Spotify Unwrapped is the company’s big promotional push at the end of each year, which dutifully allows listeners across the world to share their listening habits from the previous year (well – 11 months).

As well as providing listeners with their own personal lists, Spotify also publishes a lot of cumulative data. Here’s what Spotify says are its top 10 global podcasts for 2025:

My initial thought is that this is a very US-focused list. But it’s notable that The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett is at number 2, a title that doesn’t make a place in the Edison Research US Top 50. And nor does it make Spotify’s Top 10 in the US (see below). That suggests that it does very well everywhere else in the world, but Americans just mostly like to listen to Americans.

But we do need to be careful, because the methodology is different between Edison and Spotify. Edison is survey based data from all listening across all platforms, including YouTube these days. On the other hand, Spotify’s data is consumption based and is derived only from listening via Spotify. Different platforms do have different types of listeners – both demographically and also based around interests.

Exactly how Spotify ranks its podcasts isn’t completely clear, but a methodological note suggests that it’s based on minutes listened. Does that lend itself to podcasts that have longer rather than shorter durations?

Anyway, let’s get to the meat of things and get into the Spotify Top 50 for the UK:

1	The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
2	The Joe Rogan Experience
3	The Louis Theroux Podcast
4	The Rest Is Politics
5	The Mel Robbins Podcast
6	The Rest Is History
7	We Need To Talk with Paul C. Brunson
8	Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster
9	The Rest Is Football
10	The Rest Is Entertainment
11	Modern Wisdom
12	Parenting Hell with Rob Beckett and Josh Widdicombe
13	Call Her Daddy
14	This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von
15	Begin Again with Davina McCall
16	NearlyParents
17	The Rest Is Politics: Leading
18	Stick to Football
19	The Rest Is Politics: US
20	Saving Grace
21	The Buckleys
22	Huberman Lab
23	Bad Friends
24	The News Agents
25	On Purpose with Jay Shetty
26	Great Company with Jamie Laing
27	Sh**ged Married Annoyed
28	Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee
29	Happy Place
30	The Fellas
31	Fin vs History
32	ShxtsNGigs
33	The Girls Bathroom
34	Times news briefing
35	Dish
36	The High Performance Podcast
37	JaackMaate’s Happy Hour
38	Staying Relevant
39	The 2 Johnnies Podcast
40	The Overlap
41	The Rest Is Classified
42	Anything Goes with James English
43	Fozcast – The Ben Foster Podcast
44	Olivia’s House with Olivia Attwood
45	Today in Focus
46	Dan Snow’s History Hit
47	That Peter Crouch Podcast
48	Mystery Mondays
49	Desert Island Discs
50	Help I Sexted My Boss

The first thing to notice from this list is that The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett overtakes The Joe Rogan Experience in the UK under this methodology. And also, while some of the top performers on this chart are familiar to those who regularly look at the Edison UK Podcast data, there are titles here that definitely do not and never have shown up on that list.

So I decided it might be interesting to compare the most recent Edison data – from Q3 2025, published earlier this week – with this Spotify Unwrapped data.

In the chart below, I’ve highlighted the common titles across both lists, and left un-highlighted those that don’t. For titles like Parenting Hell this is probably a bit of an outlier, because it’s a stalwart of the Edison list, but isn’t in the Q3 release for some reason. But others are more interesting.

Let’s start with titles that are in vastly different places. Take That Peter Crouch Podcast which is a solid top-10 performer in the Edison list. With Spotify, it just scrapes into the top 50 at position 47. Similarly, Help I Sexted My Boss, is another solid Edison top 20 performer, yet here it’s at number 50. And I would note that the podcast is about to embark on an arena tour in 2026 including two nights each at Wembley and Manchester Arenas.

Then there are the titles that just aren’t in the Spotify top 50 at all. Notably Newscast which is at number 7 in Edison’s list. Is that really being driven by listening in other apps like BBC Sounds? Other BBC titles like Americast, Uncanny and You’re Dead to Me are also missing, although as I noted with Edison data, some of those may be impacted by not being “always on.” But neither Crime Junkie nor The Daily make Spotify’s list either.

On the other hand, Spotify has some titles that have never really troubled the Edison charts. Whilst both Louis Theroux and Mel Robbins have been in the chart, this is the first time I’ve come across We Need to Talk with Paul C. Brunson. It comes from Steven Bartlett’s Flight Studio and only launched in September 2024, so it’s done remarkably well to make this list in such a relatively short space of time.

But given that the vast majority of the Spotify list are always on, you won’t find any serialised podcasts here with the exception of the odd mini-seasons sitting within these titles. That doesn’t help some of the BBC or Tortoise Media’s titles in this space.

As with any of these app-specific lists, you need to take care interpreting the data. Spotify users are demographically different to Apple Podcasts users and BBC Sounds users. So consumption habits will vary. And if you’re popular, and you publish multiple episodes a week, you’re more likely to make this list.

---

As an example of the dangers, I would note that while I don’t use Spotify for music listening, I do use YouTube Music. They’ve also published their year-end, very shareable “2025 Music Recap”. According to them, my to song for 2025 was the first track from Max Richter’s album Sleep. This is an 8 hour album and I used a few times to, well, get to sleep. Quite how it came out top of my list is unclear to me, since there were plenty of pop tracks I hammered this year. But duration clearly comes into play with YouTube Music too. So be very wary with this data.