The one British Podcast Awards category that listeners actually decide has reached its final round — and from today, 30 July, the only place you can vote is inside the Spotify mobile app.
The Top 20 shortlist for the Listeners’ Choice Award was revealed this morning, drawn from a public nomination round that ran for two weeks on the British Podcast Awards website and closed on Thursday 23 July. Round 2 runs from today until 28 August. The winner is announced at the ceremony on Thursday 1 October at indigo at The O2 in London.
How the voting works this year
The mechanics have changed, and they are worth understanding before you vote.
Round 1 was open on the British Podcast Awards website. Anyone could nominate a favourite show, one vote per email address, and any podcast available on Spotify was eligible. The twenty shows with the most nominations went through.
Round 2 is different. It takes place exclusively in the Spotify mobile app, and every voter gets three votes to spread across the Top 20 however they like. You can back three different shows, or concentrate on fewer. The organisers say the aim is to make voting easier and to help listeners discover shows they have not heard.
You do not need a paid Spotify subscription to take part, but you do need the app. Voting closes on 28 August 2026.
Who is on the shortlist
What we can confirm from the wider 2026 shortlist, announced on 23 July, is the calibre of the field. Trade reporting put the overall nominations at 180 podcasts across 29 categories, and among the names in contention are The Louis Theroux Podcast, The Guilty Feminist, Newscast, Today in Focus, Table Manners with Jessie and Lennie Ware, Football Weekly, Stick to Cricket, The Intelligence and Sliced Bread. That is the familiar spread of British podcasting: BBC and broadsheet output sitting alongside independent shows and long-running comedy. If the news end of that field is where you live, our roundup of the best current affairs podcasts covers most of it.
Two Editor’s Choice categories sit outside the main list. The Spotlight Award recognises shows averaging more than 100,000 downloads per episode. The Specialist Award goes the other way, celebrating independent podcasts with fewer than 5,000 listens per episode and highlighting underrepresented voices.
Recent Listeners’ Choice winners give a sense of what this particular vote rewards: Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society, Help I Sexted My Boss, and RedHanded, which has taken the award three times. It has historically favoured shows with committed, mobilised fanbases over the biggest download numbers — which is rather the point of a public vote.
Why the Spotify-only round matters
This is where a straightforward awards story becomes an industry one.
Research published on 16 July by Edison Research at SSRS, in The UK Podcast Consumer 2026, found that YouTube has overtaken Spotify as the most-used podcast service among British weekly listeners aged 15 and over, on 29% against Spotify’s 28%. BBC Sounds sits at 15%.
Set that against a national podcast award whose only public vote now runs exclusively inside Spotify. Roughly seven in ten weekly UK podcast listeners name something other than Spotify as their main service. Some of them will have the app anyway; a good number will not, and will simply not vote.
Our analysis, not a company statement: this is a reasonable trade for the awards in the short term. Spotify brings reach, a simple in-app voting flow and genuine discovery for shortlisted shows, which is more than a form on a website delivers. The longer-term question is what a Listeners’ Choice result represents when one platform is the gate. If the same UK listeners are increasingly on YouTube, a Spotify-only vote gradually measures Spotify’s audience rather than Britain’s. The organisers have not said whether the arrangement continues beyond 2026, and we would not assume either way.
The same Edison research found 72% of UK weekly podcast consumers now watch video podcasts, up from 58% in 2023, while 87% still listen to audio-only shows. There is a Video Innovation category in this year’s awards, which suggests the organisers are reading the same numbers.
What to do before 28 August
If you want a say, open the Spotify mobile app and find the Listeners’ Choice hub. You have three votes and four weeks. If nothing on the Top 20 grabs you, the shortlist across the other categories is a decent reading list in its own right, and so is our own pick of the best podcasts on Spotify.
Share:
