Riding the Digital Wave: How Podcasts Are Reshaping Japan’s Media Landscape

Based on forecasts from Nikkei, the Japanese economy daily, voice-based social media, chatbots, and location systems are predicted to be the three key areas for future marketing strategies. Since 2021, digital advertising in Japan has eclipsed traditional mass media, with the most significant decline seen in radio advertising. Yet, paradoxically, online audio content is booming. Newspapers and magazines have begun producing digital broadcasting features, and the number of podcast programs continues to increase.

Mamoru Miyazaki, a 47-year-old TBS radio producer who has been an avid night-time radio fan since high school, immersed himself in the world of broadcasting in the late 1990s. Having worked on late-night radio shows for over 20 years, he felt a crisis in traditional radio programming for the first time in 2010. “It’s not that the program wasn’t good,” he said, “it felt like being thrown into a bottomless abyss and falling continuously.” Coincidentally, Japan launched the Radiko app, a web-based digital radio service in 2010. This technology allows radio programs to be live-streamed directly through the internet, no longer requiring radio waves, and even replayed at any time. It’s creating opportunities for late-night radio shows to appear in different daytime scenes.