Nows and Forevers

I’ve got a love-hate relationship with podcasts.

I’ve been listening to them on and off for more than 15 years, during the first wave in the middle 2000s and then again over the last decade. I’ve enjoyed any number of them, whether it’s “RadioLab” or “Ask Me Another” from public radio or content from the BBC. I’ve also listened on and off to podcasts from Merlin Mann and David Sparks, a couple of ham radio ones, and over the last several years, podcasts in the Welsh language.

Yet I’ve never been able to consistently listen, week in and week out. Whether that’s because I am easily distracted or because my tastes change from time to time, I don’t know. Probably both. Yet it seemed like podcasts had reached a point, over the last several years, of mass media saturation.

Maybe that’s changing. I saw a report on NiemanLab.org (from Hot Pod originally) that said that there aren’t as many new podcasts being introduced now than there were in 2020. That Covid year saw 1.1 million new podcasts started, the highest by far since the data was tracked (2010). Podcasts had been on a steady increase since 2010 with 2019 seeing just under 400,000 new podcasts, according to Listen Notes. In 2021 there were 729,000 new podcasts and 219,000 in 2022.

That’s the lowest, last year, since 2018.

Is that a pandemic blip or are people changing their listening tastes? I certainly spent less time in my car and at the gym between 2020 and today than I have in any three-year period since I began driving. But my listening to podcasts, or not listening to podcasts, has little to do with that.

I just haven’t found the time. I’ve continually added and dropped Overcast, the stellar podcast app, from my iPhone. It went back on about two months ago and now it’s about to go off again, because I don’t really listen to any podcasts anymore with any regularity.

I wonder if that’s a trend that will continue. NiemanLab has a lot more to say about it.