Should Justin Trudeau just start his own podcast already?
Vol. 46 - Laura Mayer shares an American perspective on Canadian podcasting, a breakdown of #TrudeausPodcastTour2024, Rogers closes the doors on Pacific Content, more.
Hihi!! Happy Pod the North Tuesday!
In this issue:
A look at #TrudeausPodcastTour2024.
Laura Mayer doesn't see why American networks shouldn't look to Canada.
Canadian Indie: Clearing a New Path
True North Podcast Feature: A Native Podcast
There are currently 29 long-term drinking water advisories in effect in 27 First Nations communities across Canada. The advisory in English River First Nation, Saskatchewan, became long-term on May 14, 2024.
10 Pods and Counting
In 2024 alone, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has appeared on 10 podcasts (thus far).
The podcast tour seemingly started with his appearance on Real Talk with Ryan Jespersen in February, an episode that when you listen to it, seemed to really spark a flame inside the Prime Minister.
The interview went well over the time the podcast was alotted, with Trudeau gleefully citing how much fun he was having on the show.
Over the next month, Trudeau and his team were all quiet on the podcast front, but once April rolled around, #TrudeausPodcastTour2024 was officially in full swing.
After appearing on an episode of The Current for an episode with a wide range of topics, he made his mark in the American market, as a guest on both Today, Explained and Freakonomics.
As a Canadian, Trudeau’s American appearances are a bit of a trip, being that not only is my hometown of Brantford covered in “F*ck Trudeau” signs but there is certainly far reaching criticism for the Canadian PM across the board right now. These US-based episodes are so strikingly complimentary, it’s a fascinating contrast to witness.
By the time these episodes were out, Canadian journalists were hot on Trudeau’s tail, wondering what the heck was happening here.
My theory has been the demographics of the average podcast listener.
With the intent of running for PM again, Trudeau is appealing to a young, welleducated and affluent audience; the demographics of which make up the majority of Canadian podcast listeners (according to the 2023 Canadian Podcast Listener Report). Right now it’s an especially poignant time to do that says Canadian Press reporter, Stephanie Taylor, who went on to explain that Trudeau “travels the country talking up the Liberals’ latest budget, which he’s pitching as a plan to inject more economic fairness into society for those under 40 — a cohort that has kept Trudeau in power since 2015 but is increasingly turning to Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.”
“One of my colleagues joked this week that this is the Liberal reply to Pierre Poilievre’s fondness for slogans,” said Susan Delacourt in a piece for the Toronto Star, “when the Conservative leader goes short and snappy, Trudeau goes long form.”
But the campaign on American shows was just the beginning.
#TrudeausPodcastTour2024 was (is?) far from over.
Over the last month, Trudeau has been making such a varied Canadian podcast tour that I almost think he might be out here testing which niche feels *just right* before committing to a podcast of his own. His Canadian tour has been as follows:
— An interview with Jordan Heath-Rawlings and The Big Story, recorded from a Honda manufacturing plant where they talked about Canada’s climate goals.
— He joined the Saskatoon-based podcast YXE Underground to discuss community leadership.
Host Eric Anderson explained in the show notes of the episode that the pitch to be on the show from Trudeaus team didn’t seem real, “I thought it was a scam email so I deleted it and continued on with my day at Sherbrooke Community Centre where I work as Communications Leader. About an hour later, I received an email from my friend and former CBC colleague, David Shield, saying some guy from the Prime Minister's Office was trying to track me down. So I thought maybe I should call this Mohammad guy back.”
By May, Canadaland had caught on to #TrudeausPodcastTour2024, and discussed it in an episode of Short Cuts with Justin Ling, who also had a chance to interview the Prime Minister himself on a subscribers-only edition of Bug-eyed and Shameless on April 10th. The two shared some choice words about the podcast tour up until that point, and about the podcasts Trudeau was choosing to engage with.
That same day, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, ex-wife to the PM, appeared on Next Question with Katie Couric.
— In May, Trudeau joined The Gritty Nurse Podcast, an indie podcast from two Toronto-based nurses, Amie Archibald-Varley and Sara Fung.
— He joined City Space from The Globe and Mail for an excellent interview with Irene Galea discussing Canada’s housing crisis.
— Then Trudeau appeared on The Pick Up - A WNBA Podcast, where he joined hosts Cathryn Naiker and Freddie Rivas for a live taping at the WNBA press conference discussing the growth of Women’s Basketball and Women’s sports in Canada. In the episode, the hosts explain that it was actually Trudeau’s Press Secretary that pitched the PM to come on the show!
We don’t know yet when or if #TrudeausPodcastTour2024 has come to an end, but I’ve got a feeling he haven’t heard the last of Trudeaus podcasting voice just yet.
For now keep an eye on your inboxes, for the government might be “listening in” more than you think.
(Okay, that’s a weird place to leave this.)
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Thoughts from the ecosystem:
Laura Mayer doesn't see why American networks shouldn't look to Canada.
Two years ago, Laura Mayer’s Shameless Acquisition Target, a podcast created solely in the hopes of getting acquired so that Laura could buy her dream Grey House, exploded into the podcasting scene. It was an especially hot topic amongst fellow podcast producers.
“I thought, ‘okay, I'm going to try it out on my own,’” Laura told me. In classic indie podcast producer fashion, she went making Shameless with zero chill. “I made this show that was about the podcast industry and then hung a “For Sale” sign around my neck which was an exercise in vulnerability, embarrassment, but ultimately it was fruitful.”
In just under a year and six-ish episodes later, Laura ended up selling the shows RSS feed to Gilded Audio, and independent podcast production company, for $18,000 USD. And despite spending the year hustling and navigating her moral compass around “selling out”, Laura shortly after accepted a job as Executive Producer of Podcast Programming at ABC News, keeping the creative rights to the podcast.
This Sunday June 2nd, Laura is on deck as a speaker at the Radiodays North America Podcast Powerup Summit in Toronto, presenting How to Seize Opportunity: Podcasts, Commerce, and Corporate Embarrassment. In honour of her Toronto visit, I spoke to her to get her American perspective on the Canadian podcast industry, her retrospective insights on acquisition and “selling out”, and who, these days, has the money to support podcasts.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
Paid subscribers can listen to the entire interivew out tomorrow!
Kattie Laur: I'm going to kick this off with a question from Al Grego (Yes, We Are Open | The Produce Stand):
“I understand a podcast like Reply All back in the day being purchased by Gimlet [Media] and then getting extra resources to tell bigger stories, but why would an independant podcaster WANT to be acquired? My guess is many podcasters are podcasters because they're not interested in being part of the corporate machine”.
Laura Mayer: It's such a good question because that is the central conflict in my life. When I was an independent podcaster doing Shameless Acquisition Target, I had just come out of this super corporate situation where I co-owned a joint venture with Sony Music.
The thing is, I am a mother of a three year old, I like to play it safe. I am someone who really values stability, and the truth is with Shameless Acquisition Target I didn't really think anyone was going to give me any money, or if the money they were going to give me was going to allow me just to break even. I kind of just wanted to use my own voice for the first time in a long time.
I do think it's hard to square that need for stability with the creativity that being independent allows you to have. But at this time in my life, it just was really important for me to wrap up the kooky shop with Shameless, try and stop the plan that I kind of secretly had – which was to see if I could start my own production company without a business partner because I didn't think I could do it – and I ended up taking this job. But that wasn't the plan.
KL: It's funny because I read a review about Shameless Acquisition Target by a woman who really truly loves you as a creator and a producer, but she was critical of the show saying that it wasn't as critical enough about capitalism. What's your perspective?
LM: I guess I am fully within the capitalist machinery because I have to feed and send my kid to daycare and I was just so tired – like, tired to the point of being dead.
And I'm not saying that these are virtuous things. I realize that that show should have been more critical of capitalism. I think it showed that the rampant capitalism that came in during the initial investment in podcasting destroyed a lot of the medium.
But I'll be real with you, in the podcast a guiding light for me was this gray house. I have what I consider to be very lofty dreams for myself of owning a home — which in previous generations was not lofty — but for me, that's “making it”. I just want to buy a house and be there for long enough, and die in it, and then it becomes a stigmatized property and haunt it.
So I take in that critique. But from my very personal vantage point, this is what I needed to do.
KL: I definitely relate to the struggle balancing being a critical human and then being like, ‘well, listen, I need to survive and I need stability’. I'm also tired. I would love to nap for like five days straight.
LM: And this is something that I really wrestle with myself, because despite the fact that I'm very happy, to have the job that I do, and the stability and all that, I took it feeling like I had failed.
KL: Listening to your series, the narrative of the acquisition basically came down to A) the work it took to make it a good enough show, and B) that enough people would be a part of the audience to then sell the RSS feed.
It hadn't really occurred to me for a long time that selling the RSS feed was “the acquisition”. Some people think of acquisitions like joining a network who helps you produce your podcast. What do you think is the most worth it?
LM: Well, speaking personally with Shameless, when I said that thing about putting a ‘For Sale’ sign around my neck, I really meant that.
If you'd been following the show as it was coming out, the gaps between the episodes grew longer and longer because all of these different outfits and people started approaching me being like, ‘I could buy your show and then hire you to do this…’ and then the deal wasn't quite right. That happened two different times.
I needed health insurance and my COBRA was running out. Like, that interview that I did with Ira Glass in the last episode where he just rejected me so hard, I was trying to get him to hire me on This American Life.
It's much harder to have something really break through than it was in 2016-2020, so I think probably the best acquisition – I should put this on a teabag – is the acquisition of oneself. Here's an example:
There's this reality recap show called Bitch Sesh, and Casey and Danielle have been doing this show, I think, since 2018. They had a deal with Earwolf, or Sirius, where they were getting paid money, minimum guarantee. Last year they decided that they wanted to start their own company called Garbage World Podcast, and they did. It's separate, it's listener supported, it has the regular Bitch Sesh show which focuses on mostly Bravo. But then it also has a bunch of other community offerings.
It also has this delicious Discord of every topic you could imagine, and as a fan looking in and thinking about the industry, that's an interesting way to go about ‘acquiring yourself’: owning the community. What they've done is really created an ecosystem between the podcast, between the Discord, between the merch, between the live shows and none of it feels diluted, because the core hosts of the show are still in it.
KL: It reminds me of Canadaland, founded by Jesse Brown who was originally doing just a podcast called Canadaland, and that branched out over 10 years into a number of different podcasts and an ecosystem.
I think it's actually a very Canadian approach almost because so many American podcasts dominate our charts, we've really created all these little bubbles of Canadian podcast ecosystems; Sonar Network, Harbinger Media Network…
LM: I think increasingly with the collapse of the high times podcast market, people who are still willing to and wanting to be in podcasting figured out that they needed to sort out revenue models where they can support themselves and not have to rely on a bigger company and listenership in place.
This fresh money from people who didn't understand the podcasting space that came in just to make it big like TV, big like radio, fundamentally misunderstood the relationship between podcast listener and podcast audience. These little ecosystems can support people's livelihoods and can exist for long periods of time, as opposed to a show that may have been a big hit, gotten a lot of money, and then burned out for a variety of reasons.
I'm not sure if it's a trend, but it's a trend in my listening.
KL: So it's possible that audiences will give you money.
LM: You gotta have a website saying, ‘give me money’. That's my advice.
KL: Another question someone sent me to ask you was, ‘how does one get Americans to care enough about Canadian stories to buy them?’
LM: So that's interesting because without going into any details that will get me in trouble, I am currently in the process of working on a Canadian story.
From a content perspective and from an advertising perspective, I've been seeing, even just anecdotally, larger North American buys. I think previously it was like, ‘I am US company, this not US audience, I'm not interested’. But if it's a show that they're able to prove is universally interesting, anything that's narrative based, story based, character based, I don't really see that much of a divide between America and Canada, and I don't see why networks shouldn't look to Canada.
KL: One thing I'm so curious to ask you about is venture capitalists, because you talk to a lot of VCs for Shameless. I've been thinking more and more about the role of an investor – people who are just genuinely curious about podcasting and maybe aren't as deeply embedded in the industry like a network might be. What was that like for you?
LM: I think that in any pocket of ‘big monies type people,’ you're going to find people who are interested in podcasting, but [it’s] the return on investment.
The story that has been around the podcast space, especially in the US over the last few years, has seemed a lot less appealing than it did in 2017-2019, despite the fact that the industry is still growing.
To give you an example, in 2017 or 2018, I had breakfast with this VC who was just sort of interested in spending money, and I was like, ‘why?’ And he was just like, ‘I like podcasts’. And it turns out that he liked podcasts but was more interested in finding someone who found a podcast training academy in which the business model was that the training academy would own a percentage of that person's profits and IP for the rest of their lives. And I said to him, while I was sitting there, ‘that sounds illegal and immoral’.
In America, from my experience during that period of time, I just kept getting thrown into these situations with people who happen to have a lot of money and were trying to put it someplace, but were also trying to take advantage of a medium that they maybe listened to but had no idea about how the business worked.
I know that there are VCs out there who are passionate about creating content companies and that sort of thing, but my point is that during that period of time, there was just so much froth in the marketplace that I think you were just getting a lot of people with a lot of money and not a lot of background coming in and just trying to place their chips.
I think these days you would need to find somebody who really believes in podcasting and has a realistic expectation for what the scale and what the return on investment would be – which I think honestly is better for the medium because then you're in a rebuilding phase as opposed to it feeling like crater after these layoffs.
If you throw money at anything and then expect it to immediately take off without actually knowing the industry or understanding that it takes time to make content and develop communities, it's not gonna work.
KL: Who do you think is gonna be thriving in podcasting in the next few years?
LM: I think that the companies that will be thriving will be ones that have been in the space for a long time and have kept their balance sheets reasonable, and will have weathered the storm and will be poised to start making deals or continue making deals that are right sized.
From a content perspective, the shows that will thrive on an ongoing basis are ones that have that solid community building driving them.
I think that there will be breakout narrative series’. What I love is when they come from places that you don't expect. But I think that there's going to be fewer and fewer of those ‘karaoke versions’ of This American Life.
I am curious to see howTikTok personalities may find themselves being able to bring their community and thrive in the space, particularly if they're skewing a little bit older.
I think it's going to be interesting to see what YouTube does in this space, and if they truly invest in podcasting for podcast sake, or if it's just going to become a distribution method.
What Laura is loving:
Check out this Canadian Indie: Clearing a New Path
Inspiring and building a more united, feminist, anti-racist rural Canada.
In the latest episode, host Shauna Rae talks to Helen Tremethick, a rurally-based Regenerative Business Designer about disrupting business coaching, how our businesses are running for us and the impact they have on our ecosystem, and the benefits of being a rural resident and business owner.
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True North Podcast Feature: A Native Podcast
Helping educate and inform about out Native American peoples & cultures.
Matt and Zach host conversations about modern day & historical events, and interviews from Native American subject matter experts while talking about tribes & tribal issues.
Don’t miss the flagship podcast from Pod the North, Canardian: the podcast gossiping about the hometowns of various Canadian podcast personalities.
What’s going on in Canada’s podcast ecosystem:
New Releases:
May 20, 2024 — Check out the trailer from How to Fall Asleep Fast, new show from Lead Podcasting and the Sonar Network. The podcast is “backed by science to inspire sleep”, and comprised of ambient music composed by music producer Boris Kurtzman, who happens to be the husband of Lead Podcasting founder Amanda Cupido.
May 27, 2024 — In a collaboration between Canadaland and The Atlas Obscura Podcast, they’ve launched Canada Obscura, a three-episodes series about the secret Canadian history of one of the world's most beloved children's characters – Winnie the bear.
June 4, 2024 — CBC’s new show, Come By Chance premiers next Tuesday. The seven episode series follows the story of two men born in the same rural Newfoundland hospital on the same day who discover a 52-year-old secret that changes the way they see themselves forever.
You Should Know:
Rogers has announced it’ll be shutting the doors of Pacific Content by the end of June. For a number of years Pacific Content has been recognized for its world-class branded content, and has been the working home of so many Canadian podcast industry innovators and pioneers. This is devastating news for the ecosystem.
Congratulations to the winners of the recent Quill Podcast Awards! The Canadian Potcast took home two wins, winning Best Interview Podcast and Best News Podcast. Congratulations also go out to Yes, We Are Open, which one Branded Podcast of the Year, the team at Pacific Content who won Best Podcast Agency, and the many other Canadian winners this year!
Spotify adds Listen Time “consumption hours” data to their podcast dashboard, Dan Misener reported in a recent Bumper blog. From Dan: “Now that Spotify offers “consumption hours,” podcasters can access Listen Time data from YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. For many shows, these three platforms represent the vast majority of verified podcast consumption.” Give it a read!
Who is listening to business podcasts? This fascinating report comes from Signal Hill Insights and is definitely worth a read!
Events:
May 31, 2024 —Canadaland’s Jesse Brown is set to host an AMA on Reddit this Friday, and it looks like questions have already started flooding in!
June 6, 2024 — The inaugural Soundwave Summit is coming to Toronto, a full days event showcasing everything Canadian indie podcasting. It is made up of two parts: a daytime portion, Soundwave Sessions, which offers panels, presentations and networking opportunities at Startwell. In the evening, catch the Soundwave Showcase, which includes a series of live podcast performances at Paradise Theatre. Get your ticket and check out the full lineup on the website. You can also use the code PODTHENORTH15 to get 15% off your ticket! (Full disclosure, I get a kickback from tickets sold with my code!)
For your pod:
Just Joe (being a good host to his BFF, Chili)…
If you have thoughts or Canadian podcasting news, please share them with me! Leave a comment or reply to the newsletter email.
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Kattie
@Podkatt (Twitter, Spotify, and Goodpods) | @PodtheNorth (Bluesky and Instagram)
Great interview! By chance did she say whether the company that bought the SAT feed is going to do anything with it? I've been patiently waiting...
Given the majority of the Canadian media is giving PP a pass on all his lies and absolute lack of anything other than rage farmed soundbites, maybe the PM just wants to talk on a medium where the questions are actually based on policies and Canadian needs. None of which Conservatives have offered anything of substance about.