Spotify hires Lifetime alum Liz Gately

Spotify has added yet another veteran TV exec to its team, this time ex-Lifetime staffer Liz Gately, who has been brought in head up podcast creative development.

Gately, who was most recently head of programming at Lifetime, will oversee Spotify’s original content development teams in New York and Los Angeles.

She joins as the company expands into podcasting across genres, including comedy, sports, YA fiction and scripted, news/documentaries and additional music formats.

Gately joins fellow TV execs Sarah Elhabashi, who arrived at Spotify from Conde Nast Entertainment, and Dawn Ostroff, The CW’s former president, at the company.

At the end of 2018 Spotify re-entered the TV programming space with music-focused format The Break. Producers also told TBI that they had been approached for music-focused commissions.

It seems the majority of these segments will be based around audio concepts, however. Spotify has made a big push into podcasting in the past few months, spending $340m to acquire producer Gimlet Media and services platform Anchor.