In the car, in the kitchen, in the bathroom… Podcasts are following us everywhere and they're not stopping any time soon. It is estimated that there will be over 500 million podcast listeners worldwide by 2024. A recap of the story of an invention born twenty years ago and which has revolutionised our relationship to audio.

It all started in 2001, in the United States. Adam Curry, Tristan Louis and Dave Winer, nicknamed the podfathers, created what might be considered the ancestor of the podcast. A year later, on the other side of the Atlantic, Arte launched arte Radio, a studio dedicated to the creation of “native” audio content. The Franco-German channel talked of the concept of “radio on demand”. The medium was intended to be more intimate and without commercial objectives.
The term “podcast”, a contraction of iPod and broadcasting, appeared in 2004 and, by 2005, the general public had became acquainted with it thanks to the iTunes software created by Apple. Radio channels seized on it as a way of rebroadcasting their content. Thanks to smartphones, listening finally became on-demand and very much democratised. Amateur podcasts were flourishing and increasingly finding their audience, but the new medium was still looking for a sustainable economic model.
In 2012, Apple's podcast application arrived on the iPhone, making the media format even more accessible. Two years later, Serial, a series of podcasts about the counter-investigation of a murder committed in the late 1990s, was creating a huge buzz across the United States. And its audience began generating advertising revenue.
The event marked a turning point: the number of American podcast listeners almost doubled in five years. This success inspired French entrepreneurs, and so production and broadcasting studios like Binge Audio, created in 2015, were born. Some podcasts are now monetised through advertising and paid partnerships.
Ever more popular, podcasts experienced a real boom during the COVID-19 crisis. 40% of British, North American and German people say they are spending more time listening to podcasts since the pandemic.