It looks like podcasts are here to stay and that listening is not declining with the return to the office and everyday life.

Podcast listening among Canadian adults rose incrementally between 2017 and 2020 and picked up the pace from the first year of the pandemic to the second year. Those that have ever listened to a podcast grew from 44% to 48%. This year there’s been another five-point increase with 53% – more than half of Canadian adults – now saying they have listened to a podcast.

This according to The Canadian Podcast Listener 2022 study. The study is co-published by Signal Hill Insights and Jeff Ulster, with support from The Podcast Exchange (TPX). Results are based on online surveys using a market representative sample from Maru Voice Canada.

While 29% of Canadians 18+ listen to podcasts monthly, daily listening is flat, with strong growth in listening to podcasts weekly. Even when looking at the increased sampling of podcasts during the pandemic, the proportion of Canadian adults who have ever listened to podcasts has only increased by 23% since 2017.

Jeff Vidler, founder of Signal Hill Insights, says the core audience profile has been consistent across the past five years –  with the on-demand consumer, well educated and affluent, indexing highest among 18 to 34, followed by 35- to 44-year-olds.

He says the leading genres from The Canadian Podcast Listener 2021 were comedy, news, sports, and true crime. “By format, conversation-based podcasts have shown strong gains over the last few years. We’ll be updating that with the main study going into field next week, with final results available at the end of November,” he says.

The study shows a 17% increase in monthly podcast listening over the past year. Weekly listening has grown from 21 to 24% – a year-over-year increase of 14%. Monthly listening is up among both English and French Canadians, with monthly listening up from 31% to 36% among Anglophones and from 21% to 24% among Francophones. Podcast listening shifted to slightly more male listeners in 2021 – 54% male versus 46% female.

New listeners are more likely to be female, younger and Francophone. Among those that started listening in the past year, more than four in 10 are women between the ages of 18 to 34, half are French-speaking Canadians – and they are now listening to podcasts monthly.

Time spent listening to podcasts continues to trend up. The number of weekly listeners is up from 70% to 74% from 2020 to 2021. Weekly listeners are spending more time listening to podcasts each week – from 5.5 hours in 2019 to 6.5 hours in 2021.

Continuing the 2020 growth in “power listeners,” those who spend five or more hours a week with podcasts now make up nearly one third (32%) of monthly podcast listeners. “Power listeners” also account for 79% of all listening from weekly listeners. Canadians are also now listening to more Canadian podcasts. In 2019, only 38% of the most listened to podcasts were Canadian, but that increased to 42% in 2021, while US podcasts declined from 52% to 44% in 2021.