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Contemporary mediation gravitates around platforms, central structures where users and content converge. As the pivotal format for mediation through sound, intersecting culture, economy, technology and social processes, podcasting has drawn the attention of platforms which have been investing heavily on attracting/retaining producers and listeners alike, by facilitating production, securing the rights to exclusive content, and providing unique ways to interact with content. In this article we analyze Spotify's Top Podcast rankings in Portugal, using descriptive analysis to identify and characterize content, to determine how discovery is promoted and how diverse is the content being presented to users, determining their perception of the format. We argue that content diversity is central to a format that has become mainstream within contemporary digital and audio culture, through the convergence of independent and mainstream producers in the unique content sphere of podcasting. Platforms may be regarded as enabling agents for this process, having become both audio discovery ecosystems and gatekeepers for the format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Covid-19 pandemic brought with it a set of impacts and consequences, some of which of a typology and dimension still to be known and properly measured. The set of communicational practices and media consumption is no exception, having been observed during the March / April 2020 confinement a significant change in the patterns usually identified in the Portuguese society. Podcasting, as a format intrinsically related with aspects such as portability and ease of access and consumption, faces in this context a very significant communicational reframing process, insofar as the relevant dimensions of its consumption are strongly associated with the paradigms of mobility. This is, however, only a relative dimension of the change that the format is going through, being simultaneous to the growing interest in platformized and closed models of content distribution and to the growing relevance of the social dimension of audio and, in particular, of the voice as an instrument to sociability. This article explores the materialization of the change observed in the format due to the pandemic. Starting from the observation of media consumption trends in Portugal, we seek to reflect on how the format is thought, developed and operationalized by the production sphere. To this end, the dynamics of podcast consumption in Portugal are observed, using a representative sample of the population, and the consumption patterns by gender and source in pre-pandemic (December 2018) and post-pandemic (December 2020) periods. The analysis carried out allows us to see that podcasting will have organically acquired a new configuration with confined communicability. From the production point of view, the pandemic has not halted the exponential growth on the supply side both in terms of content diversity and quantity and of increased competition within the existing format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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