So this was rumored a while back, resulting in The Ringer’s union posting a series a tweets essentially saying “what the hell?” because nobody informed them or employees that Spotify was considering a purchase of Bill Simmons’ sports site.

Looks like it’s a done deal though, and Peter Kafka at Vox writes the following:

Spotify is making yet another big budget purchase aimed at getting a lead in the growing podcast industry: The streaming music company has agreed to a deal to purchase The Ringer, the podcast-centric media company run and owned by Bill Simmons.

Spotify intends to hire Simmons and all of his approximately 90 employees. Most of those employees work on The Ringer’s website, which covers sports and culture, and Spotify intends to keep the site up and running.

But what Spotify really wants out of the deal is Simmons’s ability to create podcasts, including his Bill Simmons Podcast, and some 30 other titles, which range from an NBA chat show to one devoted to rewatching old movies.

That’s good news for the union on paper, since nobody will be losing their job, at least not in the immediate future.

Of course, if Spotify was mostly interested in the podcasts, it does make you wonder how much they care about the writing, if at all. That’s why people were edgy in the first place, because they thought Spotify might just kick the written content to the curb and focus on what they really wanted. Simmons, though, who recognized his employees’ unionization in August, could have been thinking to himself, ‘alright, let’s cash out on this thing now.’ Kafka says the deal has been “kicking around for months,” so it’s hard to determine whether or not the union formation influenced the decision to sell.

Point being, you’d probably feel pretty shitty if you wrote columns for The Ringer, you and your co-workers successfully unionized, and then Simmons sold the company to Spotify, who wanted the podcasts, not your content That’s life, I guess.

But it’s an interesting move from a “future of the industry” standpoint, because it shows that there’s growing value in podcasting. Selling podcasts was always more difficult than traditional terrestrial radio, because you didn’t have numerous commercial blocks to stuff in ads for car dealerships and strip clubs. Listenership was always iffy since podcasts were still a relatively new format. Now there’s a clear revenue model and larger demographic of consumers.

Simmons founded The Ringer only five years ago, so it’ll be interesting to see how long he sticks around. He could quite possibly launch another startup, or continue to work with Spotify, but either way it seems like a nice bit of business for him.