The pendulum of the podcast universe is shifting westward, following the pull of studios and agencies who see the potential of the medium. Of course, we’ve seen this pattern before. In November, the On Air Fest, a Brooklyn-based multi-day podcasting event featuring talks and live tapings, hosted an annex event in Los Angeles for the first time. The first film studios in the country were located in New York and New Jersey, not Hollywood. Though the old adage is that trends trickle westward from California, media doesn’t always follow the trajectory of juice cleanses.
Like films in the Golden Age of Hollywood, today’s podcasts are personality-driven. In the case of podcasts, though, stars tend to have more leverage than studios. Hosts who come from all sorts of worlds — from public media, to publishing, to social media, to journalism, to comedy — are able to take their listeners with them when they change networks, and are often able to negotiate better deals when they switch. The past few years have seen huge shifts as podcast stars like Malcolm Gladwell (who started Revisionist History on Slate and later moved it to his company, Pushkin Industries), Leon Neyfakh (who originated Slate’s Slow Burn and turned it into Luminary’s Fiasco), and Manoush Zomorodi (incoming host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour, co-founder of Stable Genius Productions, co-host and co-creator of ZigZag) have either founded their own production companies or bounced between networks.
Much of podcasting started in the east because it was tied to public media like WNYC and This American Life, or print and digital media, like Slate and The New York Times. Early podcasting companies like Gimlet (which was acquired for $200 million last year by Spotify) and Panoply (which got out of the content game when it rebranded into Megaphone in 2018) were New York-based. Meanwhile, in California, media companies like The Wondery (founded in 2016 by veteran Fox executive Hernan Lopez) and Crooked Media have continued to grow. Comedy podcast network Earwolf, which has been owned by Stitcher since 2016, has kept its presence in Los Angeles post-acquisition. Late last year, Sony Music invested an undisclosed sum in LA-based podcast production company Neon Hum.
As Nicholas Quah wrote in his year-end column for his newsletter Hot Pod, 2019 was the year Los Angeles superseded New York as the capital of podcasting. In the past year, Quah writes, “there has been enough movement to suggest that the focal point of the podcast industry has swung westward, toward Los Angeles.” Quah argues that this shift stems from the fact that “podcasting’s larger-scale business activities are now increasingly intertwined with the broader entertainment industry clustered around LA.”
In the past few years, podcasts have become a stronger link in the chain of intellectual property, giving high-profile books (like Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill and Nicole Weisensee Egan’s Chasing Cosby) a new platform and spurring television deals (like Facebook Watch’s Limetown and anthology series Dirty John). Additionaly, shows produced within Studio71 reflect the close relationship between podcasts and other entertainment mediums. Working with digital influencers from YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and more, the company is bringing the generation that grew up on social media over to the podcast universe. This strategy has gained the podcast marketplace an influx of brand new podcast listeners — for some Studio71 shows, 70% of the audience had never listened to a podcast before.
Studio71 hosts include reality stars, former child actors turned spiritual environmentalists, comedians, and beyond. As the loop between podcasting and Hollywood becomes more direct, we can expect to see and hear more creative, high production value podcasting from the West Coast.
Listen here for a Playlist of Studio71 podcast shows.
