For the first time, a majority of Americans say they listen to a podcast at least once per month, a new study shows.
53% of Americans 18 and older say they consumer at least one podcast per month, according to Sounds Profitable as part of its annual Podcast Landscape study.
Additionally, the number of adults who say they have never listened to a podcast is down two percentage points from last year, with 26% saying they’ve yet to listen to the format.
“It’s really fully mainstream,” said Sounds Profitable partner Tom Webster.
The listening habits are essentially universal, as 63% of Hispanic respondents said they listen monthly, while Asian-Americans responded at 62%, Black respondents were at 59% and White answerers were at 52%.
“Black and Hispanic populations are significantly younger than the White population,” Webster said. “And it actually may be more of a function of age as much as anything.”
37% of those surveyed by Sounds Profitable said they had listened to or watched a podcast in the past week, with another 16% saying they had done so in the last month. Those figures were relatively unchanged compared to the 2023 survey.
“It’s a piece of evidence that growth in audience at the moment may be slowing or maybe hitting a temporary pause, because these numbers were pretty much statistically the same as they were last year,” Webster concluded. “I’m not prepared to go out and say that we have stopped growing, but I am prepared to say that it’s time to really look at retention as much as we look at growth.”
