Why people listen? A research on podcasts
The popularity of podcasts and audio recordings significantly expanded globally in recent years. As an example, in US a number of podcast listeners increased from 46.1 to 75.9 million. It has become a modern-day radio, where people are free to select out of a wide variety of news, information, interviews, and stories, often available on demand. Previous research found a relation between age and gender among the listeners. As such, women are more likely to listen to podcasts at home and less likely at work setting relative to men. Younger people, for example, are less likely to listen at home and more likely to listen on the go. It was also proved that podcast listening could help people satisfy their basic psychological needs and provide an easy way to increase the knowledge about a variety of topics. A study by Australian authors found that people who were higher in openness to experience and curiosity, were more likely to be a podcast listeners. Study findings also suggest that greater time spent listening to podcasts would reflect on greater autonomy and competence.