Honest to Pod, ARe podcasts dying?!

The state of the pod: are podcasts dying?

My new friends that own a podcast production agency think the creative podcast is dying.

I don’t think they’re right, but I don’t think they’re wrong.

I won’t lie to you… I’ve been in a doom spiral since I chatted with these friends at a party last week. But you know what I realized today?

My doom spiral wasn’t coming from this thought that podcasts are dying.

BIG NOPE.

Because they just aren’t.

The podcasting industry is only growing right now.

I was able to do the work and get to the heart of it: I’m sad that artists and storytellers are having a harder and harder time supporting their life financially through podcasting because the industry is becoming more and more corporate.

I’ll spare you all the details.

But the bottom line is: these friends experienced the beautiful exploration and explosion of being early adopters in the podcasting industry. They were some of the first in the industry and were able to truly capitalize on that and make their livelihood through their own podcasts.

BUT the landscape is changing.

Large corporations like Spotify are buying smaller production whales like Gimlet. Google is dropping out of the podcasting space by shutting down Google Podcasts because there are other companies just doing it better.

The space is becoming more corporatized. This is the way.

This is the way in the United States.

This is the way in most of the world.

Creative minds create some beautiful form of connecting humans and it is the beautiful Wild West of the art studio for a while… and it gets noticed… and it gets acquired… it gets infiltrated by business.

We’ve seen it with Facebook, we’ve seen it with Instagram. Remember when Instagram was all photos of our outfits, our food, our vacations and we were all trying to be good photographers?

I imagine this happened with things like… football, fashion, etc.

Podcasts are not dying.

I’d argue that creative podcasts aren’t dying either.

But I would say, that this is the great challenge of the creative and the artist…

all the media we find, discover, develop

has a use for art (which often doesn’t have a lot of money behind it)

and mass-market or commercial use.

Storytellers will continue to tell stories, but we’re getting more creative in how we fund those projects.

BUT my podcasting work is in a different space.

I have ALWAYS worked with folx that are using their podcast to support their business through marketing. They invest the time and money into their show because it pays off—

they nurture their current clients and draw-in prospective clients.

I work with the people whose podcast is part of the funnel… not the product in and of itself… not what the funnel leads to.

Through podcasting, we’re able to get my client’s stories, personalities, content, presence out to their audiences.

We may not be paying their mortgages with their podcasts…

but we are inviting their prospective clients into the room where they can buy their product or service; we’re nurturing their current clients into their higher level offers.

THIS pays their mortgages.

Podcasting is a really powerful medium for business, but podcasting as a business is not going to work for everyone… we’re seeing this more drastically now than ever.

I made this commitment to myself back in 2018: I would work on shows that led to an offer and were not the offer in and of themselves.

I stand by it.

I used to coach folx around creating their own shows.

Highly creative individuals that saw podcasting as a way of getting out of the service industry and into something they loved… and I stopped.

Because the likelihood of creating a successful show (as it’s own business) without corporate money behind it or at least loads of money… is getting more and more rare.

I couldn’t, in good conscience, encourage them to pay me to give them advice and know-how to build a show that I didn’t think would meet their desires or needs.

Bottom line: the podcasting industry is growing and changing… it’s certainly not dying… and there’s still SO MUCH opportunity in it.

Schedule your discovery call today so that I can give you all the clarity you need in wondering if you should start a podcast, how to get going, or how to level up your current show with a producer or editor. I can’t wait to be a part of your team.

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