Shownotes
In this episode:
— What a humming shed in a field had to do with your career for 100 years — Why "it's worth more than iHeart" is a number nobody quoting it has checked — Barstool, Spotify, SiriusXM: three tenancies, one landlord — The bit where I admit I didn't clock any of this for years — Why you've been feeling rubbish about yourself on the wrong scoreboard — One number to look at instead, today Note: Unwell has been the subject of reporting this year, including a Vanity Fair investigation, alleging a difficult workplace culture. Cooper disputes it. Nothing in this episode is a comment on that either way — the point here is structural, about who owns what, and it would hold regardless of who the owner turned out to be. This is Podmastery: Podcasting Opinions — the spinoff from Podcasting Insights. Insights is where I think properly about something. Opinions is where something's happened in the industry and I've got a view.Podmastery goodies you can grab:
- Treat yourself to a PodmasteryPodcast Audit
- Founding member doors for thePodmasteryPodcast Communityopen soon
- Everything else:podmastery.co
Transcripts
There's a field about 30 miles away from me which has got a fence around it, and
Speaker:inside that fence there's a mast and a little brick shed that constantly hums.
Speaker:That's it.
Speaker:That's the whole thing.
Speaker:And for about 100 years, that shed was the reason anybody in broadcasting
Speaker:had to be polite to a business owner, because if you weren't granted access
Speaker:to the tech inside it, you could be the single greatest broadcaster who ever
Speaker:drew breath, and you were functionally a bloke shouting in a Wickes car
Speaker:park with nobody listening to you.
Speaker:This week, a woman who has never even been within 40 miles of one of those sheds
Speaker:got valued at half a billion dollars.
Speaker:So let's talk about what that actually means,
Speaker:Because it's not the dull podcasting business story all the tech
Speaker:journos seem to be publishing it as
Speaker:This is Podmastery, Podcasting Opinions, a part of the Podcasting
Speaker:Insight show that I host.
Speaker:I'm Neal Veglio, the podmaster, 25-odd years in radio and audio, and these
Speaker:days I help indie creators get more out of the show they've already got.
Speaker:So Alex Cooper, Call Her Daddy, started in 2018, two women talking about naughty
Speaker:things with the kind of candor that made an entire generation of dads suddenly
Speaker:discover they had a phone call to make.
Speaker:Since then, she's built a company with a bloke called Matt Kaplan,
Speaker:and that is called Unwell, and Unwell is not a podcast.
Speaker:Unwell owns her show, some other people's shows, some live events,
Speaker:and just give this a second to think about, a drinks brand.
Speaker:She's turned a podcast into a beverage, and the rest of us can't
Speaker:even get people to click follow.
Speaker:This week, an investment firm run by Patrick Whitesell put some cash into it.
Speaker:Whitesell used to run Endeavor.
Speaker:He's a proper Hollywood power blokey, the kind of dude who has people to
Speaker:have people to have people, and the valuation on the deal was $500 million.
Speaker:Now, at this point, every LinkedIn podcast expert in the world went, "And that's
Speaker:more than iHeartMedia" because Podnews mentioned iHeart were worth 450 million.
Speaker:So I went to check it because I don't repeat numbers that I haven't checked,
Speaker:which I appreciate makes me a bit of an outlier around these parts of podcasting.
Speaker:I wanna tell you exactly what happened when I checked.
Speaker:I got three different answers.
Speaker:Three, from three perfectly respectable financial sources on the same day
Speaker:about the same company, ranging from about $300 million to over 600 million.
Speaker:Turns out iHeart has multiple classes of share and about $6
Speaker:billion of debt strapped to its back.
Speaker:So depending on which bit you decide to measure, you can have
Speaker:whatever number you fancy really.
Speaker:It's less a valuation and more a horoscope.
Speaker:Which brings me neatly to my first free tip of the day for you.
Speaker:Anyone quoting with confidence a valuation comparison on LinkedIn
Speaker:this week has not looked.
Speaker:They've seen a headline, retyped it, and put a little rocket emoji on the end.
Speaker:But here's what survives all of that, and it's the bit that actually matters.
Speaker:A company that didn't exist six years ago, built out of a podcast, is now
Speaker:having conversations alongside one of the biggest radio companies in America, a
Speaker:company with hundreds of radio stations, licenses, transmitters, buildings,
Speaker:thousands of staff, and 100 years of the experience I built my career in.
Speaker:And a podcast about shagging has pulled level with it
Speaker:. Which I imagine has kind of made you think to yourself, "Lovely. Rich
Speaker:podcaster gets richer. Absolutely nothing to do with me and my 200
Speaker:downloads." And do you know what?
Speaker:90% of the time you'd be dead right.
Speaker:Most of these stories are just numbers being shouted at you by
Speaker:people who want you to feel small.
Speaker:But not this one.
Speaker:Stay with me, kiddo
Speaker:The version of this story that's currently doing the rounds is
Speaker:creator wins, platforms lose, and that's absolute rubbish.
Speaker:She went to Barstool first, then Spotify, reportedly about $60 million in that deal.
Speaker:Then in 2024, she binned off Spotify and she went to
Speaker:SiriusXM for up to 125 million.
Speaker:So she used platforms harder than almost anyone alive.
Speaker:They paid her a small fortune.
Speaker:She's been to bed with all of them, and every single time when the
Speaker:lease was up, she walked out and took the entire audience with her.
Speaker:That's the core part of this that I want you to understand.
Speaker:Barstool never owned the podcast.
Speaker:Spotify never owned the
Speaker:podcast.
Speaker:SiriusXM don't even own it now.
Speaker:They're just the current tenant with the nicest kitchen that
Speaker:she's decided to rent out.
Speaker:She's the landlord.
Speaker:So three tenancies, three moves, different apps, different feeds, different business
Speaker:model, and the audience got up off the sofa and followed her down the road every
Speaker:single time like loyal little ducklings.
Speaker:That is what got valued at half a billion dollars, not a download
Speaker:figure on any one platform.
Speaker:The fact is when she moves, they all move
Speaker:And here's where I now need to tell you what that hum in the shed at the beginning
Speaker:of this episode's opening actually meant.
Speaker:For my entire career, the landlord was whoever owned the transmitter,
Speaker:the frequency, the license, the mast.
Speaker:If nobody handed you one, your talent was just a hobby.
Speaker:That's not me being dramatic.
Speaker:That is literally how the system worked.
Speaker:Gatekeepers with offices decided who was allowed to be heard in a building,
Speaker:sometimes in London, over lunch, and that barrier hasn't weakened, it's gone.
Speaker:And I'm gonna hold my hands up here.
Speaker:I did not clock this for ages because when you've spent decades inside the thing, you
Speaker:assume that the walls are load-bearing.
Speaker:I've absolutely been the bloke going, "Well, actually, some of us were uploading
Speaker:audio before RSS was even invented", which is, let's be honest about it,
Speaker:the audio equivalent of telling someone you saw the band before they were big.
Speaker:Nobody cares, Neal.
Speaker:Sit down there, love
Speaker:Here's the thing, though.
Speaker:What got valued isn't the money.
Speaker:It's
Speaker:It's not the pizzazz.
Speaker:It's not Patrick Whitesell's checkbook.
Speaker:It's whether people follow.
Speaker:And that is measurable at any size.
Speaker:It's measurable at 200 downloads.
Speaker:It's just as measurable in a much smaller room.
Speaker:So if you moved tomorrow, went to a new platform with a new feed, a
Speaker:different app entirely, would they come?
Speaker:Would they follow you?
Speaker:And the honest answer for most people within the sound of my
Speaker:voice right now is, "I don't know. I've never once tested it." Yeah.
Speaker:Ponder that for a second, because that's the actual gap in your
Speaker:success, not your download count
Speaker:Now, I'm not gonna insult you by pretending you can do what she did.
Speaker:She had Barstool's distribution behind her.
Speaker:She had a fan base.
Speaker:She had a genuine once in a decade cultural moment.
Speaker:Nobody wrote her a check because she had good SEO and posted consistently
Speaker:on Tuesdays, and anyone telling you, "You can build this too.
Speaker:Here's my nine-step framework.
Speaker:Use code UNWELL20," they're selling you something, and I'd
Speaker:quite like them to stop, frankly.
Speaker:So no, you can't do what she did.
Speaker:Neither can I. But a thing that turned out to be valuable, the following,
Speaker:the fact that they move with you,
Speaker:that is available at literally any size.
Speaker:It's the only asset in this entire industry that nobody
Speaker:can put a skip button on
Speaker:In a moment, I'd like to play you a trailer from one of our
Speaker:Podmastery community members
Speaker:And if you'd like to be in it, we're opening the doors to public soon.
Speaker:Go to podmastery.co/waitlist, and I'll put you on the founding members list
Speaker:Here's something
Speaker:that you can do that might make you feel, you know, like you're
Speaker:going in the right direction.
Speaker:Go into your podcast analytics and stop looking at the download numbers.
Speaker:Just pick one number that measures relationship instead of distribution.
Speaker:So repeat listeners, the completion rate, how many people showed
Speaker:up for two episodes running.
Speaker:Any of those, doesn't matter which, just pick one.
Speaker:You'll usually see it in Apple Podcast Connect or maybe the Spotify
Speaker:Creator's Dashboard if you prefer that, and make that the number that
Speaker:you look at first from now on, because downloads are a distribution metric.
Speaker:It's the podcast equivalent of counting transmitters in the countryside.
Speaker:It's how many sheds you've got humming in how many fields.
Speaker:And this week the market had a really good look at those sheds and at
Speaker:the following, and they decided the following was worth about the same
Speaker:as the number of sheds, frankly.
Speaker:You've been feeling rubbish about yourself on the wrong scoreboard.
Speaker:So what do you do when you're not doing well on the scoreboard?
Speaker:You change the scoreboard.
Speaker:We see that in life in many ways these days
Speaker:If people can't compete in the way that everyone else is, they
Speaker:invent a new way of competing
Speaker:Go and find out whether your audience would follow you.
Speaker:Because I promise you,
Speaker:that's a far more useful question to ask than how you get from
Speaker:200 downloads to 400 downloads
Speaker:I hope you found this interesting.
Speaker:Share it with somebody that you think might also find it interesting.
Speaker:I'm Neal Veglio, the podmaster, and good luck with your continuing
Speaker:journey towards podmastery.
