For example, on average, podcast adopters listened to podcasts more often on weekdays (particularly during typical commute times), while they tend to listen to music more often on weekends. So how do new podcast adopters make room for this new type of content? It turns out that the average podcast adopter adjusts their routine, opening up new “time slots” for podcast listening that indicate a difference in perceived purpose for each content type. We also found evidence of this trend in podcast adopters’ music listening habits: while adding podcasts very mildly lowered users’ music listening time on average, the change was insignificant in relation to the 20% increase in overall listening time. This indicates that as people pick up podcast listening, they tend to add it to their previous habits (as opposed to fitting more content into the same timeframe of streaming). We found that after they started listening to podcasts, podcast adopters spend on average 20% more total time per week streaming on Spotify. Using propensity score matching, we created a control group, who are similar users with similar streaming patterns (up until March 1) but never listened to podcasts on Spotify. We defined podcast adopters to be those who listened to at least one hour of a show and three episodes of that show, based on user research.
In our study, we first identified users who listened to their very first podcast on Spotify after Maand became podcast adopters within two months. We found that in general, adding podcast consumption to a listener’s “diet” of content does not take away time from music streaming, but rather that listeners make adjustments to their schedules to fit in both content types. In this research, we asked whether adopting podcasts as a new medium influences listeners’ previous habits for consuming music.
And as podcast listening continues to rise, we wanted to explore how podcast and music listening habits interact with each other, especially for listeners who have a history of music consumption but are new to podcasts. Because Spotify offers both music and podcast content on the same platform, we have a unique view into people’s audio streaming habits across both types of content.