The benefits of joining a podcast collective
Amanda McLoughlin explains why she founded Multitude, a podcast collective with eight member shows.
If you look at the Apple and Spotify podcast charts that track the most downloaded shows every week, you’ll notice that many of the most popular podcasts belong to large networks. Organizations like Gimlet Media, Wondery, and NPR are able to pool their resources to promote their content, and this gives their shows a distinct advantage over independent podcasts, even those of similar quality.
That’s why some indie podcasters have formed collectives. These entities provide many of the same benefits of a network while still allowing for the podcaster to own their intellectual property. To get a better perspective on how these collectives work, I interviewed Amanda McLoughlin, the founder of a collective called Multitude.
In our interview, Amanda explained her process for recruiting shows to join Multitude, the collective’s business model, and why podcasters shouldn’t be timid about asking their audience for financial support.
To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player. If you scroll down you’ll also find some transcribed highlights from the interview.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity.
How she founded Multitude
Amanda got the idea for Multitude while trying to grow the audience for her own podcast. She was working at her day job in finance when she and her best friend from kindergarten decided to launch a show about mythology and folklore called Spirits. “It’s a subject that my co-host Julia Schifini is very interested in, and we have a dynamic where she brings the research and I am kind of like the audience tie-in — somebody who is less knowledgeable about that particular field and who can just be there to listen and provide reactions and give my own commentary on the stories that we're discussing.” Over the years, the show developed new formats. “We now feature listener submissions — people writing in about particular customs and folklore from places that they are from. We also have a book club and a movie night where we can feature contemporary works by other people and analyze them from a mythological and folkloric lens.” The two also went on to launch a Dungeons and Dragons podcast as well.
About six months into co-hosting these podcasts, Amanda started to feel burnt out at her job and struggled to maintain her podcasting hobby as a side gig. She wanted to make the transition into a full-time podcasting career, but at the time there weren’t many resources for people in her position. “I saw a gap in the market for podcasts like mine, which had small, dedicated audiences and were recouping their expenses or making a decent part-time living, but there weren't really services for us. There was nobody who could help us sell ads. There was no one we could turn to to ask about how to build our audience, how to market. We had to figure out all of these things for ourselves.”
Eventually, Amanda did build out a skillset that allowed her to tackle all the various facets of growing a podcast business. “So having done that for our two podcasts, some friends of mine who had started podcasts asked me for some help. I got a couple of inquiries about consulting. A radio station was releasing its first podcast and said, ‘we know how to make audio, but we don't know how to find an audience off air,’ and I realized that I had really put together a skillset that was helpful. And so I was able to quit my day job in 2018 to work on this full-time.”
How Multitude works
There are a couple ways a podcaster can work with Multitude. One is by joining as a member of its collective. “We are not playing a volume game. We have currently eight member shows, and the members of the collective all own their own shows, they own their own editorial. They produce their own shows. We don't have any central editing or mixing. But what we do share is access to our studio here in Brooklyn. We launched it about eight months before the pandemic, and we are now on a rotating schedule to make this resource still available to everybody. We have things like monthly check-ins with all of the shows to talk about audience growth, about advertising, about editorial, and we ask if they need any support that we can provide. So it really is a resource well that folks can dip into as they need it.”
Multitude also offers consulting services to podcasts outside the collective. “We consult on development, on marketing, on growth, on running membership programs for other podcasts. And it is good from the perspective of diversifying our revenue, but it's also really fun.” Demand for this type of consulting has increased as brands started adding podcasts into their content marketing budgets. “Whenever I get on the phone with the brand, my first question is always, ‘what are you hoping to accomplish? What are your metrics of success? Why are you doing this? Why is it a good fit for your brand?’ Because if there aren't solid answers to any of those questions, I know that I would be setting myself and the client up for failure if I were to enter into that arrangement. We're fortunate to be able to really choose our partnerships and our clients carefully.”
How the podcast platform wars will affect indie podcasters
Over the past few years, corporate behemoths like Spotify, Amazon, and SiriusXM have collectively spent billions of dollars to acquire podcast IP. I asked Amanda whether this kind of investment would hurt or help the indie podcast scene. “We are stronger for the fact that there is not one dominant platform that monopolizes all podcast listener discovery, which is the big white whale the companies are chasing. I like that marketing and audience acquisition is kind of inefficient in podcasting right now. We don't have one platform search algorithm that is determining trends. I hope that we keep being a weird, decentralized, fragmented industry.”
Because podcast distribution is becoming more centralized, Amanda thinks indie podcasters should optimize for direct audience support. “I think almost all podcasts should have a manner of letting listeners support them financially. Most of our shows are on Patreon. We use Memberful for our Multitude membership program. It is really important to have a direct connection with your audience.”
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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.