Podcast platforms now function as the dominant discovery engines for spoken-word content.
The numbers arrived quietly but their implications are thunderous. According to Edison Research’s Q4 2025 Share of Ear® data – the authoritative annual survey of American listening habits – podcasts now command 40% of all daily spoken-word audio time among Americans aged 13 and over.
AM/FM radio, including both over-the-air and streaming, has slipped to 39%. It is the first time in the study’s history, which dates to 2014, that radio has relinquished this ground.
To understand what this milestone means, consider the trajectory. In 2015, radio held 75% of spoken-word listening time; podcasts had a mere 10%. By 2020 the gap had narrowed considerably, with radio at 50% and podcasts at 24%. The crossing of paths happened in Q4 2025, after a decade of steady, relentless erosion – a 65-percentage-point swing without a single significant counter-trend. Meanwhile, as a broader benchmark, spoken-word audio as a whole now represents 25% of all daily time Americans spend with any audio format.
For publishing professionals – acquisitions editors, rights managers, marketing directors, audio producers, and the executives shaping strategy at houses large and small – this is not a data point to file away. It is a structural shift in the media landscape that demands a considered and creative response tinged with urgency.
A Decade in the Making: Understanding the Shift
The story of podcasting’s rise is, at its core, a story about on-demand culture displacing linear broadcasting. The same forces that brought Netflix to dominance over scheduled television are now reshaping audio. Audiences have grown accustomed to choosing what they listen to, when they listen, and for how long – habits entirely incompatible with radio’s fixed schedules and geographic constraints.
The growth in podcast listenership has also been demographically broadening in ways that matter enormously to publishers.
This is precisely the demographic that buys books, attends literary events, and drives backlist sales.
In 2017, podcasts skewed heavily towards young adults: the median age of a podcast listener was 29, and daily reach was strongest among 18-to-24-year-olds. By Q3 2025, that median age had risen to 39, reflecting a massive influx of older listeners – the 25-to-44 and 45-to-64 cohorts – into habitual podcast consumption. This is precisely the demographic that buys books, attends literary events, and drives backlist sales.
The audience has not merely grown; it has matured into publishing’s core customer.
Edison also reports that over 55% of Americans – approximately 158 million people – now listen to a podcast at least monthly, and 40%, or around 115 million, do so every single week.
These are not casual experimenters. These are committed, habitual listeners with deeply ingrained audio routines built around trusted voices and niche communities.
Let me spell that out clearly: The podcast median age has soared from 29 in 2017 to 39 in 2025 – maturing directly into publishing’s core reader demographic.
One further dimension deserves attention: the emergence of video podcasting as an accelerant.
YouTube reported that viewers watched 700 million hours of podcast content per month on living room television sets in 2025, up from 400 million the year before.
Platforms are no longer purely audio-first. When we speak of the podcast audience, we are increasingly speaking of an audience that watches as well as listens – a development with considerable implications for author presentation and multi-format production.
The View From The Beach: Why This Demands Recalibration
Publishing has long been comfortable treating audio as a secondary concern – a profitable add-on, perhaps, but rarely a primary strategic priority. The audiobook market has grown steadily (the Audio Publishers Association continues to report year-on-year gains), and most major houses now have dedicated audio divisions.
But the podcast ecosystem has largely been engaged with opportunistically rather than strategically: an author appears on a prominent show, sales spike briefly, and the experience is noted but rarely systematised.
Podcast platforms now function as the dominant discovery engines for spoken-word content.
That approach is no longer adequate. What the Edison data reveals is not merely that podcasting is popular, but that podcast platforms now function as the dominant discovery engines for spoken-word content. They are the spaces where audiences encounter new ideas, build relationships with voices, and make decisions about what to read, buy, and recommend.
For publishers to treat podcast engagement as peripheral marketing is to ignore the primary channel through which their audience now navigates the information landscape.
An analogy to TikTok’s impact on book discovery – the ‘BookTok’ phenomenon – is instructive but imperfect. TikTok works through visual brevity and algorithmic amplification. Podcasting works differently: through extended, intimate, parasocial engagement.
A listener who spends an hour with an author discussing the research behind a non-fiction book, or exploring the emotional architecture of a novel, has formed a relationship with that author that a thirty-second social clip simply cannot replicate.
Conversion rates from substantive podcast appearances to book purchases reflect this: the engagement is slower to build but deeper and more durable when it arrives.
Audio-First Acquisition: Rethinking the Rights Conversation
The most significant structural implication of the podcast era for publishers may be the need to fundamentally rethink how audio rights are conceived, negotiated, and exploited.
Historically, ‘audio rights’ meant a single category: narrated audiobook. Today, audio rights encompass a far more complex and valuable bundle: audiobook narration (human and AI-assisted), podcast serialisation, exclusive audio originals, branded podcast series, and rights for use in third-party podcast productions.
The industry has been slow to develop the legal and contractual frameworks needed to govern this complexity. As rights expert Joanna (J.F.) Penn and others in the self-publishing community have pointed out, authors who sign broad audio deals may inadvertently sign away podcast rights they did not know existed.
Publishers acquiring audio rights in 2026 need to be asking granular questions: What formats does this cover? Does it extend to serialised podcast delivery? Does it permit AI-assisted narration? What are the territorial restrictions in a global audio environment?
There is also the increasingly compelling case for audio originals – content created for audio first, without a corresponding print edition, or created simultaneously across formats. Publishers like Audible and Spotify have invested heavily in exclusive audio originals, recognising that the format commands genuine creative possibilities distinct from the print-to-audio pipeline.
Trade publishers willing to commission audio-native projects – author-narrated essay collections, serialised audio fiction, documentary-style non-fiction – will find themselves with a new category of premium content that speaks directly to the habits of the podcast generation.
The reverse pipeline deserves equal attention. Podcast-to-book deals – commissioning print books from successful podcast series or hosts – have already generated significant commercial successes. As podcast audiences for particular voices and topics deepen, the audience-building work has been done in advance of the book’s existence.
For acquisitions editors willing to scout podcast charts with the same attentiveness they bring to reviewing literary journals, there is a rich seam of pre-validated content and pre-built readerships to mine.
Platform Strategy: From Mass Broadcasting to Niche Targeting
Radio’s power as a promotional tool for publishers has always rested on its reach: a single appearance on a national programme could expose an author to millions of listeners simultaneously.
That reach has not disappeared – radio remains powerful in-car, commanding 76% of in-vehicle audio time, and AM/FM retains a dominant 64% share of ad-supported audio overall – but its relevance as a book discovery platform is diminishing as audiences migrate to on-demand formats.
The targeting precision available through the podcast ecosystem is, in marketing terms, transformative.
Podcasting’s replacement proposition is fundamentally different. The medium’s strength lies not in broadcast reach but in deep penetration of specific communities. A true crime podcast with 200,000 weekly listeners is not a consolation prize for an author who cannot get on national radio; it is direct, sustained access to 200,000 people who are precisely the right audience for a true crime book. The targeting precision available through the podcast ecosystem is, in marketing terms, transformative.
Publishers building platform strategies for the podcast era need to think in terms of vertical communities rather than mass audiences. Literary fiction, narrative non-fiction, business and self-help, wellness, history, science communication – each of these categories has a thriving podcast ecosystem with its own established shows, respected hosts, and loyal audiences.
Developing systematic relationships with the leading shows in each of these verticals, matching titles to communities with genuine specificity rather than blanket outreach, is the work of a sophisticated audio marketing operation.
This also argues for diversification beyond the obvious. Spotify and Apple Podcasts dominate platform share, but niche platforms, YouTube podcasting, and Substack’s audio features are growing rapidly.
Publishers should be mapping the full landscape of audio touchpoints for each title, not defaulting to a handful of prominent generalist shows.
“The targeting precision of podcasting is transformative: 200,000 weekly listeners to a true crime show are exactly the right audience for a true crime book.”
Author as Audio Talent: The Skills Gap and How to Close It
One of the most underappreciated challenges – and opportunities – in the publisher-podcast relationship is the variable quality of author performance as audio talent.
Print-trained authors who communicate brilliantly on the page can struggle with the spontaneous, conversational register that podcasting demands. (And why you won’t hear me doing a podcast, much as I’d love to have TNPS available in audio format.)
The intimacy of headphone listening is unforgiving of hesitancy, over-qualification, and the kind of careful hedging that reads well in a book review but sounds uncertain in audio.
Publishers investing in their authors’ podcast careers need to invest in their media training with the same seriousness they bring to jacket design or launch events. This means not merely coaching authors to handle standard interview questions, but developing their ability to tell stories verbally, to pitch their book’s central argument in a compelling sixty-second frame, and to hold their own across an hour of unscripted conversation with a well-prepared host.
High-quality author appearances on relevant shows produce sales spikes that are traceable, repeatable, and frequently superior to equivalent spend on traditional advertising.
The returns on this investment are measurable. Publishers who track attribution from specific podcast appearances to sales data – using unique discount codes, UTM parameters on landing pages, or audience surveys – consistently find that high-quality author appearances on relevant shows produce sales spikes that are traceable, repeatable, and frequently superior to equivalent spend on traditional advertising.
Building systematic attribution tracking into audio promotional strategies is no longer optional; it is the evidence base that will justify future investment.
There is also a longer-term asset being built: the author’s audio brand.
An author who becomes a familiar, trusted voice in their area of expertise through regular podcast appearances – as a guest, but potentially also as a host – accumulates a kind of audio equity that has genuine commercial value across their publishing career. Publishers who help authors build this equity early are making an investment that will pay dividends across multiple books.
AI-Assisted Podcasting: The Frontier Reshaping Audio Production
If the podcast-radio crossover is the headline, then (Luddite Fringe, look away now!) artificial intelligence is the emerging subplot that could transform the economics and scale of audio content for publishers entirely.
The tools now available for AI-assisted podcast production represent a step-change in what is achievable without large production budgets or dedicated studio infrastructure – and the implications for publishers are profound.
Google’s NotebookLM, to take the most widely discussed example, can ingest a book manuscript and generate a remarkably convincing two-host podcast-style discussion of its themes, arguments, and ideas – without a microphone, a recording session, or a production team.
The output is not yet indistinguishable from human-produced audio; voices for now lack the warmth and idiosyncratic emphasis of real presenters, and the dialogue can feel slightly mechanical under close scrutiny.
But for backlist promotion, international markets where author travel is impractical, or rapid content generation around a new release, the capability is genuinely transformative. A publisher could, in principle, generate a portfolio of audio discussions around an author’s catalogue in hours rather than months.
Beyond content generation, AI is reshaping every stage of the podcast production workflow. Tools like Descript allow audio editing through text manipulation – cut words from the transcript and the audio edits itself – dramatically reducing post-production time.
What once required a production team of three or four people across a full working day can now be accomplished by a single producer in a few hours.
Platforms including Blubrry’s AI suite and Riverside FM can automatically generate show notes, chapter markers, episode summaries, social media clips, and promotional copy from a raw recording.
What once required a production team of three or four people across a full working day can now be accomplished by a single producer in a few hours.
For publishers without dedicated audio staff, this democratisation of production capacity is significant. Small and mid-size houses that have been unable to justify podcast investment on cost grounds now have access to toolchains that make regular audio content financially viable. The barriers to entry have not disappeared, but they have fallen substantially.
The AI narration dimension deserves particular attention given the audiobook conversation.
ElevenLabs and Amazon’s Audible Virtual Voice programme represent a rapidly maturing ecosystem of synthetic narration that can produce audiobooks at a fraction of traditional production costs. Literary publishers remain cautious – and many authors are actively resistant to AI narration of their work – but for backlist titles that have never been recorded, or for markets where human narration in the relevant language is economically unfeasible, the technology is already good enough to be commercially viable.
Sure, the legal and ethical questions around AI narration are live and unresolved; but publishers need to be engaging with them now rather than waiting for the contractual landscape to clarify itself.
The most intriguing frontier, however, may be the podcast-to-book pipeline enabled by AI. Services like Podbook can ingest a podcast archive and generate a structured first-draft manuscript, giving creators who have built substantial audio audiences a route to print or ebook publication that bypasses the traditional blank-page problem.
For publishers scouting podcast content for acquisition, AI-assisted manuscript generation from podcast archives could accelerate the development pipeline considerably.
The ethical and creative dimensions of AI in audio are not trivial, and the publishing industry should not treat them as mere compliance questions. The value of authentic human voices authors who genuinely know and care about their subject, hosts who have built trust with their audience over years – is not diminished by AI’s capacity to simulate conversation.
It is, if anything, enhanced. As AI-generated audio becomes more common, the irreplaceable quality of genuinely human expertise and genuine human feeling will become more rather than less commercially valuable.
Publishers should be leveraging AI to reduce friction and extend reach while protecting and amplifying what is distinctively, irreducibly human in their authors’ voices.
Conversational Commerce: Attribution, Data, and the New Promotional Model
The ‘discovery engine’ model of podcasting has a commercial logic that publishing has been slow to fully operationalise.
When a respected host recommends a book within a trusted audio context – not as a paid advertisement read awkwardly from a script, but as a genuine endorsement woven into conversation – the conversion dynamics are meaningfully different from traditional advertising. The listener’s relationship with the host, built over months or years of parasocial engagement, transfers to the recommended title in a way that a banner ad or a review quote simply cannot replicate.
Publishers need to develop the infrastructure to capitalise on this dynamic systematically. This means establishing dedicated podcast booking functions (or partnering with specialist audio PR agencies), developing template arrangements with high-value podcast partners that include attribution mechanisms, and building reporting pipelines that connect audio appearances to sales data in near real-time.
The goal is not merely to get authors on shows, but to understand which shows, which formats, and which types of conversation drive meaningful commercial outcomes – and to invest accordingly.
There is also a content licensing dimension worth exploring. Podcast hosts with large, loyal audiences have begun to explore exclusive content arrangements with publishers – first-listen episodes, exclusive chapter readings, author Q&As for premium subscribers. These arrangements, analogous to the exclusivity deals that streaming platforms have used to build subscriber bases, create genuine value for listeners, genuine revenue for creators, and genuine promotional reach for publishers. The economics are still being worked out, but the model has legs.
A Note on the Global Picture
The Edison data referenced thus far is US-specific, and publishing professionals operating in global markets should apply appropriate caution before drawing universal conclusions.
Radio remains powerful in many markets where digital infrastructure is less developed or where public broadcasting retains strong cultural authority.
In the UK, Germany, and France, commercial podcasting has grown substantially but from a different baseline and against different competitive dynamics than in America.
Publishers should be developing audio promotion plans that are market-sensitive rather than simply exporting American playbooks.
That said, the directional trend is consistent across developed markets, and the underlying drivers – smartphone ubiquity, on-demand culture, audience demand for niche content – are global.
Publishers with international rights strategies and global ambitions should be developing audio promotion plans that are market-sensitive rather than simply exporting American playbooks. What works for a US business book on a mainstream entrepreneurship podcast may require entirely different treatment for the UK literary fiction market or for reaching diaspora communities in West Africa or South Asia through culturally specific audio platforms.
Strategic Imperative: The Window Is Open, Not Yet Closed
The inflection point in the Edison data is a confirmation of a trend that has been developing for a decade, not a sudden disruption. Publishers who have been thoughtfully building audio capabilities will recognise these numbers as validation. For those who have treated audio as secondary, the question is less whether to act than how urgently.
The habit migration from scheduled to on-demand listening is generational and structural, not cyclical.
Radio’s ten-year decline trajectory will almost certainly continue. The in-car dashboard – radio’s last great stronghold – is steadily being colonised by connected audio systems that give drivers access to the full podcast ecosystem alongside FM broadcasts. The habit migration from scheduled to on-demand listening is generational and structural, not cyclical.
The window of opportunity is open but not indefinitely. Publishers who build systematic audio capabilities now – who develop author talent, cultivate platform relationships, invest in rights frameworks fit for the audio era, and intelligently deploy AI tools to extend their reach – will have structural advantages over those who wait for further clarity.
The platforms have shifted. The audience has migrated. The habits are set. The question for publishing is not whether to follow them, but how quickly and how well.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsletter.
