Music Podcasting is Hard. Why it’s worth the effort Part 2: "Music Podcasts don't do well."

"Music Podcasts don't do well."

Let's get this out of the way. If by "well" you mean as big as Joe Rogan, that's another discussion. But there are hundreds of podcasts that are sustainable and profitable with a fraction of his numbers. And those numbers are very attainable with the right partners and practices.

Let's not sell all music pods short. There are some excellent music podcasts (Shoutout "Disgraceland" and "Broken Record"). But they are mostly catering to niche audiences and mostly of the "talking about music" genre.

On numbers: what we have heard consistently over the past year is that 150k downloads per week could be considered a hit.

Adam Davidson, a personal hero, created "Planet Money" and has experienced firsthand the entire history of podcasting from its non-monetized origins through the 2018-19 investment boom and now into the post-boom. On a recent episode of the excellent Puck podcast "The Powers That Be" he stated that a new NPR cast at 50K per episode would be canceled.

So let's say that somewhere around of 150K is a hit and somewhere south of 50K is a miss.

Let's put that in the context of the music industry.

If I got those numbers, or even 5-10x that, for any piece of content I launched with an established artist at my former major label marketing job, I would have been in big trouble. Video views and audio listens in the music industry are measured on the millions on the low end and the hundreds of millions on the high end. Even converting a small percentage of those millions can make a successful podcast.

This may seem elementary, but the music industry is in the business of driving listeners to listen to things. And they are pretty good at it. As in "hundreds of millions of monthly active users listening to billions of songs per month" good at it.

Because the platforms are huge.

Source: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/music-streaming-market/

 You can do your own analysis, but Spotify alone is bigger than the entire Podcast market. You can look it up!

Source: https://www.insiderintelligence.com/insights/the-podcast-industry-report-statistics/

And that's not counting Apple, Soundcloud, Amazon Music and Pandora. It also excludes the daddy of them all, YouTube. And it excludes the wild uncle, TikTok.

Music industry revenues grew nearly 20% in 2021 (numbers for 2022 are not in yet).

Who wouldn't want a piece of that?

The music industry is a sea of active listeners. Some of these people follow individual artists. Some follow genres. Some follow algorithms. Music companies -- Managers, labels, marketing firms -- even publishers -- wake up every morning thinking about how to drive these audiences to listen, buy tickets and buy merchandise.

And they are pretty good at it.

The best part is that they are already driving people to the exact same places that folks listen to podcasts. The listeners are already using the apps. The music folks are already engaging the listeners and the listeners are hungry for more stories and content.

This is the opportunity.  

It's not an easy solve. It takes the right content, the right marketing, realistic goals, and crucially, the right people talking to each other. But that active and loyal music fan pool is still sitting there waiting to be spoken to.

Next: "Audience Building for music pods is hard."