Will audio have a seat at the creator economy table?

As 2024 comes to a close, it is worth reflecting on this year’s audio trends and where we expect things to head in 2025. Per our recent report, ‘MIDiA’s 2025 predictions: It’s social’s stage now’, social platforms will continue to take centre stage on the heels of the creator economy reshaping entertainment in the first half of the 2020s.

Against the backdrop of attention saturation, content commodification, and increased focus on profit, audio companies will have to adapt to keep pace with changing tides. Fortunately, audio is well-positioned to contribute to an increasingly social-driven creator economy, even if it means embracing format agnosticism, as Spotify appears to be.

As early as March 2024, MIDiA’s 2024-2030 global podcast forecasts uncovered the extent to which YouTube had surpassed Spotify as the top platform for podcast consumption. In May 2024, Spotify and Amazon made evident their bet on video as a supplementary format for audio. A month later, Spotify showed signs of moving away – or at least evolving – from the traditional podcast format as the company partnered with video creator companies and further encouraged direct video uploads to the platform while also rolling out more YouTube-like features.

At the same time, the lines between social video and podcasts continued to blur, to the point where companies began experimenting with “ghost podcasts” as a viable advertising format. Come autumn, Spotify’s bet on video creators became even more transparent, culminating in major announcements at Spotify’s Now Playing event, including the news that Spotify for Podcasters’ would be renamed to Spotify for Creators. 

Spotify, recognising the power of YouTube not as a video platform but as a creator platform, is forcing a reckoning in audio, but it is a reckoning based largely on consumer behaviour. Audio companies may hold a degree of uncertainty about the implications of lumping podcasters in with YouTube creators. However, consumers tend not to make distinctions between formats so much as they just want quality art, information, and entertainment delivered conveniently.

As such, in 2025, we are likely to see even more format agnosticism, especially when it comes to audio and video. With podcasts and audiobooks in particular, the audiovisual experience may increasingly serve as a creator-driven alternative to television, leaving radio as the last truly audio-driven format. That is not to say that video will supplant the importance of audio in podcasts and audiobooks; rather, consumers will go in and out of hyper- and hypo-attention with these formats, watching when it makes sense, listening when it is convenient, but never skipping a beat in the narrative. Social video will also be crucial for marketing and discovery of these audiobooks and podcasts.

With AI technology further simplifying the audio and video production processes, we will also begin to see an increased significance of podcasts as marketing drivers for creators’ other endeavors, be it music, writing, or anything else. While 2025 will be a transitionary period for audio – and for podcasts in particular – in order for audio to have a seat at the creator economy table, audio companies must consider how to engage creators, be it with on-platform tools or off-platform marketing initiatives. Audio companies must also meet consumers where they are – or rather, where they will be in the future.

For more 2025 predictions from MIDiA, check out the newest predictions report here.