Towards the consolidation of the cultural industry of podcasting in Spanish: An analysis of production in Spain and Argentina

Abstract

Twenty years after its creation as a technological innovation to include listening to audio in blogs, the podcast has established itself as a creative and cultural industry of great reach and commercial efficiency. Its ductile nature, which favours the listener's autonomy in accessing and personalising their listening, has multiplied the production and consumption of this format to the level of a value chain with an ever-increasing number of actors involved. This article analyses the consolidation of the podcast industry in Spanish by analysing the original offer of the main platforms and audio companies in Spain and Argentina in 2023. It is supposed that, in the current digital ecosystem, these operators have integrated the podcast into the sound menu of information and entertainment by overcoming the synchronicity and transience of radio and making it easier to listen at any time and from any connected device. The results reveal the growing variety of titles, themes, and genres, as well as the similarities and differences between the two countries; conversational podcasts dominate in both countries, ahead of narrative non-fiction podcasts; audio fiction is almost non-existent in Argentina, where the branded podcast technique is more widely used due to the slower development of subscription services. The study, which takes as a reference the data from ONE (2024), validates the potential of podcasts to test new grammars, introduce new topics and reach audiences neglected by traditional radio, in which the more than 500 million Spanish speakers around the world stand out.