Sorry, Apple. Spotify is now the king of podcast downloads now.
Apple practically invented podcasting (well, at least the way it was delivered) twenty years ago. Because of its huge head start, It became the segment leader and the de facto go-to play to download podcasts. Then Spotify got into the act.
Spotify needed to diversify its audio offerings because licensing music was a money-loser. How could the company keep users engaged and using the platform without spending more money? The answer was podcasts. If even 10 or 15% of Spotify users spend their audio time listening to podcasts, it would keep the number of monthly users up with minimal investment. It worked.
Buzzsprout is a site that tracks podcasts. Here’s their chart for April 2024.
While we’re on the topic, here are a few more fun facts about podcasting from April 2024.
- The US downloaded 44.1% of all podcasts that month. The UK was second (6.4%) and Canada was third (4.5%).
- Most people (61.9%) listen to podcasts via an iPhone. About 22% listen on and Android phone, with 7.1% listening on a Windows computer.
- 85.4% of us listen to podcasts on a mobile device. Only 0.7% use a smart speaker.
- Most podcasts (32%) run between 20 and 40 minutes. After that, it’s podcasts 40-60 minutes (22%).
- Only 6% of podcasts are published every day. About 35% come once a week and others (38%) come every 8 to 14 days.
I’m a tad surprised. Obviously Spotify is huge. But I’ve been enjoying podcasts over 15 years and found the Spotify experience terrible, after they made Gimlet shows exclusive. Really it was the forced unskippable ads, but other players have just always had much better features in general.
My old iPod trained me to listen to a lot of content at 2x speed, but I love Pocket Casts’ silence-skipping feature. I assume Spotify at least honours device-syncing, but no idea tbh… Spotify always pissed me off as a music player for not syncing my playlist between devices like Rdio did.