It’s that time of year. End-of-year lists are coming in thick and fast.
Despite fragmented listenership and the cost-of-living crisis making it difficult for some to maintain paid subscriptions, Australians still tuned in to hours and hours of content throughout 2023.
According to Deloitte’s Media & Entertainment Consumer Insights 2023 report, Australians on average listen to nine hours and 15 minutes of audio content each week.
The vast majority of this time is spent listening to music or radio (seven hours and 20 minutes), with the remainder on podcasts and audiobooks.
Australia leads the world in podcast listenership, according to the report, with 41 per cent of people consuming at least one hour of podcasts and audiobooks a week.
So, Australians are listeners. But what are they listening to?
The music and podcasts that came out on top
Spotify is the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service, with more than 574 million users, which includes 226 million subscribers in more than 180 markets.
Spotify Wrapped 2023 is now available to individual users, although some have reported experiencing glitches on the web interface.
Its stats are in, however, on how we listened as a whole as a country.
Taylor Swift was Australia’s most-streamed artist this year, with Flowers by Miley Cyrus the most-streamed song in the country. The Wiggles were Australia’s most-streamed local artists.
Globally, Swift beat out Bad Bunny to claim the number-one spot in 2023. It’s the first time a female artist was the most-streamed on the platform since Spotify began collating stats in this way.
The top five genres according to Spotify were pop, rap, rock, hip hop and dance pop.
Swift also came out on top in Apple’s end-of-year charts, with more subscribers listening to Swift in 2023 than to any other artist in the world. This set a new all-time record for the most listeners for any artist in a single year.
Cyrus finished at number one in Australia when it comes to singles, with Flowers.
Apple has more than 1 billion paying subscribers overall across its music, podcasts, books, iCloud, Fitness+, Apple TV+ and other brands.
The following lists contain data from Spotify Wrapped
The following lists contain data from Apple
The Prince and the Wizard: It’s all about Harry
Despite earlier this year expanding its offerings to include 15 hours of audiobook access a month, Spotify Wrapped doesn’t include stats on audiobooks for 2023.
On Audible, the most listened-to audiobook in Australia was Prince Harry’s Spare, with almost 50 per cent of the first-week sales in Australia being from audio.
Audible data also reveals a 19 per cent increase in listening hours for memoirs and pop culture content compared to last year, with Australia a nation of celebrity memoir enthusiasts.
While Apple’s stats put Prince Harry on top in the non-fiction category, it was the other Harry – Harry Potter that dominated the fiction audiobook charts, with all of the top five slots going to author JK Rowling’s books.
The following list contains data from Audible
