The new rock and roll: podcasts have become box-office gold
From low-key beginnings, podcasting has metamorphosed into a genuine stage phenomenon. Rosa Silverman reports
O‘Those who can sell out big venues are probably getting around £10,000 for one night’s work’
utside the London Palladium, excited fans are queuing to see their idols. Some, decked-out in official merchandise, are taking selfies in front of the venue. Inside, they chat loudly as they settle in for a night of raucous entertainment. But the twenty-to-fortysomethings aren’t here to see a pop star or TV comedian. They are here for a live podcast show – about badly written erotic fiction.
When the stars of My Dad Wrote a Porno walk on, to strobe lighting and a soundtrack of pumping disco, the screams are on the decibel level you might hear at a rock concert.
“London, are you ready?” shouts James Cooper, one of the trio of podcasters. London goes obligingly wild.
Just a few years ago, the idea of a live podcast show selling out a major venue would have seemed bizarre. Today, such shows are box-office gold and podcasters the new rock gods. No one, perhaps, is more surprised than them. When I speak to Jamie Morton, son of the eponymous dad in My Dad Wrote a Porno, which has been downloaded more than 300 million times since it launched in 2015, he says he and his two co-hosts laughed at their agent the first time he told them they were capable of selling out the Palladium. In the event, they have just completed five nights at the famous venue.
“When we started out there just wasn’t this ecosystem, this wasn’t possible,” he says. “Big shows like ours have built a new business, which is kind of cool. But it’s also testament to where the medium’s gone.”
And the medium has gone into the stratosphere. In the past ast three years, the number of people in the UK who listen to podcasts has risen from 9.5 million to 21 million, and nd that number is expected to climb to o 28 million by 2026. This has allowed d a thousand fan bases to bloom, containing ntaining listeners who not only y display levels of devotion equal to that of any music fan, but who are also, on average, relatively well-off. “Podcast listeners are mostly quite well-to-do,” says Dino Sofos, founder of podcast production company Persephonica.
“They probably will be able to afford to [buy tickets to shows]. It’s a goldmine, really. The money left over at the end after you’ve sold all those tickets is quite a lot. You’re not haemorrhaging cash in massive overheads…If you look at the current landscape, live shows are front and centre. [And] if you’re building up a [podcast] audience, fans will now expect you to have a live element.”
Agents and promoters have been quick to seize the opportunity, says Tom Billington, content director of The Podcast Show, a two-day industry event due to be held in London later this month.
“[People] whose bread-and-butter is normally music see the huge potential in the podcast space,” space, he says.
The format of the Porno live show is not all that different from the podcast: the three hosts sit on stage, Morton reads out excerpts from his father’s excruciating Belinda Blinked novels and his two friends, Cooper and Alice Levine, comment and digress. Added extras include a slick introductory video, some audience interaction and a little physical tomfoolery. Thanks to the hosts’ comic brilliance, it entirely works as a show, as confirmed by the crowd’s constant whoops and claps.
Other podcasters’ live shows are more elaborate. When Dragons’ Den star Steven Bartlett took his popular The Diary of a CEO on tour earlier this year, he performed with a fervent, black-clad gospel choir. And Chris and Rosie Ramsey, hosts of Shagged Married Annoyed, a show about married life and parenthood, set a record for the largest-ever live podcast at the end of last la year when they played the O2 in Greenwich Gree (inset), breaking a record they themselves th had set just weeks earlier ear by selling out Wembley Arena. Aren Other podcasters to take their sho shows on the road include Deborah D Frances-White, host of The Guilty Feminist (“less of a podcast and more of a global g phenomenon”, runs the blurb), Hannah Maguire and Suruthi Bala, presenters of the true crime
podcast
RedHanded, and many more besides.
Tickets aren’t cheap. After selling out the Palladium, Porno has added an extra date at the Royal Festival Hall, where tickets range from £48 to £62. Front row seats for The Guilty Feminist at London’s Hammersmith Apollo later this year are on sale for £83. According to Giles Gear, founder of Giddy Aunt Comedy, a live event promoter that does some podcast shows, those who can sell out big venues “are probably getting around £10,000 for one night’s work”.
If that sounds like an unlikely sum for what often amounts to two or three people sitting on a stage having a chat, funny or otherwise, it’s worth considering the loyalty the top podcasters inspire. “Superfandom is usually predicated on a feeling of connection or maybe even intimacy with the artist you enjoy listening to, and that can be through music or the spoken word,” says Jake Warren, founder of podcast company Message Heard. “A lot of what makes podcasting really popular isn’t celebrity PR, but the accessibility and relatability of
someone like you [talking].” “That’s the hallmark of podcasting,” agrees Morton. “Because it’s an intimate medium, you’re in people’s ears, and… people really do feel like they have a connection with you.” He is frequently recognised in the street, he says, both in Britain and abroad, and fans often speak openly to him about their lives, as if they know him.
For the few hundred UK podcasts that develop large followings, there’s also money to be made through advertising, sponsorship and subscriptions. “When you get to 5,000 downloads per episode, sponsors will start to take a bit of interest,” says Chris Pleydell, an independent music promoter and chief executive of Hybrid Events. “If you get to [this level] you might make £3,000 to £4,000 a month in sponsorship.”
Reaching 10,000 downloads per episode “supercharges it” and podcasters could be netting as much as £10,000 a month from sponsorships, subscriptions and additional sales of products, courses or coaching. My Dad Wrote a Porno has spawned a bestselling book (as has Shagged Married Annoyed) and an HBO special. “It starts to be good money at that point,” says Pleydell. “But just as with bands, the majority of podcasters don’t make money.”
Of those who do, many will already be established names: the likes of Joe Rogan, Peter Crouch and Louis Theroux fall into this category. Likewise BBC journalists, such as Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel who, following the success of their Americast podcast, have quit the Corporation to front a new podcast for the Global Player commercial audio platform, with Sofos as executive producer. Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo have also jumped ship from BBC Radio 5 Live to Sony, where their film review show has been turned into a twice-weekly podcast.
With the platforms that host the podcasts taking a cut of advertising revenues, they too are among the winners in what Sofos calls the current podcast “landgrab”. Advertisers, for their part, are drawn by the high levels of audience engagement and perception of authenticity, especially with “host reads” – the lucrative practice in which the hosts themselves read out the adverts.
A minority of podcasters have built up big audiences without pre-existing name recognition. Morton wasn’t famous before My Dad Wrote a Porno. Now he is asked for selfies wherever he goes and, at least while on tour, enjoys something of a rock and roll lifestyle.
“I do cane it [on tour],” he says. “After that week at the Palladium I was absolutely destroyed. But this might never happen [again]. I’m very aware this isn’t going to last for ever. I want to enjoy it while it does.”