Adding to piles of existing research on Covid-related listening shifts, eMarketer has today release a study of podcast listening during the shelter-at-home period. Two main projections here:

• Podcast listening will dip by 6.5% in 2020, due to the pandemic’s affect on habits and lilstening behavior.
• It’ll go back up next year.

Important to note that the changes eMarketer has identified are micro shifts. The per-day amount of listening reduction is two minutes per day. And the amount of recovery projected for 2021 is one minute per day.

We speculate that small shifts in that range might be due to influences not related to lifestyle, such as a trend toward shorter episodes being produced. At any raste, there is no question, a s we have learned over the past three months, that enforced habit change, and disrupted routines, certainly alter media use.