Music and Podcasting

by Ben Horner

Published 2 October 2025
With currently 850,000 series and some 30 million episodes, podcasting is making its mark on the world’s media landscape and deserves a text filling this gap in its scholarship. Using some of the most popular, exciting, and creative podcasts, Music and Podcasting combines new media study with contemporary musicology to discover how music and sound can be used to bring a podcast to life. It offers a step-by-step framework to analyse how music and sound work in any podcast show, and offers guidance to producers making their own programmes. Through close listenings and interviews with the creators of some of today’s most innovative and fascinating podcasts, including For Your Ears Only, currently #2 on the itunes chart in the technology category, this book explores issues such as sourcing and editing music, staying on the right side of copyright law, and how live musicians can be employed to add extra sparkle to both live and studio-based shows.