For the first time in history, podcasts have overtaken talk radio as the most-listened-to medium for spoken-word audio in the United States.
Podcasts, including video podcasts, eclipsed AM/FM talk radio (which notably doesn’t include listening to music on the radio), with 40% of listening time, as opposed to 39% for radio, according to Edison Research’s Share of Ear survey.
Researchers have tracked these statistics over the last decade. In 2015, AM/FM radio accounted for 75% of the time Americans spent listening to spoken-word audio. At the time, podcasts accounted for just 10%.
Year over year, that gap has slowly closed, as podcasts boomed in popularity, increasingly keeping us company on daily commutes and during menial tasks. Over half of Americans, 55%—an estimated 158 million people—listen to a podcast monthly, and 40%, or 115 million, listen every week.
This year, the scales finally tipped.
Although the difference is only 1 percentage point, this is the first time podcast listenership has surpassed radio. Whether the gap continues to widen remains to be seen.
Watching podcasts has become a growing trend over the past year, perhaps shifting the balance in podcasts’ favor. YouTube said viewers watched 700 million hours of podcasts each month in 2025 on living room devices like TVs, up from 400 million the previous year.
Streaming platforms like Netflix have inked deals with iHeartMedia and Barstool Sports to bring podcasts to their services. Daytime talk shows have also suffered blows, including the recent cancellations of both Kelly Clarkson’s and Sherri Shepherd’s TV talk shows.
Apple’s audio-only app has taken a hit as well, falling from 15.7% of monthly podcast listeners’ preferred platform in 2022 to 11.3% in 2025.
But audio-only isn’t going anywhere, at least for now. According to Triton Digital’s annual podcasting report, only 7% of audiences exclusively watch their favorite podcasts, while 13% exclusively listen. The remaining 80% alternate between the two.
The meaning of the word “podcast” has vastly expanded and grown increasingly diffuse as our media habits shift, Joe Berkowitz recently wrote for Fast Company.
As for the future of podcasting—not talk radio, not TV chat show, but instead a secret third thing.
