Already building out its podcast business with a slew of acquisitions, Spotify is now segmenting users based on podcasts they stream.

Up until now, Spotify has only broken down audiences based on their music streaming habits. Today, the company has introduced podcast listener targeting, which allows brands to reach Spotify Free users who listen to podcasts.

The new audience tool is available in the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia.

Spotify is focusing the tool in "select markets," where brands can reach users who listen to categories such as comedy, lifestyle and health, and business and technology.

Samsung and 3M are already on board testing the tool.

According to its most recent earnings report, Spotify has 123m monthly users of its free, ad-supported service. In total, Spotify has 217m users.

Spotify has been pushing hard into podcasting. Beyond its acquisitions, the audio streaming giant announced a deal with Barack and Michelle Obama to co-produce podcasts exclusively for the platform.

The Swedish-based company has also been testing new audio ad formats. In early May it partnered with Uniliver on voice-enabled ads on mobile devices, where users could respond to a given message.

When it comes to advertising in audio, Spotify's global head of automation sales Julie Clark said creative is relatively cheap to produce. But as programmatic offerings increase and audience targeting becomes more granular, brands can't forget creativity for data analytics.

Spotify announced 100 million paid subscribers and underlined its podcast strategy in its 2019 Q1 results. But insight from Kantar suggests the company may have difficulty monetising its new podcast real estate.

The Drum has collated the major 2019 audio advertising trends, in which Spotify and its podcast strategy plays a vital role.