This is the final Sounds Profitable newsletter of 2025, and I want to leave you with something to chew on over the break. It’s not a comfortable thought, but I think it’s the most important one to emerge from The Creators 2025, the study we released last week.
Here it is: if we don’t proactively shape the creator landscape, the audience will never follow. We cannot market our way to audience development without the product to match. And right now, the product doesn’t match.
Marketing-with-a-capital-M starts with the product, not the promotion. You can run all the ad campaigns you want telling women that podcasting is for them. You can buy billboards encouraging 55+ Americans to give podcasts a try. But if those audiences don’t see themselves reflected in the people making podcasts—if they don’t hear voices like theirs, addressing concerns like theirs, from perspectives like theirs—the marketing is just noise.
The data from The Creators 2025 makes this clear. Among podcast consumers, 15% of men are currently creating podcasts. For women, it’s 8%. Among 18-34 year-olds, 17% are creating. Among Americans 55+, it’s 4%. These gaps in the creator space map directly onto gaps in the audience. That’s not a coincidence. The inventory creates the audience.
And here’s the challenge worth taking on in 2026: these different demographic gaps represent fundamentally different problems that require fundamentally different solutions.
Different Problems, Different Interventions
I wrote last week about the gender gap in podcast creation—women are half as likely as men to start creating, even though they’re slightly more likely to stick with it once they do. That’s an entry-barrier problem, and I stand by what I wrote: it demands intentional work on representation and role models, and on examining whether our industry’s video expectations are adding friction that falls harder on some potential creators than others. If you missed that piece, I’d encourage you to go back and read it.
I’ve seen this dynamic play out in another world I care about: magic. Magic remains overwhelmingly male. Go to a show at the Magic Castle in LA, and you’ll see a room full of dudes with decks of cards doing card tricks for other dudes. Why? It’s not because women can’t do sleight of hand. It’s structural. For two centuries, women were portrayed as assistants to male magicians rather than as magicians themselves. The traditional “uniform” of a magician (jacket and pants with plenty of pockets) is designed for concealment in ways that dresses are not. And perhaps most importantly, there’s been a lack of successful female role models that women can identify with. Not just successful people, but successful people like them.
Podcasting has its own version of these structural barriers. Think about who gets profiled in trade publications, who keynotes conferences, who gets held up as examples of “how to make it.” There are successful women in podcasting—many of them. But has the industry been intentional about making sure those success stories are visible, celebrated, and positioned as models for aspiring creators? The 15% vs. 8% gap suggests we haven’t done enough. And addressing these barriers requires intentional, proactive work—not hope that things will naturally balance out.
But entry barriers aren’t the only problem in this data. LGBTQ+ creators and 55+ creators both have 40% churn rates. These aren’t people who never tried podcasting. They tried, and they left. That’s a retention crisis, and it demands an entirely different intervention.
Both LGBTQ+ Americans and Americans 55+ are smaller segments of the population. If you’re creating content that speaks to a particular community, and that community is smaller, it can be harder to build the audience you hoped for. When your expectations aren’t met, when the effort-to-reward ratio feels off, you stop.
This is where I think about something Garth Brooks said at a conference I attended. I know I’ve mentioned this before in this space, but it really applies to this challenge. He talked about how, before streaming, a songwriter trying to make it in Nashville might land the fourth single on a Travis Tritt album, or the fifth single on a Reba McEntire record. It wasn’t a number one hit, but it was enough to keep them going—enough to pay some bills, enough to validate that they were on the right path, enough to sustain them until they wrote that breakout song for George Strait.
Streaming and iTunes disrupted that. The culture shifted toward hits and singles (away from albums), and those “fourth single” opportunities dried up. Songwriters who might have eventually broken through had to go back to waiting tables because there weren’t enough little wins along the way to keep them in the game.
Podcasting has a version of this problem. We’ve built an ecosystem that celebrates the massive successes but doesn’t do much to create pathways to modest, sustainable successes that can keep creators going long enough to find their audience. For segments that already face headwinds in building audience, this hits especially hard.
Putting a Thumb on the Scale
So here’s my challenge as we head into 2026, and I want to direct this specifically at publishers, networks, and platforms: it’s time to fund creators in high-risk audience categories. Proactively. Intentionally. With real money.
The long tail of podcasting is rich and vibrant, but the shows at the top rarely change. The creators who are already successful have resources, audiences, and momentum. The creators trying to break through—especially those creating for smaller or underserved audiences—are fighting uphill with less.
Here’s an analogy I’ve used before: if I have a dollar and you have nothing, I can “fairly” agree to split every future dollar with you 50/50. Sounds equitable, right? But I will always have more money than you. The gap never closes.
That’s where we are in podcasting. Treating everyone “fairly” from this point forward doesn’t fix the structural inequities that already exist. It locks them in. If we want a creator population that actually resembles the U.S. population—and I believe that’s essential for long-term audience growth—we have to put a thumb on the scale. We have to invest disproportionately in the creators and communities that are currently underrepresented or churning out at high rates.
What does that look like? It looks like dedicated funding pools for creators over 55. It looks like development programs specifically designed to support LGBTQ+ voices. It looks like subsidizing the “fourth single” opportunities—the modest wins that keep creators in the game long enough to build something sustainable. It looks like networks and platforms making deliberate bets on creators who don’t fit the existing mold, not because it’s charity, but because it’s the only way to grow audiences we’re currently not reaching.
I don’t have all the answers. The only demographic I fit in this data is 55+, and I’m keenly aware that solving problems for communities I’m not part of requires having the right people in the room. But I do know that if we don’t act—if we just let the creator landscape evolve on its own—the inequities in the audience will never improve. They’ll only get worse.
The inventory creates the audience. It’s time to fix the inventory. Happy holidays, friends. Back next year!
