There are those in the business who feel that Spotify is turning its energies away from music — a claim that a rep for the company soundly denied to Variety. In the past 18 months, it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire audio production companies (among them Gimlet and Anchor for a reported $337 million) to fortify its podcast slate. Dawn Ostroff, Spotify's chief content officer, said as much at South by Southwest last month when she declared that the company's mandate is to become "the world's No. 1 audio platform." It was hard not to notice the absence of the word "music."