Spotify (and other streaming services) has a stronger incentive to push things you're actually likely to listen to and find value in, otherwise you're likely to not use the app and stop paying them.

And it's funny you point to the podcasts as an example for that, a lot of the podcasts and now audiobooks they push are some of the most expensive content they have.

The game every big media company is playing now, and the thing that Doctorow coined as "enshittification" works sort of like this:

1. Companies want you to keep paying for the subscription, so they want to offer you things with value.

2. At the same time, since you're paying a flat fee, they don't get much incremental reward for offering you things of incrementally greater value. So their incentive is to cut costs by offering you as little value as possible as long as the value is juuuuust above the threshold where you (well, the aggregate behavior of all users as "you") cancel.

3. Because of lock-in effects like having a huge library of liked songs and playlists in Spotify, being in the middle of binging an exclusive show on Netflix, the threshold of frustration where you would cancel gets higher and higher.

4. Thus, they are incentivized to increase lock-in because it enables them to cut more costs and deliver less value.