More Black Americans are listening to podcasts on a monthly basis, research shows

Black Americans are regularly listening to podcasts at higher rates than the US general population, a role reversal from 2021, a report from SXM Media, Mindshare, and Edison Research published this month suggests.

As of a 2022 survey of more than 2,500 Black Americans, 43% said they’d listened to a podcast in the past month, up from 36% in 2021, the first year the survey was conducted. Meanwhile, the share of respondents who said they’d listened to a podcast in the past month slightly declined from 41% in 2021 to 38% according to Edison’s Infinite Dial study from 2022, which surveyed 1,502 Americans over the age of 12.

The increase in listenership among Black Americans could be the result of a recent push from podcast companies to increase representation among hosts and illustrate the role advertisers can play in making the channel more diverse.

New kids on the block: About half (48%) of Black monthly podcast listeners surveyed said they’ve been listening for less than a year. That means they might not yet be as familiar with the channel’s rotating cast of advertisers.

These newer listeners are also fairly receptive to podcast ads, the report found, which could open a door for brands that want to market to Black Americans, Nidia Serrano, VP of sales marketing at SXM Media, told Marketing Brew.

“Because these listeners are so new to podcasts, everything is new to them, the advertisers are new to them,” Serrano said. “In other spaces, they may be a little fatigued. We learned how to navigate away from ads in other spaces.”

Gender note: More Black podcast listeners who listened on a monthly basis were women (56%), than men (44%). But when it came to Black podcast listeners who tuned in each week, men represented the largest share (52% of men versus 48% of women).

That could be due to the podcast genres they prefer, Serrano explained. Men often tend to gravitate toward sports and politics podcasts, which typically release episodes more frequently than a category like self-care and true crime (a favorite among women), which might only drop new episodes once a month.

(Ad)ded value: As is the case with women podcast listeners, regular Black listeners seem receptive to ads that run on podcasts with hosts they can relate to; the report found that 80% would trust a brand if they heard about it via an ad on a podcast with Black hosts, and 78% would purchase from that brand.

“Advertisers are already advertising on podcasts, but they’re not considering Black Americans in their targeting strategy,” Serrano told us. “Knowing how this audience is the future of podcasts—they’re exceeding the total population and they keep growing—[brands] need to really be intentional about reaching and approaching this audience in a way that’s very relevant.”