Industry Takeaways from the 2022 Multitude Listener Survey

Multitude’s annual summer survey is our favorite event of the year! It’s our chance to check in with our audience, get their feedback on what we’ve been doing, and decide what to try next. So many of our favorite projects—from our new community Discord to our newest member show to the Multicrew itself—were first floated as survey questions.

This year more than 1,000 people shared their podcast thoughts with us. Here are some takeaways!

Resource: Make Your Patreon Work for You

When folks get started on a new podcast, we get a lot of questions about, “when should we start looking towards networks?” The underlying idea under this question is usually, "How can someone sell ads for us to make money on the show?” But building a Patreon community will be a much easier, faster, and more rewarding way to get a financial return on a burgeoning show.

Resource: Caring for your Creative Team

An entire Presidential administration ago, I wrote an article on how to work with your friends. I was two years and two shows into my fun new side gig as a podcaster, and thought others might be able to learn from my mistakes turning fun ideas into actual projects with my friends.

Four years later, podcasting is my career. We still use the lessons in that article every day, but now they’ve been upgraded from habit to policy.

Here’s how we keep Multitude a fun, sustainable, and creative place to work.

Resource: My Favorite Podcast is a Late Night Show

People love podcasts because of their familiarity. The show comes out at the same time every week with the same hosts, making jokes or diving deep into the topics that you’d expect. It is variations on a theme, like Oreos coming out with a new flavor or Americans tuning in at 11:30 to watch a late night show. Although we can’t surprise-drop a chocolate-peanut-butter-pie podcast, we can use the structure of a late night show to make our podcasts work for us.

Where Are the Conversational Podcasts in the 'Best of 2021' Lists?

There were a whole lot of Best Podcasts of 2021 lists this year, such as these examples seen here, even one from industry people themselves. But there’s one glaring flaw that unites all of them: almost all of the shows recommended were heavy, narrative non-fiction shows. You know the ones: revealing a dark mystery or traumatic event, a reporter delivering a voiceover from an extremely tight script, interviews from experts “in the field,” starting with a dramatic quote and immediately following up with, “That’s That Person.”

All of those shows took a long time to make, went through countless numbers of edits, and are good journalism. They’re capital-I “Important”. But, they can’t be the only shows y’all thought were good this year. Unless we really only want to produce and listen to heavy, devastating topics and made in public-radio-style.