Anchor as well.

Anchor, the podcast hosting platform that, full disclosure, this very podcast is hosted on. You may remember us switching hosts about a month

ago and also the fact that we are now doing weekend bonus episodes that was all part of the

deal we did with anchor full, but the big news here is a major, major move into

podcasting by Spotify, and in a way it makes total sense for Spotify.

Spotify wants to be thought of as Netflix for audio.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said something along those lines

in his blog post announcing the acquisitions,

although I'm sure he wouldn't like me name-checking Netflix specifically.

...