I love a trend survey, so I was delighted to come across the 2025 US Media Consumption Report thanks to a fascinating article in Publishers Weekly on the opportunities for children’s authors and illustrators. Much of the focus is on the trend toward social media detoxing. But there are some fascinating figures on audiobook habits.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Such as the fact that 5 percent of Americans listen to an audiobook every day. Smaller than the 93 percent who use social media (the highlight here is the really solid growth of TikTok use, despite the shadow of a potential US ban hanging over the platform for much of the time covered in the survey), but it still represents a lot of listening.
Audiobook Listening Patterns
There is also an interesting comparison between that 5 percent and the 42 percent who stream music every day. That gives an insight into the Spotify ecosystem. Notably, Spotify heads up the streaming audio platforms in the US ahead of YouTube Music, with a particular skew to the under-thirties, well over half of whom are listeners.
But there is a really important statistic hidden away. Eighteen percent of the population are weekly audiobook listeners (48 percent listen sometimes), and the figure is highest among thirty-one- to forty-nine-year-olds. But that figure hasn’t grown in the past year. And the survey suggests a simple reason for that. Only 8 percent of over-fifties listen to audiobooks. The sentence “Failure to engage this age group appears to be holding back growth of the medium” is highlighted.
Subscriptions and Shifting Habits
Finally, there are some interesting figures on subscriptions, which seem to be slowing down, with 34 percent of Americans having a digital or print subscription (only 4.5 percent have only print). This is down 2 percent, and the squeeze seems to be really felt among the youngest group, with subscriptions among eighteen- to thirty-year-olds down 11.5 percent. I highly recommend going and having a dig through the full report.
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