Australia: millennials, Gen Z and blue-collar workers all listening more

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

The findings come from PodPoll 2025, Australia’s most comprehensive annual survey into podcast listening habits and behaviours, conducted by podcast production house Deadset Studios and leading 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 per week (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,” Kellie says.

“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, ” Kellie says.

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,” Leanne says.

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.

Leanne 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.”

Download PodPoll 25 from the Deadset Studios website

About the methodology

PodPoll 25 is Australia’s most in-depth podcast listener survey. Conducted by Insightfully and fielded via online questionnaire in May 2025 the survey comprised 33 questions, answered by a representative sample of Australians aged 15 years and over.

Data collection used interlocking quota targets and data have been weighted by age, gender and location using the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data.

The survey was conducted in two parts. Part 1 was a survey among n=3768 Australians 15+ to accurately measure podcast listenership nationwide; Part 2 reduced the sample size to n=1,638 regular (monthly) podcast listeners, and added additional questions to delve deeply into their listening habits, preferences, and demographic attributes.

About Deadset Studios

Deadset Studios is Australia’s premier podcast production house and a global leader in creative story-telling, podcast development and creation, and audio strategy.

Director Kellie Riordan is an internationally recognised podcast strategist who founded Deadset Studios in 2020.

Kellie established the ABC’s podcast unit and initiated some of the country’s most successful podcasts including Conversations and Ladies We Need to Talk, as well as The Solutionists, Curveball, and Grand Gestures. Deadset Studios have created award-winning podcasts for media organisations including ABC, SBS, BBC, iHeartRadio, Deutsche Welle, and Global UK, as well as branded podcasts for The University of Sydney, VicHealth, Queensland Human Rights Commission, UNSW, and Dementia Australia.

About Insightfully

Leading Australian market and opinion research agency Insightfully is trusted by some of Australia’s most senior decision makers to provide high quality, accurate insights for winning campaigns.

Founder and Managing Director Leanne White has provided research to corporate clients and lobby groups and provided insights to Prime Ministers in Australia and the UK.

Insightfully clients include the Australian Automobile Association, the ABC and the Pharmacy Guild to whom Insightfully provided the numbers behind the winning 2022 Affordable Medicines Now campaign.