When the austerity era began, the Tories were fond of telling their opponents that there was no such thing as a “magic money tree”. But in September last year, George Osborne thought he’d finally found one. You may have heard him talking about it.
Political Currency, presented by Osborne and his former Labour opponent Ed Balls, was a cheerfully transparent attempt to take a piece of an exciting new trend in the political podcast market: the ravenous appetite of centrist commuting blokes of a certain age to listen to – be in the room with – two sensible remainer men who wish they were still in charge. Rory Stewart, whose own podcast with Alastair Campbell, The Rest Is Politics, is a fixture of the Top 5 in Apple’s chart, calls it disagreeing agreeably. We can call it dadcasting. (You will not be too surprised that as a 40-year-old father who lives in Hackney and literally works for the Guardian, I enjoy several of them.)
Billed as expert insight from political pros unshackled from the discipline of party politics, dadcasts – named for their most devoted listeners – are obviously useful as a reputation-laundering service. (You feel in your bones that Matt Hancock has been doggedly shopping around a concept.) They are also useful because they hold the promise of making you absolutely loads of money for quite a small amount of work.
That’s not because podcasts have become mass media: even the most successful shows still count their audiences in the hundreds of thousands. But the model for the recent raft of chatshows is simplicity itself: get two well-known faces in the studio, hit record and count the advertiser cash as it flows in.
The goliaths among the independent production companies are Persephonica, which produces Political Currency and The News Agents for LBC, and Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger, which produces The Rest Is … across a range of subjects. For their headline acts, they operate on a profit-sharing model. This significantly lowers the risk of being stuck with an expensive contractual commitment on a failing show, and offers a lot more upside to the talent.
No production company shares audience figures publicly, but industry rivals estimate The Rest Is Politics gets north of 200,000 listeners an episode, with the main weekly edition supplemented by an audience-boosting Q&A. The golden goose has also laid an additional interview podcast, Leading, which comes out every Monday. As a rule of thumb, programmatic ads start at about £10 per thousand listeners; “host reads”, where presenters read the ads out themselves, can command up to five times that. All of this is supplemented by live shows and a £3.50 monthly membership.
With minimal production costs, that translates to a lot of profit. Last year, Stewart marvelled that “I’ve earned more this month than I’ve ever earned doing anything else in my life”, and called it “Championship footballer money”. Estimates of £70,000 a month each have not been disputed. The much less lively Osborne-Balls knockoff oscillates between the 30s and the 60s in the Apple charts, and industry insiders estimate its audience as somewhere between 60,000 and 75,000. It still seems likely to be earning its hosts a six-figure annual sum. (The best of luck to Lord Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia, whose passion project about “futurists set on forging new paths for humanity” launched earlier this month and currently sits outside Apple’s top 250.)
Goalhanger’s co-founder, Jack Davenport, recently called the model “chat format, high volume, always on”. Talking about Lineker’s new football show with Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, he acknowledged the importance of money in the mix: “It hasn’t been possible for very long in podcasting, to be really honest, to afford those kind of people.”
There is undoubtedly huge skill in identifying the chemistry necessary to make these shows work. And the entrepreneurial spirit that sparked the dadcast revolution is not objectionable in itself. But there is something deadening about the way it reveals the podcast market to be going. Whether you call it commercial maturity or capitalism’s bleakly inevitable assimilation of all cultural forms, the conclusion is the same.
To see how this goes, consider the streaming giants, which started out as upstart disruptors to the traditional networks and took all kinds of risks on shows that would never get commissioned by terrestrial TV. These days, the golden age of television appears to be on its last legs: Netflix sells ads, makes much more conventional choices and is as mainstream as it gets.
The podcast charts today abound with evidence of a similar tendency. The Diary of a CEO, Jake Humphrey’s High Performance and Modern Wisdom are all chasing the same audience of men in search of cod philosophical self-optimisation. Peter Crouch took his popular format about being a matey footballer away from the BBC, so the BBC came up with My Mate’s a Footballer. And many, many influencers have marriages that are relatably similar to your own.
The proliferation is the problem. After a pandemic boom that saw more than a million new shows released in 2020, the saturation of the market brought that down to about 218,500 in 2023. But on average, about 2.4m episodes are still released globally each month. “It was all growth for everybody two or three years ago,” one industry veteran says. “Now to get on to someone’s regular listening list you have to bump someone else off.”
In the face of all this, the makers of resource-intensive narrative shows or series based on eccentric personal obsessions may be lost in the cacophony. Shows that run in short seasons rather than wallpapering their listeners’ phones all year round used to be able to rely on returning audiences, but now find that numbers dip dramatically if they go off air for any length of time. Even the studios behind these shows are being advised by platforms to find the viral always-on hit that can underwrite the rest of the stable.
Shows outside the very highest echelons are, meanwhile, reeling from Apple’s decision to switch off automatic downloads for users who haven’t listened to five episodes of a show in a fortnight – news that will make advertising data more accurate, but mean a double-digit percentage haircut in audience figures.
To succeed in this climate, or even to be noticed, a large social-media following is all but essential. It may help to be part of an ecosystem such as Goalhanger’s: when the studio bought the interview show Walking The Dog from the Times, the first guest was Alastair Campbell. Looking at the Top 100 shows on Apple and Spotify, it also seems to help enormously to be white.
The dadcasts aren’t the entirety of this bleak phenomenon. But they are its inescapable emblem. And they are in danger of building a world where podcasts are exactly like everything else: chat format. High volume. Always on.
Archie Bland is the editor of the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter and writes on media, culture and technology
