All entries for Wednesday 08 January 2025

January 08, 2025

2024 Retrospective: Most Streamed Podcast Episodes

Writing about web page https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/exchanges/podcast

With over a dozen episodes to enjoy last year, which podcast episode of the Exchanges Discourse found the most favour with our audience? A surprise or two awaits.

Following on from yesterday’s article, today I’m looking back at the episodes of the Exchanges Discourse Podcast published last year. This means we’re considering all 14 episodes recorded and released to on our Spotify home over 2024.[1] Now, as with all things, those episodes which appeared earlier in the year have a certain advantage over others in the ratings, as there’s more time for them to be picked up by listeners than those appearing towards the end of 2024. However, as you’ll see from the chart below – primacy of release doesn’t always guarantee high ratings!

Position	Episode	Listen	Duration
1	Biochar, Artificial Pollination & Multispecies Justice: In Conversation with Catherine Price	Play	25m24s
2	Energy Poetry One: Harnessing the Wind	Play	29m19s
3	Voices of Transnational Girlhood(s) on Identity, Gender, and Culture: In Conversation with Simona Di Martino	Play	22m23s
4=	Researcher Vulnerability and Physical Impacts: In Conversation with Mia-Marie Hammarlin⁠	Play	39m30s
4=	Postdisciplinarity, Ontologies & Futures: In Conversation with Liam Greenacre	Play	12m58s

So, what was our number 1, most listened to episode for 2024? Well, it’s perhaps no surprise that returning podcast guest Catherine Price’s chat around Biochar and Multispecies released back in January last year is at the top of the heap! Although, while it’s early release will have helped, a lot of its popularity will also be due to Catherine being such a charming and informative guest, making the episode is an especially enjoyable listen. What is surprising though is that as we move down to the number 2 position we find our guest podcast from our poetic Irish colleagues on Harnessing the Wind. As this episode only came along at the end of November, it’s managed to leapfrog past many other longer released episodes to come up the chart quite rapidly. No doubt as 2025 moves along, I wouldn’t be surprised it we weren’t looking at a future all-time top-rated episode here! [2]

Another semi-guest episode comes in at number 3, with my chat with Simona Di Martino on Voices of Transnational Girlhood and Identity. Simona isn’t talking about an article in Exchanges [3], but as one of our former IAS fellows it was still a delight to have Simona on. Clearly looking at the episodes statistics that’s an opinion with which our listening audience agrees. Bringing up the bottom two places of our top five are two jointly fourth placed episodes from Mia-Marie Hammarlin and Liam Greenacre. Liam’s episode, on Postdisciplinarity, has the advantage of being one of those recorded earlier in 2024, so has gained in listeners over the year. By contrast, Swedish academic Mia-Marie’s episode – a timely piece on researcher vulnerability - was only released in early December. I suspect like our energy poetry episode above, this will be another discussion whose ratings will continue to climb over the coming months. I enjoyed both of these chats, but especially my wide-ranging discussions with Mia-Marie, possibly because of the closeness of our own disciplinary alignments.[4]

Incidentally, while it came out in late 2023 and so isn’t appearing in this chart, our highest overall rated episode – of all time – are my discussions with Moroccan scholar, scientist and author Intissar Haddiya. Wonderful to see how popular this one continues to be with our audiences, especially as it was one of the more unusual episodes with Intissar being the subject rather than the author of an article in Exchanges! Maybe we should record more of these kind of episodes – what do you think?

So, there you have it, the highlights of last year’s podcast episodes. Was your favourite episode among them? Were there other lower rated episodes that inspired you instead? And more importantly, as I’m in the process of scheduling the first recordings for 2025 – who should we interview next?

As always, let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

---

Endnotes

[1] And available on other platforms too.

[2] And we’ll be looking forward to their next submission in the coming weeks for this series too.

[3] More’s the pity, as her work is in a fascinating and revelatory area.

[4] I am, after all, allowed these tiny biases.