Every morning, after she boards her train to Manhattan, Erika puts on her headphones and disappears for the next 40 minutes until her train reaches Wall Street. She doesn’t disappear into Netflix, TikTok, or Instagram reels, but into “My Vampire System,” a serialised audio drama spanning over 2,296 episodes that offers the right mix of dark fantasy and dystopian intrigue.

“It’s like the movies, but into the ears. It’s something more intimate that also fuels my imagination,” Erika says.

Erika is one of the over 200 million listeners who are hooked on Pocket FM, the audio series platform owned by Indian startup Pocket Entertainment, which leads the non-music audio entertainment market in the United States. And, audio series like “My Vampire System,” “God Eye” (1,478 episodes), and “Jack’s Retribution” (2,442 episodes) are among the few dozen fantasy shows that the non-music entertainment company has produced so far.

The truth is, Pocket FM, which already has more than 100,000 hours of non-music content in its library, is quietly transforming the fantasy genre into audio blockbusters packed into bite-sized, voice-led sagas — designed for binge-listening.

In other words, the India-born startup has redefined fantasy, arguably the most visual, effects-heavy genre of all, into one of the hottest audio experiences on mobile phones by blending myths, melodrama, and manipulation without borders.

“We’re not just creating fantasy stories. We are creating habit loops,” says Lalit Gangwar, Head-US, Pocket FM. “The audio format allows us to drip-feed epic narratives in a way that mirrors how people consume TikTok or reels.”

From cheap thrills to deep worlds

Pocket FM’s fantasy titles are not trying to win literary awards. What the Indian-born startup is doing is “engineered addiction.” “God Eye” is more like the dystopian version of Dan Brown, while “Jack’s Retribution” could be considered at home in any post-apocalyptic subreddit.

Fantasy, historically, has always thrived on archetypes — the orphaned hero, the secret prophecy, the reluctant villain. Pocket FM has tightened the arcs to audio pacing to create the cliffhanger endings for each episode.

On average, Pocket FM’s audio series episodes are only 7 to 10 minutes long. According to Pocket FM’s internal data, listeners often binge dozens in a row, averaging roughly 115 minutes daily. That’s simply because of the carefully crafted cliffhanger endings of episodes.

The IP game

Pocket FM likes to position itself as a builder of “audio IP.” But unlike the video-heavy players, Pocket FM is playing the volume game, and the factory-like nature of its production is hard to ignore. Episodes are written quickly, tested in-market, and scaled like any fast-moving consumer product. Some succeed, others are dropped.

Pocket FM’s advantage is the format it plays right now. Audio requires a fraction of the production cost of any fantasy movie. And Americans are binge-listening to these audio dramas around the clock and on the go.

“We see this as the prequel to a much larger format play,” says Gangwar. For Pocket FM, it’s more like a combination of an artist’s studio and a genre lab, with well-built retention metrics.

At a time when the world of content is fighting with diminishing attention spans, Pocket FM has found a loophole — storytelling that fits in your pocket, unfolds endlessly, and doesn’t demand your eyes.