What the 2026 podcast landscape just taught small-business leaders about platforms, quality, and invitation
By Michele Forto | Peak Experience | September 18, 2026
Robert is in New York this week at Podcast Movement. We go most years for the same reason we keep making Peak Experience: we want the signal, not the noise.
This year’s signal came from Tom Webster of Sounds Profitable and the fourth edition of The Podcast Landscape, a study of more than 5,400 American adults. On paper, it is a report about listening habits. In practice, it is one of the clearest leadership briefings I have heard all year.
If you run a family business, coach a team, or keep trying to grow without chaos, the story is not really about podcasts. It is about what happens when organic growth flattens, the room changes, and the platforms you trusted stop singing your song.
The growth chart is no longer the point
About three-quarters of American adults have tried a podcast. Fifty-five percent consume one each month. Thirty-nine percent do so weekly. Those figures have been essentially flat for two or three years.
That sentence makes some people nervous. It should not. Flat is what a medium looks like when it grows up. The twenty-year tailwind of word of mouth is over. Webster’s line was the one I wrote down: word of mouth got us here. It will not get us any further.
A large door is still open. Roughly 23 percent of people who are not current listeners are at least open to the idea. That is about 60 million American adults. Some used to listen and drifted. Some know a friend who listens. Some have never been given a reason that felt like theirs.
Leaders misread this moment all the time. They assume the market is closed because the easy growth stopped. Most of the time the market is not closed. It has not been invited well.
Growth now is not volume. It is craft. It is the quality of the knock on the door.
The living room is the new trail
The only platform clearly gaining ground is the smart television. Podcasts are leaving the earbuds and walking into the living room. People who find shows through Netflix and other connected-TV apps skew younger, are more likely to have children at home, and are twice as likely to always consume with someone else, often with two or more people in the room.
That should make every coach sit up. Co-consumption is not a media metric. It is a partnership. It is the difference between a private habit and a shared experience.
That is Peak Experience language. Teams do not change because one person watched a video on a phone. They change when people sit in the same room, hear the same thing, and decide together what it means. A service dog team learns that way. A family business transfers leadership that way. A sled team runs that way. The work happens in relationship, not in a feed.
Researchers also asked non-listeners why they had never tried a podcast. Forty percent said they prefer watching television or movies. Webster’s answer was almost too simple: fine. The medium now has something that is television-shaped. Meet people where they already gather.
If you lead people for a living, translate that before you buy another software tool. Stop asking why they will not come to your classroom. Ask what room they are already in, and whether your work can live there without losing its spine.
We are losing our Tower Records
Then Webster asked the question the industry has been dancing around. What even is a podcast anymore?
YouTube is still the place most people encounter one. Spotify is second. Netflix is now third. Apple, once the hometown platform, fell from 11 percent to 8 percent as the most-used service. Apps built only to showcase podcasts dropped from 19 percent to 15 percent as the most-used app.
The picture he used is the one I have not been able to shake. We are losing our Tower Records.
Tower was never just a store. It was a hub of culture. Hits on the front table, yes. Also the middle tier, the back catalog, and the strange record nobody had heard of yet. If the only place left to buy music is the two-foot rack at Walmart, you get the biggest star of the week and almost nothing else.
That is the risk when more of our work lives inside closed ecosystems that do not exist to sing the song of the medium. YouTube and Spotify have been generous in one important way: a creator can still walk in and build. Netflix is not built that way. It is a gatekeeper. The biggest shows get in. Everyone else waits outside. And if you do get in, you can be canceled the same way a television series gets canceled, not because nobody cared, but because the algorithm moved on.
Robert and I did not start podcasting to wait for permission. We started because advertising a small dog-training company was expensive, and a microphone let us build authority the long way. Intimate. Repeatable. Ours.
That origin story still matters. Podcasting was never supposed to be a lease on someone else’s living room. It was supposed to be a place where you could still find the middle of the catalog.
Four leadership translations
Here is the part I care about as a coach. You do not have to work in media for this report to describe your business.
1. A bigger screen is not a better business
More eyeballs on a closed platform is not the same thing as an audience you can keep. If the deal does not let you own the relationship, price the work, or stay when the algorithm gets bored, it is not a partnership. It is a lease.
Leaders sign those leases constantly. The new marketplace. The new directory. The new “featured partner” badge. Visibility without ownership feels like growth until the terms change.
2. Quality is the open lane
Webster said people are keyed in right now to brain rot: the scroll, the snack, the thing that leaves you emptier than when you started. Podcasting still has a chance to stand on the rung of quality.
That is our rung too. Experiential learning. Leadership that holds under pressure. Systems that still work when the trail gets ugly. You do not need to be louder than the feed. You need to be better than the feed.
3. Protect the middle tier
If you develop only the stars, you never build a bench. If the only stories you tell are the hits, you lose the culture that made the hits possible. The long tail of a company is where future lead dogs come from. Ignore it, and you will spend the next decade wondering why nobody is ready.
4. Invite on purpose
The 60 million adults still open to podcasting are a picture of every market we serve. People are not rejecting the work. They have not been given a reason that feels like a peak experience instead of another obligation.
Invitation is a leadership skill. It is not a marketing department problem. It is the difference between announcing a program and walking someone to the door.
A smaller pledge from Willow
Webster pledged that Sounds Profitable would convene its partners around three things: a real conversation about Netflix, asking the biggest names in the medium to show up for the medium, and a consumer campaign that tells the story of quality. Got Milk. Beef. It’s what’s for dinner. Their version of that.
I will make a smaller pledge from here. We will keep building the kind of show, and the kind of coaching practice, that would still belong in a Tower Records. Not only the hits. The work in the middle. The long conversations. The partnerships that look like Danny and Gunner: trust built under pressure, not content built for a feed.
Where is your Tower Records? Where do you still get to sing your own song, and who are you inviting into the living room with you?
Listen, then do the work
This piece is a companion to a short Peak Experience solo, “Don’t Lose the Song.” If the question landed, send the episode to one person who is tired of chasing platforms and ready to build something that lasts.
If you lead a team or a family business and you want the work rather than another motivational clip, that is the conversation we have at Dreamchaser Leadership. We help founders fix communication breakdowns, improve accountability, develop managers, and grow without chaos.
Book a strategy call. Bring the real problem, not the polished version. The trail does not care about the polished version.
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Michele Forto is the Super Glue at Dreamchaser Leadership and co-host of the Peak Experience podcast. She and Dr. Robert Forto work with small-business owners and family firms on leadership that holds under pressure.
Source note: Figures in this article are drawn from Tom Webster’s Podcast Landscape 2026 keynote for Sounds Profitable at Podcast Movement NYC, based on research conducted with Signal Hill Insights among 5,400-plus U.S. adults 18+.
