The forecast: Spotify is still expanding its podcast listenership in the US, while Apple Podcasts’ has essentially stagnated. In fact, Spotify will narrowly surpass Apple in that metric by the end of this year. The Swedish streaming company will have 28.2 million monthly podcast listeners over Apple’s 28.0 million, a razor-thin lead that will widen in the years to come.

Dive deeper:

• This year, 40.0% of US internet users will tune in to podcasts at least once per month. Given the medium’s rapid listener growth thus far, we expect that growth to slow down for the next few years.
• Despite this overall deceleration, Spotify’s growth among that listener base will continue to increase through the end of our forecast period in 2025.
• YouTube and Google Podcasts are also popular platforms for podcast listening in the US. Amazon Music continues to build out its audio offerings and invest in the medium. (We do not yet publish podcast listener forecasts for these platforms.)

Looking ahead: In 2024, podcasts will reach about 40% of the population and 45% of internet users in the US at least once a month. By the end of the following year, there will be 142.7 million monthly podcast listeners. Among them, 43.6 million will listen via Spotify and 29.1 million will listen via Apple Podcasts.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Spotify's yearly listener numbers. That issue has been fixed.