The Uses and Gratification Theory Applied to Podcasts How Age and Cultural Background Impact a Person’s Podcast Consumption

Over the last two decades, podcasts turned into an on-demand audio medium that is now indispensable within the audio media landscape. With its increasing presence and importance, researchers started to assess the listening behavior of podcast consumers. While analyzing podcasts and the consumers, researchers found similarities to traditional media outlets. In the late 2000s, studies arose about the motivations behind people’s podcast consumption, which applied the uses and gratification theory that was already applied to various mass media outlets for around a hundred years. However, not only the amount of those prior studies are limited, but also their scope and approach. Most of those studies referred to North-American podcast consumers and the creation of podcast uses and gratification typologies. Little to no research was done about how personal motivations arise and how they are influenced by personal traits if people from the same age groups share the same motivations, or how those could be influenced through other personal traits. Therefore, this study aimed at finding out to which extent people’s age and cultural background can influence people’s podcast consumption behavior. Additionally, the connection between sought uses and gratifications and podcast genres was assessed. For this research, the approach of a quantitative survey research was chosen, including the conduction of an online survey, which approached 293 participants, who were active podcast listeners. Each participant was recruited online and sampled according to non-probability convenience and quota sampling. After questions about their actual podcast consumption, participants had to state which genres they prefer, indicate why they are listening to podcasts and which uses and gratifications they seek to fulfill, and finally provide insights about their personal profile and cultural background. The analysis of the results showed that both a person’s age and cultural background are only partly predictors for people’s podcast consumption. Age was able to predict five out of nine tested preferences of podcast genres and predicted three out of eleven tested motivations. A person’s cultural background was able to predict five out of ten podcast genre preferences, and two out of eight tested motivations. The findings of those study support, challenge, and extend existing theory on media consumption behavior and provide approaches that can be tied up with future research.