A prospective client asked me a question recently that stuck with me: Did I miss the podcast boom?
I get why people wonder. Podcasting is not the scrappy new medium anymore. There are celebrity shows, corporate shows, massive interview shows, beautifully produced narrative shows and video podcasts with sets that look more like television studios.
There are also approximately nine billion people who own a microphone and would like to tell you about their podcast.
If you’ve found yourself asking the same thing, “Should I start a podcast now?” the answer is yes—but the opportunity looks different than it did 10 years ago.
Yes, the landscape changed, but you did not miss it. You missed the period when simply having a podcast made you interesting.
That’s different. And for people with a strong idea, a specific audience and something worth saying, it may actually be a better time to start.
Podcasting Isn’t Fading. It’s Maturing.
I keep coming back to YouTube. There was a point when YouTube stopped feeling new. Big creators were already established. Competition was everywhere. Production quality jumped. Advertisers arrived.
You could have looked at the platform then and said, “Well, I missed it.” You would have been spectacularly wrong.
Some of YouTube’s biggest creators, formats and businesses were still ahead because the platform had moved into a more mature stage.
The future of podcasting isn’t about whether the medium survives. It’s about what the medium becomes as audiences, platforms and production expectations mature.
That’s where podcasting is now. And the audience data backs it up.
Edison Research found that 80% of Americans age 12 and older have listened to or watched a podcast. Fifty-eight percent consumed one in the previous month and 45% in the previous week. Both monthly and weekly consumption hit all-time highs in 2026.
Meanwhile, YouTube reported more than 1 billion monthly active viewers of podcast content as of January 2025.
Those are not the numbers of a medium limping toward irrelevance. Podcasting got bigger. It also got better. And that second part matters.
Podcasting is established enough that audiences understand it, platforms are investing in it and brands take it seriously—while the medium itself is still evolving.
The Mic Got Cheaper. Attention Didn’t.
The technical barrier to starting a podcast is almost laughably low now. Buy a decent microphone. Find somewhere reasonably quiet. Open recording software. Upload the episode.
Congratulations. You made a podcast.
Now make somebody care. That’s the harder part.
I spend a lot of time talking with people who want to start shows, and the question is rarely whether they can record one. Of course they can.
The bigger questions are:
- Why this show?
- Why this audience?
- Why should anyone choose it over the 47 other things they could listen to right now?
A microphone can capture a conversation. It cannot give that conversation a point. And “two smart people talking” is not much of a differentiator anymore.
RELATED: How to Start a Podcast with No Audience: A Pro-Quality Launch Guide >>
We Checked What Podcasters Are Actually Struggling With
The industry numbers answer part of the “Should I start a podcast?” question: People definitely listen to podcasts. But I wanted to know whether podcasters themselves were seeing the same shift we see from the production side.
So we reviewed 12 recent public discussions and creator resources about starting a podcast, saturation, finding an audience, production workload and keeping a show going.
Ends up, they were seeing the same shift.
The biggest recurring theme was production, presentation or storytelling, which appeared in seven of the 12 sources we reviewed.
Audience definition, niche or differentiation came up in six.
So did consistency and building a production process people could actually sustain.
This wasn’t a scientific survey, and we’re not pretending 12 conversations represent every podcaster on Earth.
But the pattern was hard to miss.
People weren’t primarily asking:
- How do I get a podcast onto Spotify?
They were asking:
- How do I make this stand out?
- Who is this really for?
- Why isn’t anyone finding it?
- How much production does this actually take?
- How do I keep doing all of this every week?
That tracks almost perfectly with what we see talking to prospective clients and producing podcasts ourselves.
The technical barrier collapsed. The challenge moved to differentiation, production and sustainability.
Saturated? Sure. So What?
Audience definition and differentiation were among the most common themes in the podcaster discussions we reviewed. That makes sense.
People keep asking whether podcasting is oversaturated. It is.
So is YouTube. So are restaurants. So is music.
Nobody walks past a packed restaurant district and concludes that humanity has reached maximum dinner.
The question is not whether other podcasts exist. The question is whether there is room for your show for your audience. So if “Should I start a podcast?” really means “Is there still room for mine?” the answer depends much more on differentiation than saturation.
One new history podcaster acknowledged right up front that history is oversaturated—but planned to focus on narrow areas he genuinely cared about. In another discussion, a dentist asked whether podcasting had become too saturated to enter at all. The conversation quickly shifted toward something much more useful: What kind of show? For whom? With what purpose?
That’s the right conversation.
“Business podcast” tells me almost nothing.
A show for independent restaurant owners trying to open location No. 2? Now we have something.
“Technology podcast” is broad enough to swallow the internet.
A show about how small health care practices are actually using AI without creating a compliance disaster? I know who that is for.
You do not need to invent a subject nobody has ever discussed. You need a reason the right listener chooses you. Specialization does that.
RELATED: Starting a Podcast? These Podcast Topic Ideas Actually Work >>
And Then the Show Has to Deliver
This was the most common theme in the sources we reviewed—and it’s the part we deal with every day. Having a good idea gets someone to press play. Now the show has to be worth listening to.
This is where people hear “production value” and immediately picture an expensive studio, six cameras and enough LED lighting to guide aircraft home. That’s not what I mean.
Polish is not spectacle.
Polish means the show feels intentional. The opening gets somewhere. The conversation has shape. The audio is clean and consistent. The host knows when to let a moment breathe and when a seven-minute answer desperately wants to become three. And the production choices actually serve the episode.
Take podcast sound effects.
Throwing a bunch of sound effects into a podcast doesn’t make it professionally produced. Sometimes it just makes it annoying. A good sound effect has a reason to be there.
Placement matters.
A sound landing half a second too early can step on the joke. Too late and the moment is already gone. An effect underneath dialogue may add atmosphere—or make the listener work harder to understand what someone is saying.
Loudness matters, too.
The listener should not have to reach for the volume because the dialogue disappeared beneath music or get blasted by an effect that is suddenly twice as loud as everything around it.
And sometimes the best sound-design decision is not adding anything at all. That judgment comes from understanding what the moment needs.
We work with raw recordings every day. We know what happens after the microphones shut off.
- Sometimes the best moment in an interview is buried 22 minutes into the recording.
- Sometimes a guest gives a fantastic answer after wandering through three unrelated stories to get there.
- Sometimes two hosts have terrific chemistry and absolutely no internal clock.
- Sometimes music or a carefully placed effect makes the moment land harder.
- Sometimes the weird laugh stays because the weird laugh is the best part.
That’s production. It is not running audio through a cleanup tool, dropping in a few sound effects and exporting an MP3. It is knowing what to change, what to add, where to put it, how loud it should be—and when to leave the damn thing alone.
Podcasting Got Easier to Start—and Harder to Sustain
There’s another part of the curve people don’t see until they’re already in it. Consistency and sustainability came up in half of the sources we reviewed. And once you’ve actually produced a podcast for a while, it’s pretty obvious why.
The podcast starts as:
“We’ll record once a week.”
Then comes:
- Editing.
- Mixing.
- Podcast video.
- YouTube.
- Clips.
- Thumbnails.
- Show notes.
- Social posts.
- Guest coordination.
- Uploading.
- Metadata.
And suddenly your fun little weekly podcast has developed tentacles and eaten Thursday.
Recent podcaster discussions are full of people trying to figure out exactly this problem. One new creator planning a 25- to 30-minute weekly show asked experienced podcasters how much time the process actually consumes. Another community analysis of more than 50 responses found editing time varied enormously depending on the format and complexity, with basic conversational shows taking far less time than narrative or video-heavy productions.
We see the same thing from the production side.
Bad recording practices cost time. Unfocused conversations cost time. A format that changes wildly every episode costs time. Video multiplies the workload. Trying to create every conceivable content asset from every recording costs time.
Professional production should not make the show more complicated. It should make the whole thing easier to sustain.
RELATED: Podcast Production Costs – What Your Podcast Editing Company Probably Won’t Tell You >>
And a Podcast Isn’t Just an Audio File Anymore
This is one of the biggest changes from the early podcast boom. Sounds Profitable’s 2026 Podcast Atlas describes the modern podcast ecosystem across five connected areas:
Audio. Video. Clips. Social. Newsletters.
Different formats do different jobs.
Audio is still incredibly powerful. It goes places video cannot. People listen while driving, walking, exercising, cooking and doing all the other things that make staring at a screen a terrible idea.
But podcast video opened another door. Clips opened another. Social opened another.
Sounds Profitable found that 89% of podcast listeners watch podcast clips on at least one social platform at least sometimes.
That doesn’t mean every new podcaster should immediately create a full video show, five social channels, a newsletter and 19 vertical clips per episode. Please don’t.
It means the modern podcast is part of a bigger media ecosystem. The trick is figuring out which pieces actually serve your show and building a production system capable of handling them.
RELATED: What is a Video Podcast? Why Podcasts with Video Are Taking Off >>
This Is Where a Podcast Production Company Actually Matters
There are plenty of people who can cut ums out of an audio file. That is not the same thing as producing a podcast. A good podcast production company helps you make the show better.
That means understanding what you are trying to create before blindly polishing whatever landed in the timeline.
At Redrum Creative, we look at the whole thing:
- Does the episode get moving fast enough?
- Is there a better cold open buried later in the conversation?
- Does this section drag?
- Is the host stepping on the guest or is that overlap part of what makes the conversation feel alive?
- Does this need music?
- Does it need less music?
- Is the video adding something?
- Which moments are actually worth turning into clips?
- Can we build a repeatable workflow so the team isn’t reinventing the production process every week?
Those decisions come from experience. Our job is not to sand every human edge off a conversation until everyone sounds like beautifully leveled robots. Our job is to find the best version of what was already there.
And when something isn’t there? We’ll tell you.
Because no amount of EQ, color correction or clever editing can rescue a podcast that has no point.
So, Should You Start a Podcast Now?
Yes, but the rules changed. You don’t get much credit anymore simply for showing up with microphones. The audience expects more because they have more to choose from.
That doesn’t mean every show needs a giant budget. It means the show needs intention.
Know who it is for. Give them a reason to care. Make something worth listening to. Build it well enough that you can keep doing it.
The audience data, the podcasters we reviewed and what we see behind the scenes all point in the same direction for the future of podcasting.
The novelty stage is behind us. The professional era is here.
Have the Idea? Let’s Build the Show.
If “Should I start a podcast?” has become “How do I make mine worth following?” you’re asking the right next question.
Building a podcast people want to come back to is a different job. That’s what we do.
Redrum Creative is a full-service podcast production company built by experienced producers, editors and sound designers. We handle the work behind the microphones—from shaping and editing episodes to audio production, sound design, custom podcast music, video editing and the assets that help your show travel beyond the podcast feed.
You do not need to become an editor. You do not need to become an audio engineer. You do not need to spend your Thursday night cutting camera angles because somebody told you every podcast has to be on YouTube now.
You need to know what you want to say and who you want to say it to.
Bring us that. We’ll help you turn it into a show worth following. Talk to a Podcast Producer >>
