Is the podcast industry becoming too saturated?

Nowadays, you can find a podcast for every taste, interest, and topic of discussion.

From literary criticism, to true crime, to A-Level revision, as of September 2025 there are over 4.52 million podcasts available worldwide, with hundreds of thousands of new shows launched in the past three months.

If a podcast is not compelling enough to keep the attention of its listeners, it can quickly lose them to fierce competitors before the podcast can even reach its full maturity, known as the “second series syndrome.”

Yet, at one point, the phenomenon of the podcast was exactly that – a phenomenon, something new and exciting for the digital world.

The sheer volume of choice now spoils listeners across a variety of different platforms, such as Spotify, YouTube, and BBC Sounds. But is the medium getting too popular? Is the perfect podcast for you buried beneath the abundance of choice?

With the number of different options available to listeners, audience retention requires a tighter hold than ever. If a podcast is not compelling enough to keep the attention of its listeners, it can quickly lose them to fierce competitors before the podcast can even reach its full maturity, known as the “second series syndrome.” As rapidly as a new podcast idea can gain traction, it can lose it.

Although, the fact that anybody can make a podcast with limited resources means that new content is popping up all the time, with the market expanding at a rapid rate.  The ever-increasing use of AI by approximately 40% of podcasters also streamlines the production process, such as through generating transcripts and enhancing audio.

Making your own podcast is therefore a faster process than it has ever been, contributing to the influx of frequent new content. If a specific niche lacks a podcast, it can easily be created and attract the target audience, making for quick capitalisation and reputing the podcast as a “DIY medium.”

To retain an audience, a podcast-maker  has to branch out to as many platforms as possible to meet consumer demand.

Even though (as expected) no relevant results came up when I searched for “oversaturated podcast industry” on Spotify, a new podcast devoted entirely to such a topic would easily have my undivided attention, as an audience member researching for this article against a deadline –  and who can find no other competing option.

That being said, the fact that competition now spans across platforms that use different mediums creates a whole new area of concern for podcast-makers. YouTube, for example, combines video with audio, appealing to consumers that prefer visual content and thus diverting them from audio-only platforms, like Spotify.

As this expands the battlefield for competitors, it also focuses the expectancy of consumers on their favorite podcast’s availability. To retain an audience, a podcast-maker  has to branch out to as many platforms as possible to meet consumer demand – which can be a taxing administrative effort, especially for small or even one-person teams.

Catering to the ever-shortening attention span of society, podcasts have become widely popular for being easy to passively consume. 

But what made podcasts unique in the first place was that an audience can take in a lot of information just by listening, convenient for multi-taskers, note-takers, etc. through a similar impact to the audiobook industry.

Catering to the ever-shortening attention span of society, podcasts have become widely popular for being easy to passively consume. This means that a consumer puts little effort into listening to a podcast, and the creator gains a high reward simply from their loyalty.

With this inflation of multimodality across platforms, the unique selling point of podcasts is therefore called into question – when does a “podcast” start to too closely resemble a documentary, a TV show, or even simply an informative video? Has the passive listening experience been lost to widespread capitalisation, imitating longer-established mediums, and catering to algorithms?

The saturation of the podcast industry shows that there will always be hindrances, to both consumers and creators, that come with too much choice, too high accessibility, and too much love for a digital sensation.

There are ups and downs with the growing popularity of the podcast industry. Decades ago, I would not have been able to casually browse Spotify for a podcast on forensic linguistics and reap more than a single relevant result. And yet, decades ago, the market was barely advanced enough for me to consider searching for that specific field, let alone expect success from it.

The data has spoken, and the market will continue expanding until the charming novelty of the podcast – if it is not already – will be a thing of the past. The saturation of the podcast industry shows that there will always be hindrances, to both consumers and creators, that come with too much choice, too high accessibility, and too much love for a digital sensation.