Young Chinese are turning to podcasts and ASMR for comfort, companionship and a stronger sense of cultural belonging.
On restless nights in Beijing, Liang Ce places her phone on the bedside table, lowers the volume of rain sounds until they are barely audible and closes her eyes.
In her mind, she is back in Harbin, at her grandparents' single-story house in Heilongjiang Province. Raindrops fall one by one from the eaves. Inside, her grandparents move about the room. Everything feels safe.
"Sound is like a safe house for me," said Liang, 31, who works for an education company. "When you feel frustrated, it can be very hard to get the comfort you need from the people around you. But you can simply type in a keyword and find it."
Podcasts are a weekend fixture for Liang. She chooses what to listen to according to her mood: a relaxed show hosted by a couple while doing housework, crime stories when she has company, a book-discussion episode when she wants to focus, and a slower-paced podcast to ease her toward sleep.
"Without sound or fragments of information coming into my ears, my brain just feels stuck. I instinctively want to put something on to fill the silence," she said.
When pressure at work builds into something heavy but difficult to define, Liang deliberately searches for content that can help her break it down. One podcast prompted her to ask herself a simple question: Was the pressure coming from her supervisor, from herself or from expectations she had set too high?
She applied the method to her own situation."Once the pressure becomes specific, it drops by half," she said. "The other half, I will solve through action."
Listening also gives Liang a way to connect with friends. One podcast about a comedy competition left her and a friend deeply moved. It described how two female stand-up comedians had begun preparing their next set as soon as the previous season ended, working harder and with more composure than their male counterparts.
"We both felt so uplifted after listening," Liang recalled.
Liang's relationship with audio is deeply personal, but it reflects a much broader shift in the listening habits of young Chinese.
According to The Power of Dialogue: The Public Value of Chinese Podcasts, jointly released in 2025 by Fudan University's Center for Information and Communication Studies and the Xiaoyuzhou app, users aged 18 to 35 accounted for more than 83 percent of Xiaoyuzhou's podcast listeners.
Data from iiMedia Research show that China's audio entertainment market reached 611.01 billion yuan ($90.07 billion) in 2025 and is projected to expand to 741.58 billion yuan by 2029.
Sound Connects
For some listeners, sound offers emotional shelter. For others, it provides a path back to local memories, language and cultural identity.
Based in Fujian Province, A'ang (pseudonym) produces a podcast rooted in the culture of Minnan, or southern Fujian. She also runs Another-ear, a bookstore and art shop in Xiamen.
Her podcast, RadioAnEar, launched in 2021 with an episode recommending Hokkien music. Later episodes explored local folklore and folk beliefs, while new co-hosts joined the project.
Her work soon extended beyond producing episodes to creating spaces where other audio makers and listeners could meet. She previously ran an open podcast room program, lending equipment to visiting creators and helping them recruit live audiences.
"There was no single decisive moment. One thing simply led to another," A'ang said.
"Every time an episode goes live, I feel as though something has finally come to fruition," she continued.
After the show released a series about visits to local temples, listeners posted photographs of themselves at the sites featured in the episodes. Others shared new reflections on their relationship with the region, while some said the show had inspired them to start podcasts of their own.
"I started as a listener myself," A'ang said."That feels like the most natural thing."
What attracts young people to the program, she believes, is a particular sense of recognition.
"They want to understand a Minnan culture that is connected to their own lives," she said. "It connects memories of the past with a sense of belonging in the future. It is a living, changing culture — the customs and everyday realities of people's lives."
A bookstore offers a different experience from a podcast. It requires physical presence, touch and sustained attention. "It is more about adapting to the setting, so the threshold is higher," she said. "Sound in a bookstore is also part of the content."
Podcasts, by contrast, slip easily into everyday routines. Yet A'ang does not believe one medium will replace another.
"Some are thriving and some remain niche, but they coexist in a reasonable way," she said."Together, they offer a richer range of sensory experiences. This is something we will need and value increasingly."
While A'ang uses voices and local stories to foster cultural connection, creators of autonomous sensory meridian response, or ASMR, build another kind of refuge through whispers, touch and carefully recorded everyday sounds.
Tang Yuzhou, who goes by MTkoala online, began creating ASMR content in 2014, before the format had gained much traction in China. Her earliest videos, filmed on a phone, captured her turning the pages of books.
To learn about recording equipment, she turned to guitar forums and online discussions about capturing live indoor music.
What she gradually discovered was that listeners were not simply searching for pleasant sounds. They were looking for someone to keep them company.
A comment from one listener has stayed with her. "Everyone is exhausted. Everyone needs someone who can comfort them like an older sister," the listener wrote. "But then you realize that asking for that may feel a little selfish. There are not that many older sisters in the world."
Tang now often records in the small hours, when the city is quiet enough for her microphones to capture the most delicate sounds. She uses several microphones — sometimes four at once — to create an immersive, three-dimensional soundscape.
She organizes her content into three categories: a "calming corner" featuring spa and body-care themes; a "story garden" built around characters, narratives and role-play; and a "no-voice corner" devoted entirely to sound without speech.
Her favorite content focuses on head care. One episode released last year drew inspiration from traditional head-care practices from the Republic of China period (1912-49). It featured hair combing, massage with a bian stone tool, hot compresses and a heated moxa pouch.
"Head treatments are especially effective at eliciting a strong ASMR response," she explained.
Asked what makes a sound worth recording, Tang has a straightforward answer: Anything can work if it is comfortable to hear — even the shaking of a small packet of desiccant.
"There is no such thing as a sound that belongs exclusively to ASMR," she said. "If it feels comfortable to listen to, it is a good sound."
Whether through remembered rainfall, regional stories or the quiet sound of a comb, young listeners are turning to audio as a form of emotional shelter — portable, personal and always within reach.
(Source: China Daily)
Editor: Wang Shasha
