18% of music streamers listen to podcasts, while only 15% use curated playlists.
Australians are listening more to podcasts than to streaming playlists, confirms a new report. UK-based MIDIA Research’s State of the Streaming Nation used Australian data as well as that from the US, UK, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, Japan and Sweden. 18% of music streamers listen to podcasts, while only 15% use curated playlists.
As the report points out, “In fact, of all the key streaming feature activities, curated playlists come lowest. Curated playlists are clearly not to streaming music what binge watching is to streaming video. Instead streaming activity is fragmented across multiple features and just 10% of streaming consumers regularly do all (main) four activities.” It says podcast penetration is 19% overall, but rises to 28% among users of streaming services.
That Australians are exchanging playlists for podcasts is not surprising. Podcasts are our fastest growing audio medium. The first Podcasting Intelligence Report in mid-2018, by Nova Entertainment, Acast & Ipsos stated 3.5 million Australian podcast listeners (aged 16-64) and PwC’s Australian Entertainment & Media Outlook forecasts the number of monthly listeners to hit 8.9 million by 2022. An ABC report estimated listening time at 6.1 hours over a weekly average of six podcast episodes and five series. Other studies showed Aussie podcast fans loyal, educated and wealthy, and skewed to women. Among reasons for future growth in Australia are that six months ago all the major radio broadcasters set up a committee on how to grow that market, and by 2020, 98% of all cars will be podcast-connected.
You may be wondering why the MIDA figures make sense given the amount of streams generated from playlists, and earlier surveys that being included in one of the top playlists could boost a song’s income to US$160,000.
MIDIA explains: “The key factor here is the difference between the number of playlist users and the number of playlist streams. Playlists over index in terms of contribution to streams. With dozens of tracks per list, lean-back playlist listening can easily generate more streams per user than lean-forward listening. Thus, we have one of the great emerging paradoxes of streaming: passive audiences can generate more streams, and thus rights holder pay outs, than engaged, aficionados. However, a word of caution, should casual playlist listening become large enough, then the net result will be a dilution of the royalty pool and thus diminishing per stream rates.”
No wonder Spotify has gone into podcasting by buying out Gimlet, Anchor and Parcast this year alone. In a recent interview, CEO Daniel Ek named podcasts as one of the streamer’s biggest priorities. MIDIA notes, “It is not entirely inconceivable to think that five years from now, podcasts could be a bigger business for Spotify than music.”
