Why everyone in Charlotte suddenly has a podcast
Plus: County commission chairman fired up about directive objections; Superintendent says CMS is prepared for return of students; Kings Mountain casino moves forward; Another brewery for 'LoSo'?
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With easy access to tech, more businesses and hobbyists are hitting ‘record.’ But can they actually make money?
Plus: How to start your own podcast
The audience for local podcasts tends to be small, but people are starting them to increase name recognition for themselves or their businesses — or just for fun. Seen here: A recording session of Charlotte’s The Comedy Zone Podcast. (Photo courtesy of the Queen City Podcast Network)
By Ely Portillo
Looking for a new Charlotte beer to try? There’s a podcast for that.
Need fashion advice from a Charlotte boutique? Help buying a new house in Charlotte? Help keeping up with news from the Panthers, Hornets and Charlotte’s MLS team? Yoga and wellness tips? An escape into Charlotte comedy or Charlotte City Council members chatting about the news of the week?
There are podcasts for all of those, too.
Every person and business in Charlotte is trying to get you to follow their podcast these days (disclosure: I recently launched “Future Charlotte,” a podcast about our city’s growth). Podcasts have been around since the early 2000s, but recently — as people suddenly found themselves with a lot more time on their hands and major media companies poured hundreds of millions of dollars into acquiring podcast companies — they’ve exploded in popularity. For potential producers, the barriers to entry have fallen to basically nothing, and listeners are devoting more hours to their favorite pods every year.
“What podcasting has done has really leveled the playing field,” said Brian Baltosiewich, founder and executive producer of the Queen City Podcast Network. “I can record something on my smartphone right now, and with [podcast app] Anchor, I can have it up on the internet in five minutes.”
But while money is flowing to national podcast companies and a few mega-hit shows, it’s not raining on individual podcast producers — at least, not on the vast majority.
“Everybody thinks they’re going to launch a podcast and it’s going to be the path to making money,” Baltosiewich said. “And that’s not how it works.”
As a rule-of-thumb, you need 20,000 downloads per episode in 30 days to have a hope of landing an ad deal for your podcast, Baltosiewich said. Only the top 1% of podcasts achieve that kind of reach.
“I don’t know that there’s a local podcast in Charlotte that’s threatening that number,” he said.
Instead, many — perhaps most — of the podcasts proliferating in Charlotte are produced by businesses looking to burnish their brands and stand out in the ever-more-crowded digital world. Podcasting is now a new marketing channel, akin to publishing white papers or “thought leadership” pieces.
Stuart Watson is a former WCNC reporter whose podcast “ManListening” features female guests and explores his journey to “stop talking and start listening” to women. The podcast doesn’t generate revenue for Watson — instead, he pays a team of producers, editors and marketers to create it.
He recently published a memoir (“What She Said & What I Heard”), and said marketing now requires even more “legs” to work.
“I don’t think anything stands alone anymore. Everything has to have the other legs,” Watson said. “The podcast feeds the book, the book feeds the podcast.”
Kelly Spiggle, a yoga instructor, wellness coach and mentor who leads small group retreats in the North Carolina mountains, said her “Girlfriend’s Guru” podcast helps her connect with clients around the world who she might not otherwise meet.
“My podcast is helping me continually to build my brand. I have people listen to my podcast and come from Atlanta,” said Spiggle, a member of Queen City Podcast Network. “I had someone fly in from London. They feel like they know me.”
Baltosiewich has produced audio online since the early days of the internet. In 2018, he decided to start a network of local podcasts with five shows focused exclusively on Charlotte, to increase their ability to combine audiences and monetize their content. Queen City Podcast Network has grown to almost 30 Charlotte-based shows with more on the way, supported by a sponsorship from OrthoCarolina. Podcasting is now Baltosiewich’s full-time job: In addition to building Queen City Podcast Network, he produces podcasts for everyone from Steve Smith Sr. to local companies looking to replace their stale internal newsletter with audio messages and interviews.
“Our client work has almost surpassed our network work, and that was really unexpected,” he said. “I know we’ve got something, and now we can continue to build this.”
ICE UP, SON: You don’t have to be rich or well-known to start a podcast. You can buy a microphone for less than $50, use free audio editing programs and pay as little as $5 a month for hosting. (Photo courtesy of Brian Baltosiewich)
A 2020 report from Edison Research showed 75% of the U.S. population is familiar with podcasting, up from less than half a decade ago. And 37% listen now to a podcast monthly, passing 100 million Americans for the first time.
Reasons for that growth are myriad:
Smartphone ownership has reached ubiquity, and more of us are buying smart speakers for our houses.
Podcasts are flexible, on-demand and you can listen to them while you do other things.
The barriers to entry in terms of making a podcast have sunk almost absurdly low:
You can buy a microphone for less than $50, rent time in a podcast studio at a Charlotte coworking site like Hygge for $15 an hour, or just use your phone.
YouTube tutorials make audio editing with free programs like Audacity easy, and you can use a free template from Canva for cover art.
Hosting starts at $5 a month on the popular service LibSyn, and streaming platforms like Apple and Spotify have removed the need for almost any technical skill to distribute your work to a potential audience of billions.
As a consequence, the number of podcasts available has exploded. There are more than 2 million podcasts indexed on Google, ranging from megahits with millions of listeners (think “Serial” or “Dirty John”) to niche podcasts like “The Pen Addict” (which is about, yes, pens).
It’s a corner of the media landscape that feels exciting, fresh and weird, like the internet in the Wild West days of Geocities and weird message boards. Since literally anyone can publish a podcast on all the major platforms, your oddball cousin’s Harry Potter fan fiction show might appear next to the New York Times’ book review podcast.
But serious money and big companies are moving in fast: Spotify spent a reported $340M to buy podcast studio Gimlet Media and recording app Anchor in 2019, while Apple dropped $300M to acquire Wondery in December.
Still, the first item on Queen City Podcast Network’s list of frequently asked questions remains as a reminder of how new podcasts are to many people: “What is a podcast?”
From hard news to labors of love
In Charlotte, the podcast scene breaks down broadly into several categories. News shows, like “Nooze Hounds” from Queen City Nerve and “She Says” from WFAE, and sports shows like “The Roar” and “Locked on Hornets,” are like on-demand radio, untethered from the constraints of broadcast, advertising and exact time slots.
Charlotte-based companies big and small are turning to podcasts to reach audiences in different ways with brand extension and marketing shows. For example, you can get information on economic trends from the “Merrill Perspectives Podcast” or learn about automation technology and smart buildings from Honeywell’s “The Future is…” Maybe after listening, you’ll explore a Merrill Edge trading account or think about adding some home automation technology to your house.
Small businesses are using podcasts, too. Realtor Jonathan Osman started “At Home With Jonathan Osman” in the Hygge studio last January (disclosure: I’ve appeared as an unpaid guest on his show, and on “The Charlotte Podcast”). His blog, previously a good source of leads, had tapered off, and Osman was looking for a new way to stand out in a crowded market.
“There are like 15,000 Realtors in Charlotte. Pretty much everyone knows one,” he said. “How do you convince that person who may not know you to bypass their friend who might have gotten their license yesterday and use you instead?”
One answer: If someone is searching Google and Osman’s podcast pops up, he’s got a better shot of being chosen. Osman, who bought a microphone and switched to a home studio after Covid-19 hit, learned to edit his audio himself. He said he gets more leads from the podcast than from social media advertising, and at a much lower cost.
“Your content being there is essential,” Osman said.
Across all Queen City Podcast Network shows, Baltosiewich said the network averages about 1,000 downloads a day. That includes old and new episodes, which speaks to the durability of podcasts — another feature that makes them attractive, as new listeners tend to download a bunch of old episodes.
Baltosiewich said some business owners see those numbers and have a question: “Why would I do a podcast if only 100 people are gonna listen?” He asks if they’d be happy to have 100 people a month come see them talk about their company at Dilworth Neighborhood Grille: “You’d be thrilled.”
There’s another type of show that tends to be much quirkier. I’ll call them labor of love shows, those offbeat ideas the creators just fell in love with and enjoy doing, even without a defined goal like making money or finding business leads. John Short and Miller Yoho, co-creators of “The Charlotte Podcast,” have one of those. They’ve produced more than 220 episodes in the past six years, interviewing everyone from WSOC reporter Joe Bruno to “Miracle on the Hudson” flight survivors to State Sen. Jeff Jackson.
Shortly after they met (on Twitter, of course), Short and Yoho were bonding over their mutual love of all things Charlotte. They wished there was a show that focused on the city through their intensely civic-minded, slightly cynical lens.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if there was something like this out there?” Short remembers asking. They decided to give it a try — Advent Coworking had just opened a podcast studio they could rent for $20 an hour.
“We started asking people we thought were interesting to come on, and nobody said no,” said Short. “If somebody had said no early on, we would have probably stopped doing it.”
“If there was any friction at all, we would have stopped,” Yoho said.
Now, they get several hundred listens an episode, with popular shows getting more than 1,000. They’ve racked up hundreds of thousands of total listens over the years. But the show remains their hobby — both have day jobs — and they intend to keep it that way.
As Short puts it: “If we were to take it seriously, we’d have to take it seriously.”
—
Want to start a pod?
If you’re considering starting a podcast, the creators I talked to shared this advice:
➡️ Don’t totally cheap out
Sure, you can record on your phone and upload with no editing, but that doesn’t mean you should. An entry-level mic, an actual studio and the services of an audio editor or sound engineer who knows what they’re doing can make a huge difference.
“People on the internet will forgive a lot, but they won’t forgive crappy audio,” Baltosiewich said.
➡️ Know your goal
Are you looking for business leads? Trying to build your brand or sell a book? Or just looking for something fun to do with your buddies for a few hours? Be clear what you want to get out of a podcast, so you can judge success — as well as how much effort to put in.
If you want to monetize your podcast directly, you’ll have to get a ton of listeners and viral growth. If you want to attract potential customers to your business, those raw numbers won’t matter as much to you, but you might be willing to pay a premium to sound professional. And if you’re a hobbyist dissecting “Bridgerton” with your friends, you probably won’t care as much about listener numbers or professional audio production.
➡️ Don’t be afraid to change your format
Just because you start as a two-host show with a guest and a trivia segment each episode doesn’t mean you’re locked into that forever. Successful shows are constantly adapting to changing conditions.
Short and Yoho are introducing shorter shows and switching to a mostly biweekly format, mixed in with shorter, “pop-up” episodes, to make their recording schedule easier and allow them to book timely guests on short notice. Spiggle also shortened her shows during the pandemic, to account for listeners who no longer have a morning and evening commute to fill.
Now she aims for a podcast that can fill a walk. That means going down from almost an hour to about 30 minutes per episode.
➡️ Remember, it’s still work
“We’ve done a weekly show for six years,” Short said. “The only reason we made it this long is because it continues to be fun.”
But that fun includes a big-time commitment: doing research, booking guests, recording the show, editing it and figuring out new segment ideas like a Charlotte City Council “mock draft” for a capture-the-flag game.
Lots of podcast producers have an idea for a few episodes but let their shows die when that first creative flare runs out.
“I’ve seen podcasts come and go, even people who are way funnier than us,” Short said. “They just kind of get into a rut and it dies.”
Osman said he recorded several months of content in his first few weeks, giving him a cushion of shows to release when his energy flagged.
“It does take a commitment,” he said. “But when everyone else starts waning and giving up, you’ll stand out.”
That time can start to look even more daunting if your audience numbers don’t grow rapidly — which they likely won’t.
“The podcast takes the same amount of time to produce whether you have five listeners or 5,000,” Spiggle said.
Ely Portillo is assistant director at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. He previously spent a decade as a reporter at The Charlotte Observer.
Today’s supporting sponsor is T.R. Lawing Realty:
Quotable: ‘We’ll shut the whole place down’
County commission Chairman George Dunlap, at a meeting last week, on residents’ questions about why the county has turned off park lights at night at tennis courts and basketball courts in response to the health department’s Covid directive:
The real question is, “Do we want to do what we can do to limit the amount of spread in our community?” And if you don’t want to do that, then everybody ought to be able to do what they want to do. We ought to have basketball and tennis and everything else…
This is in lieu of shutting the place down, which was the first course of action we took. We worked with all of the towns. We actually had a stay-at-home order as opposed to asking people to stay at home, because that’s where we are headed. If it gets bad enough in some of these townships, then they will join with Mecklenburg County, and we’ll shut the whole place down, and we’ll shut the economy down. But we’re not trying to do that. We don’t want to do that.
And so we’re asking people to take reasonable measures. In this case, the reasonable measure was only 3 weeks! For 3 weeks!
I understand why people don’t understand it, because it is not in line with what they want to do. People want to do what they want to do, which is why we have so much spread. …
You can’t blame [health director Gibbie Harris] for doing what is in the best interest of Mecklenburg County. That’s her job. That’s why we pay her.
I don’t let too many things bother me, but this one really gets to me, because people want to play tennis or play basketball and we can’t answer their questions? It’s because we’re trying to stop the spread of the virus! It’s really just that simple!
In brief:
Covid numbers decline: The most recent local Covid data, released Friday, shows key numbers declining in the previous 7 days. The number of new daily cases, hospitalizations and percentage of positive tests were all lower than their recent highs. Health director Gibbie Harris cautioned Friday that while the numbers are encouraging, it’s too soon to declare that they have peaked.
Schools ready, giving more F’s: School superintendent Earnest Winston says Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is prepared for students to return to classrooms, with adequate staffing and supplies, when local Covid numbers settle down. At a Friday news conference, he also said 33% of students have at least one failing grade. (WBTV)
New Covid strain confirmed: North Carolina confirmed its first case of the new Covid-19 strain, from a sample in Mecklenburg County, the state said Saturday. The new strain, first detected in Britain in December, is believed to be more contagious and perhaps more deadly than the regular form of the virus. (WCNC)
Favorable odds for casino: The state and the Catawba Indian Nation reached an agreement that will allow “Vegas-style gambling” at the planned Two Kings Casino in Kings Mountain, 30 minutes west of Charlotte. The pact still requires federal approval. It allows “such Vegas-style games as roulette, craps and keno; card games including blackjack, baccarat and chemin de fer; and slot machines,” the Observer reported. At least some of the gambling could be available by this fall.
Speedway vaccinations: Appearing this weekend on CNN, Atrium Health’s Dr. David Callaway said the mass vaccinations at the Charlotte Motor Speedway were a success because of the hospital system’s partnership with the speedway and Tepper Sports & Entertainment: “The patients are ecstatic. They are fist-bumping our staff. People are crying in their cars because they feel like finally there’s some hope they can see their grandkids again.” (CNN)
New brewery for ‘LoSo’? Documents filed with the city suggest that German brewer Gilde is a potential tenant in Beacon Partners’ LoSo Village development. The address in the filing “ties to a 9,200-square-foot space in that adaptive-reuse project, located directly behind the Scaleybark Station on the Charlotte Area Transit System’s Lynx Blue Line,” the Biz Journal reported.
Loves me some live television
WBTV anchor Molly Grantham primps her hair and stares silently at the camera for an uncomfortable 45 seconds, not realizing she’s on the air, in a video posted on social media:
She later took it in stride on Twitter: “Live TV. You never know.”
Taking stock
Unless you are a day trader, checking your stocks daily is unhealthy. So how about weekly? How local stocks of note fared last week (through Friday’s close), and year to date:
Intriguing stock read of the week: “A Fight Over GameStop’s Soaring Stock Turns Ugly” (Wired)
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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire, CXN Advisory; Reporting intern: David Griffith