As audio goes long-form, podcasts and audiobooks converge

Songs may be getting shorter, but many of the most popular podcasts are not. As Ashley Carman reports for Bloomberg, Lex Fridman’s August 2024 episode with Elon Musk reached almost nine hours, while Steven Bartlett’s Andrew Huberman interview reached four. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal’s popular Acquired podcast tends to also release long episodes, with their histories of company acquisitions averaging three to four hours. Podcasts are stretching towards the length of audiobooks, which tend to last somewhere between eight and 12 hours (per Speechify). In fact, the Acquired website self-describes its episodes as “conversational audiobooks”.

Importantly, according to Carman’s reporting, listeners remain engaged despite the extended duration, and that has a lot to do with the genres of these podcasts. As outlined in MIDiA’s recent report, “Audio psychographics: Understanding why people listen”, hearing / learning new things is the top reason people listen to both podcasts and audiobooks. Consumers already spend more time listening to audiobooks and podcasts combined than they do streaming music. As content length grows for the former and shrinks for the latter, this trend looks set to continue.

Ultimately, as audiobooks and podcasts grow together on platforms like Audible and Spotify, so will the grey area between them. For now, the only defining characteristic of an audiobook is that it is a spoken version of long-form text. However, as MIDiA explored in our “Audio psychographics” report, book readers are not necessarily audiobook listeners, which means audiobook dependence on a text-based correlate may wane as the format matures. In effect, audiobooks may become, at least in the minds of consumers, long-form audio stories decoupled from any physical counterpart. 

When the podcast was first developed, RSS distribution was key to the definition. As the format has evolved — especially as YouTube has overtaken Spotify as the top platform for podcasts (as outlined in our MIDiA Research 2024-2030 global podcast forecast) — RSS is no longer essential to the definition of a podcast. Now, the only defining characteristic of a podcast, at least practically speaking, is digitally-distributed spoken audio. Most listeners do not think twice about the mechanics of distribution so long as the format they want is accessible on a platform they can access conveniently.

There are some indications that book reading is already in decline among younger generations (per The Honest Broker), which may further accelerate the divergence between audiobooks and physical books. Considering the fact that many podcasts are already audio stories and some podcasters are already describing their content as “conversational audiobooks”, the formats are likely to continue to overlap in both purpose and function, at least for consumers looking for informational long-form content.

If podcasters are already making conversational audiobooks, then what is to stop authors from making novelised podcasts? And at the end of the day, what is the difference?