PodPoll 2025 finds Millennials, Gen Z & blue-collar workers all listening more

Millennials and Gen Z are leading Australia’s podcast listening evolution in 2025, with 69% of 25-34-year-olds listening each month, plus a surprising jump in tradespeople who represent the fastest growing demographic of podcast listeners.

These findings come from PodPoll 2025, an annual survey into podcast listening habits and behaviours, conducted by podcast production house Deadset Studios and market research agency Insightfully.

The survey also found:

• Overall listening is up 7% year on year to 9.6 million Australians 15+
• An increase in the number of people listening daily to 2.8 million
• More than half (54%) of regular listeners consuming 1-3 hours of podcast content perweek (up 2%)
• While Spotify remains the platform of choice (steady at 58%), YouTube listening is now at 44%, up from 30% last year.

Deadset Studios Director Kellie Riordan says the survey shows while the younger fan base continues to grow rapidly, there’s also an increasing number of blue-collar workers who are

exploring what podcasts have to offer. “We’ve seen a noticeable jump in the number of tradies and other blue-collar workers who are consuming more episodes per week this year, than they did in 2024.”

“It might be listening on the jobsite, in the ute, or at home, but there’s been a 7% increase in those combined blue-collar sectors listening to between 5-9 podcast episodes a week. Blue collar workers over-index on listening to sports podcasts above other genres and also love comedy shows and health and wellbeing podcasts.”

The power of podcasts to influence the views of younger people and young men in particular was evident in recent elections in both the United States and Australia.

“More than 40% of young Aussie men aged 15-34 listen to a podcast each day, which demonstrates how influential podcasts now are in shaping people’s opinions and influencing behaviour,” says Riordan.

The continued growth of YouTube in 2025 is notable. While Spotify remains the platform of choice (58%), YouTube listening is at 44%, up from 30% in 2024. Apple Podcasts has lost share this year, dropping from 28 to 20%.

“This doesn’t necessarily mean people are watching an episode on YouTube, although it could mean that. Some people discover podcast episodes on YouTube thanks to its search engine functionality, but then they’re actually just listening to the episode. So in this way they’re often using YouTube like they did a radio.”

Insightfully’s Managing Director Leanne White says Australian podcasting is in new territory, with the number of regular monthly listeners closing in on ten million.

“Almost half of Australians aged 15 years and over are now regularly listening to podcasts,” Leanne White says. “Podcast growth is up in the past 12 months, with 9.6 million listeners now making podcasts part of their monthly media habit. There’s also been a jump in those who’ve made podcast listening a daily habit – 2.8 million.”

The most popular three genres remain comedy and news/current affairs, both on 29%, closely followed by crime (28%).

But trending upwards are the health and well-being genre now at number 4 (27%) and sport at number 5 (26%).

The number of people listening to 2-4 episodes a week has also gone up 5% and more than half of regular podcast listeners are listening 1-3 hours per week.

White says as the podcast audience grows, listeners are making choices that suit their needs, including the length of their favourite podcasts.

“While most listeners still prefer their podcasts to run between 15 and 60 minutes, there’s a shift towards hyper-short and hyper-long podcasts. The number of people listening to podcasts running less than 15 minutes has jumped 11% to 64%, and the number listening to episodes longer than an hour has gone up 7% to 65%.”

“As the Australian podcast industry becomes more sophisticated, podcast audiences are being offered more choice, and so we’re seeing a growing diversification in listening preferences.”