New York (CNN Business) Spotify recently redesigned its app to focus on podcasts. That's paying off big time.

The number of people listening to podcasts on the streaming service jumped nearly 40% compared to the previous quarter, a highlight of Spotify's strong third-quarter earnings report.

Roughly 500,000 podcast titles are now hosted on the platform. The United States is Spotify's largest market for listening to podcasts, and it's also growing across Europe. Podcasts are "clearly a growing global phenomenon," Spotify said.

The company cautioned that some of the increases in subscribers are "almost too good to be true," that it's working to "clean up the data to prove causality, not just correlation."

Spotify also said that podcast listeners are more likely to upgrade from the ad-supported tier to a paid subscription.

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