BREAKING NEWS: Podcasts Arrive On Amazon Music
This is obviously good news if you’re an Amazon user, as it is more lovely content for you to consume, but it is even better news if you’re a podcast content creator, as Amazon Music is going to remove yet another barrier to entry for podcast listening.
Why? Because Amazon Music is the default platform for devices such as Alexa and Echo — which means when you say ‘Alexa, play blah blah blah podcast’ it will (eventually) seamlessly play your content to the listener, nice right! And I say eventually because not all shows are on Amazon Music yet.
Now, you might be forgiven for thinking, “yer, that sounds great but how many people in the UK actually have a smart home device?’, but a survey undertaken last year by Strategy Analytics estimated that the number of UK homes with ‘smart speaker’ stands at around 1 in 5…
There are just over 27.8 million ‘households’ in the UK, so 20% of that is around five point eight million. Fairly significant wouldn’t you say.
Ok, so you’re now thinking “yer, that sounds great but how many people in the UK actually use their smart speaker for listening to a podcast?”.
Well, I am glad you asked, as an Ofcom survey in 2019 suggested that 22% of those who own an Alexa, Amazon Echo, Google Home or Apple HomePod use it for streaming podcasts.
Based on all the above I reckon there’s about a million podcast fans that you can reach, right now, on smart home devices and here’s the (very) basic maths I am using to work that out:
- There are 27,800,000 households in the UK
2. 1 in 5 of those have a smart speaker, which is 5,560,000
3. 22% of those with those speakers use them for podcasts, which is 1,223,200
So get your podcast on to smart home devices and there are 1,223,200 potential listeners waiting for your show*
The other point, that I think it much more exciting that just the figures stated above, is the fact that Amazon Music now featuring podcasts is another barrier to entry being eradicated.
Getting podcast content is becoming easier and easier and easier. Ease leads to increased levels of adoption, which leads to the medium becoming more mainstream, which leads to larger audiences, which leads to more money in the sector, which leads to greater opportunities for those in the space.
Think back just a few years ago — 3G was crap and 4G didn’t exist, so us hardcore, early-adopting podcast fans would have to download our favourite show before we were out of range from a WIFI connection — and still the sector grew.
There were only a few, fairly poor, platforms for people to find podcast — and still the sector grew.
In 2018 there were only 525,000 shows registered on the biggest podcast platform (and many of those had suffered with Podfade — so were actually dead) — and still the sector grew.
You see the pattern? Podcasting has got to the scale it is now enjoying very much against the odds… and we’re only just getting started!
And, if you need any more reasons to be excited about podcasting and smart speakers as a mutually-beneficial combo, a survey from Loup Ventures (which ‘is a research-driven venture capital firm based in Minneapolis and New York investing in frontier technology’ in case you wondered) estimated that 75% of US households will have a smart speaker by 2025…
* please note, these 1.2 million people are probably not actually waiting for your show, but good to know they are there right!?
