Nerd Out @ Spotify
A long-running tech podcast that took Spotify's engineering culture and turned it into a genuine recruiting, PR, and business development asset.
The Situation
Spotify's R&D organization wanted to spotlight the technology work happening well behind the company's consumer app, the engineering, infrastructure, and open-source work that backs up their claim that "we're not a music company, we're a tech company." The goal was to reach a specific, hard-to-reach audience: engineers who might want to work there, potential open-source collaborators, and business partners evaluating Spotify's developer tools. We've worked with Spotify's R&D team to develop NerdOut@Spotify, which officially launched in March 2022 and has run continuously since.
The Approach
The show started as a genuinely high-production narrative series built around a technology called Backstage, which is Spotify's open-source developer portal platform. We helped script multi-episode arcs, brought in developer interviews, and used sound design specifically to help explain technical concepts that don't naturally translate to audio, including perspectives from early outside adopters at companies like Netflix and American Airlines.
As the show matured, the format evolved into something happily sustainable: an ongoing interview show hosted by Dave, a Spotify principal engineer, talking with developers across the company about the projects they're working on. We kept Dave's voiceover role as connective tissue, setting up context and explaining why a given topic mattered, even after the fully scripted narrative approach was retired. That shift let the show repurpose research and storytelling Spotify's engineering team was already doing for blog posts and internal talks, repackaging it for an entirely different, audio-first audience without starting from scratch every episode.
The Craft Challenge
Dave is a genuinely engaging person, but he'd never hosted a show before, and helping him become a confident, directable voice on mic has been an ongoing, multi-year collaboration. One of the more effective tools we developed together was building distinct "voices" he could consciously step into on command, Radio Host Dave, Excited Dave, Academic Dave, each a specific, learnable adjustment to pacing and energy rather than an abstract note like "sound more engaging." That kind of concrete, repeatable direction is often what separates someone who freezes up on mic from someone who becomes a genuinely good host over time.
The guests presented their own challenge. Most are engineers with little or no on-mic experience, connecting on our show from all over the world. To help ease any trepidation, we run pre-interviews with every guest before they ever talk to Dave, walking them through the technical setup and what to expect so nothing about the recording process itself adds to their nerves. In post-production, standardizing wildly inconsistent remote recording quality into something that sounds like it belongs on a show carrying Spotify's name is a real, constant technical task.
We also composed an original score for the show, recorded with session musicians all over the country, all coordinated and recorded remotely to keep the production genuinely affordable and attainable within the show’s budget
Corporate review added its own layer of complexity: every episode goes through Spotify's internal legal and PR review process, and navigating that smoothly, anticipating concerns before they become last-minute rewrites, has become a real part of the job, the kind of institutional fluency that's hard to replicate without years of experience working inside large companies.
The Outcome
NerdOut@Spotify has run for years, evolved from an internal highlight reel into a show that directly supports Spotify's business goals, including driving awareness for Backstage's commercial offering to enterprise partners, while still sounding like the same show fans have followed from the beginning. It's reached guests from companies like Netflix and the BBC, supported real experiments like a live-recorded episode built around Spotify's internal Advent of Code coding challenge, and remains one of the clearest examples of turning a company's own internal expertise into something worth listening to well outside the building.
Seaplane Armada works with organizations to turn deep, technical, internal expertise into audio that reaches a real audience, without asking their team to become podcast producers. If your organization has more going on than your marketing ever gets to show, get in touch at theadmiral@seaplanearmada.com
