Nearly every survey of the podcast industry in 2024 agrees on one point: Chat podcasts are king. As video rises in popularity (33 percent of US podcast listeners prefer to consume this way), ad spending increases (estimated to top $4 billion worldwide), and listenership steadily grows at 8 percent year-over-year, it is the chat format—in its combative, enlightening, and sometimes quite unserious splendor—that continually draws people in.
The ecosystem is profuse and unpredictable. There are the mainstays that have become fixtures of culture: The Joe Rogan Experience, Armchair Expert, and The Read. Newer fare like I’ve Had It and ShxtsnGigs (more on that one later) have also found tremendous followings. Other chat-casts, like Club Shay Shay, seem to court controversy with every release. “Katt Williams, please close the portal,” @nuffsaidny recently joked on X, alluding to the comedian’s guest appearance from January when he prophetically proclaimed of 2024: “All lies will be exposed.”
“That appointment—that relationship—is everything,” says Eric Eddings, vice president of audio at Kevin Hart’s media company, Hartbeat, of the bond that chat-casts are able to establish with listeners.
In 2014, along with Brittany Luse, Eddings launched For Colored Nerds, a weekly gabfest about pop culture, race, and current events (full disclosure: I appeared on an episode in 2017). After Nerds, Eddings went to Gimlet Media, where he coanchored The Nod (also with Luse) and produced for the shows Undone and Habitat before moving to SiriusXM. Today, Eddings steers podcast development for Hartbeat. What was true of the medium when he started out, he tells me, is still true today. In a recent video call, we discussed the state of the industry and its sometimes complicated evolutions.
JASON PARHAM: Why have chat-casts gotten so popular?
ERIC EDDINGS: There are a few reasons. Just to be straight up, a lot of the companies wanted to figure out ways to invest less in programming. Narrative podcasts are very expensive to make. They require a large upfront investment, and then you try to figure out how to make them as successful as possible if they resonate with audiences. And a lot of companies have had difficulty bringing those types of projects to market given the struggles of the entertainment media industry.
So it’s a money issue?
Podcasts with chat as a focus are a little bit easier to test out, put in the market, and to create each week. You've seen a lot of a turn toward that. Those are the macro influences. But that also short changes a little bit of the conversation.
How so?
Even though podcasting has been out for a while, you've also seen a lot more groups of people come to podcasts in new ways. There’s more familiarity with the medium. You've seen comedians, you've seen influencers. There was a trend early in the pandemic where folks were like, “Ah, we’ve got to start a podcast.” Whereas now I think people are having ideas or finding people they want to collaborate with and see podcasting as the place to explore that. It’s a really flexible medium. Collaboration allows for experimentation. And that type of experimentation is so much easier in a chat context because the conversation is the point.
But does the surplus of chat-casts feel like a kind of anti-innovation?
I would push back on that a little bit.
Please.
To back up even further, that has kind of always been the narrative of podcasting. Podcasts started as a chat format. A lot of folks were really committed to getting stories or their opinions out. But with Serial, in 2014, you really see a breakout of the narrative podcast, maybe even the prestige narrative podcast and what that could bring. There was a lot of energy around it. You saw an influx of people and creators wanting to come into that space. Then we started to see the rise of fiction podcasts in the market. Around the early part of the pandemic, there was a surge in different celebrity interview shows. And what we have right now is chat as the basis in that same kind of model.
That makes sense.
One Song is a chat music podcast we created at Hartbeat. It’s hosted by Diallo Riddle, a comedian and writer, and Luxury, who is a producer, DJ, and musicologist. And their basis is just two guys who talk about music, you know, but they're also exploring the intricacies of that music. They’re playing stems talking about how they react to it, what other music it makes them think of, and how they can connect those dots. I think that brings a little bit of innovation. It takes a show that feels much more narrative like a Song Exploder and injects more fun and energy into it. No shade to Song Exploder, I think it’s great. Even outside of the Hartbeat ecosystem, there are shows like Beautiful Anonymous with Chris Gethard. At its base it’s a chat podcast. He's talking to people who are calling in. Sometimes he's helping them to navigate a problem. Sometimes they're just talking about what that person wants to talk about that day. Conversation and connection are the point.
Kind of like an old-school call-in show.
Right. You know, we've seen a lot of shows with two people trying to say a spicy thing and see if the clip goes viral. And that has been happening a lot more as people come into the space. But the good stuff is always going to float to the top regardless of how many other people are doing the same thing. You still see success from people who start a podcast on their own that doesn’t feel like it was conceived in a corporate boardroom. A show like ShxtsnGigs is a good example. It’s been a tough time for them recently but I think they're understanding a bit more about how to move in the space and how to be responsive to their audience.
They flew too close to the sun. [The hosts of ShxtsnGigs, James Duncan and Fuhad Dawodu, received a wave of criticism for laughing off an offensive comment made about Black women during a recent interview.]
We could all learn a little bit from Icarus and that myth. But I think to that point, though, the community, the word of mouth, the conversation around that shows—that’s what gave it its power. It helped them grow really fast. That relationship is paramount. And when you are not navigating that relationship with your audience as closely as you should, they will tell you. It will come back.
Celebrities have fully invaded the medium. Club Shay Shay was a major talking point all year. Yet many of the celeb-centric podcasts still read like vanity projects.
There are a lot of celebrities who have podcasts and maybe there are some who shouldn't. Maybe even more than some who shouldn't. But I think in terms of the shows that win an audience or that earn an audience, I do think that typically comes from good creative production. And sometimes there is a celebrity involved. But to be honest, celebrity culture still drives everything.
True. American culture is celebrity culture.
So I think it's not crazy that that would be at the forefront. That drives a lot of investment. But also, within that, you still see a lot of variety.
I want to circle back to something you mentioned earlier. A decade ago, in 2014, Serial's release seemed to signal a shift in the industry toward narrative. That never materialized. What happened?
Some companies really tried to get ahead of the market. They said, let's give them as much narrative storytelling as we can. That can lead you to a place where you're just releasing things because you think that that's the show to put out, as opposed to really thinking about who are the voices that folks want to hear. What are the stories that they want to hear? What are the stories that provoke investment, that invoke like a personal emotion, that invoke like a call to action? Narrative shows that leaned on those concepts worked. Whether you love Serial or you hate the show, there's an idea of whether or not you got justice. And needing to answer that question that felt very important.
But not everyone was able to achieve that.
Some folks maybe missed the forest for the trees in the sense of, “This is a thing that’s working. Let me get as much of that as possible.” Something that was also a little challenging in that regard, was how short they are. Narrative podcasts are typically eight to 10 episodes. Maybe 12. What a lot of audiences—especially audiences that were realizing that podcasting is a medium for them—wanted was to create a deeper relationship. They want to be with you. And when your story runs out, they have to start that search all over again. There are some folks who want shows that they can have a deeper relationship with and fit into their routine. Like, I know I’m going to get my fix of Higher Learning twice a week. The same with Brittany [Luce] on It’s Been a Minute. I can listen on my way into work or while I run errands. That appointment—that relationship—is everything.
I never considered that. There are certain shows we consider appointment TV, so it makes sense that podcasts would benefit from the same framing.
So if narrative podcasts are the maximal version of that, people are having to restart that process over and over of finding what's good, catching up, not missing the discourse—that can be challenging.
Now, I do think there are ways for the medium to be able to respond and evolve to that challenge. But it does make sense why, at least in those regards, why narrative didn’t quite take off like we thought it would. Also, with the strikes across the entertainment industry in the last few years, companies are being a lot more cautious with what stories they tell and the investments they make. That also trips things up. A lot of really good stories either weren't told or won't get the chance to be told because of that.
This kinda unexpected-but-expected mutation happened where an audio medium went visual. It almost seems like to have a successful podcast today, you need a presence on YouTube as well. Is that true?
It is becoming a little bit more of the norm because clips and reels and TikTok have become a lot of the foundation of how we connect. And it's not that crazy that those tools are now what we use to communicate about podcasting. You see Spotify making investments in that space. I know Sirius is also really starting to lean on video via their app. People recognized that audiences actually do want this option. I just hope that it doesn't become a barrier to entry for people who want to launch a podcast, who really just want to talk and have meaningful conversations.
How does the industry better evolve?
The industry part of podcasting has to not be afraid to invest in innovation. You have to invest in the creators who want to innovate, who want to mix it up and do something different. And it doesn't have to include AI to be innovative.
The economics of the industry, however, are continuing to figure itself out. You've seen a lot of different types of investments. We saw a wave of celebrity shows. Now there are fewer of those huge mega deals, but there is still a smattering of different types of things. There’s always going to be glut—or not glut, that has a negative connotation, but an overabundance of programming. So it’s about figuring out how the industry can create levers to showcase the broadest range of that, because that feeds into how those shows make money.
It's about figuring out how to make sure new voices are being heard and lifted up so that we can get exposure to them. With discovery. With monetization. With distribution. There needs to be a little bit more work into how all those ecosystems play together.
How will AI impact the future of the industry—or is it all hocus pocus?
From my vantage right now, AI has not taken over or become a huge foundation of the content we make here at Hartbeat. Don’t get it twisted, AI transcription has changed the game. It has made a lot of our lives a lot easier in terms of how we edit and supervise our content. Across the industry, the jury is very much still out on some of the larger advancements and how they will actually work together. In a medium that is really built on human connection and conversation, I still think it's going to be tough to compete more materially with that.
