A Day Out at The Podcast Show
At last year’s Podcast Show – a vast annual industry expo that takes place at Islington’s Business Design Centre – my plans to spend a relaxing afternoon tutting at panels and reacquainting myself with the half dozen podcast people I’m already acquainted with, was interrupted when Rishi Sunak decided to step out in the driving rain and call an early general election. Suddenly, my plans – both professional and financial – for the summer months, were in turmoil. I scrambled onto a Zoom call from the shop floor, keeping one eye on Lords Mandelson and Finkelstein, reacting live, at Times Radio’s recording booth by the mezzanine toilets.
A year on, and the dust has settled. We have a new Prime Minister, one who arrived on a wave of enthusiasm but has managed to evaporate the last dregs of support in record time. America has a new President – the old one, the bad one. And so, with a sense of trepidation, I bought myself a day pass to the show (today, Thursday, I am avoiding the conference and doing so-called “real work” instead) and decided that nothing too bad could happen while I was safely ensconced within the walls of the Business Design Centre. I hot-footed it from south London to Angel and then strolled the short walk from the tube station. And then I got lost. I had recalled an entrance to the centre opposite The Angelic, a pub where I hosted a drinks reception last year. Was I imagining things? Was this the Mandela Effect in action? I found myself, instead, in a bleak loading bay, where a few pot plants struggled, gasping, towards sparse sunlight, beneath a sign bearing the apocalyptic slogan: I NEED THIS WILDERNESS FOR MY HEART TO BEAT.
At some point in my examination of this wilderness – feeling like Steve Backshall, who would appear in the show, a couple of hours later, alongside a 12-foot Burmese python – I received a text from a pal, Mark, who runs an important audio technology company. I joined him and a couple of his friends at the pub, and wiled away an hour or so at this impromptu festival fringe. Mark filled me in on the top lines from the opening keynote, given by James Cridland, the godfather of opening keynotes. Eventually, after Mark had finished eating his fish and chips in a way I’d never seen before – he used the mushy peas as a sauce, rather than a side – we made our way into the show.
When it first arrived here in London, The Podcast Show felt like an alien spaceship. I remember walking into that first show, assuming that I knew basically everyone who worked in podcasting in London, and feeling, suddenly, like I’d been kicked in the chops. Who were all these people? What were all these businesses? Why weren’t Spotify and Audible and the BBC bending over backwards to speak to me? Mercifully, so many of the stands in the main hall were giving out free stress balls that I was able to spend the day walking around, pumping my gratis stress relief like a teenage boy locked in his bedroom. But now, in 2025, the show felt quite familiar; a reflection of the hot air that has filled the industry in the past half decade.
Exhibitors are still flocking to the show, albeit in slightly different ways. In its first year, Spotify occupied a vast area by the entrance, where they were printing free tote bags with your podcast artwork. It was Weimar-era extravagance, but a delight for attendees. This year, Spotify were confined to a mini-lounge on the neglected upper floor. Indeed, there were no exhibitors placed particularly prominently: a little Beeb hub, a petite Amazon HQ, various booths demonstrating gear like pop-ups in a strip mall. But things felt smaller. Most of the services on offer were abstract – ad sales, PR, market research – rather than tools designed to enhance the content. Podcast companies feel a bit like a house-broken Spaniel, no longer needing to piss on every chair leg.
This isn’t a bad thing at all. Industrial conferences are a business in themselves (the conference on conferences must be a thing of meta-beauty), and are a good bellwether for excitement. A frenzy of money will chase the early opportunity, but now, a few years down the line, most companies are going to take a more sensible approach. After all, what return do you get on the stress balls? How many conversions will the French company that dispersed free flat whites (whose name I can’t even remember) get? Is it better, perhaps, to just buy a pass and engineer more natural conversations with the people you actually want to speak to? Is it preferable to simply stump up to wangle yourself onto thought leadership panels?
In a way, the panels are the great enigma of The Podcast Show. I attended two on Wednesday: a discussion about the production techniques deployed on Wondery’s British Scandal that featured its co-hosts, Alice Levine and Matt Forde, and a look at the interaction between podcasts and politics, which saw comedian Nish Kumar on incendiary form, alongside a Patrick Batemanesque salesman from Crooked Media. The latter, at least, was explicitly billed as being presented by Crooked, though the former was such a puff piece for Wondery and Samizdat Audio, the production company that makes British Scandal, that I assume they also have a commercial relationship with the show. I don’t have a problem with that – naturally, if I were running the conference, I would take the same approach – but it turns these side-room panels into soft propaganda. I sat in the audience, itching to ask a difficult question (do you do any original reporting or just digest other people’s work, and, if the latter, how do you square the thorny question of attribution at a time where the squeeze is being put on investigative journalist?) but the vibe of the Q & As was, at best, optimistic, and, at worst, sycophantic. Believe it or not, I have no desire to be a dissenting voice.
But who exactly these panels are for is still a mystery to me. There are undoubtedly quite a lot of tickets sold to independent creators, the sort of people who might be inspired by the aspirational stories of how famous people launched successful podcasts (“I was just a jobbing stand-up comedian with occasional appearances on Mock the Week,” they might inform their slack-jawed audience, “who would have thought I could ever become a successful podcaster?!”). But the majority of tickets seem to be sold to the legion of staff at SMEs who know the real grind of podcasting. They don’t need to be offered easy answers to the wrong questions, because they deal, every day, with the right questions and know how complicated the answers actually are.
Part of the issue lies in the nature of industrial conferences as businesses. In order to sell tickets, they want to get big names at the show (including Backshall and his giant snake) which means that talks are talent focused. And while someone like Nish Kumar is a very punchy and enjoyable speaker (on regulation: “Joe Rogan is a publisher. Theo Von is a publisher. Mark Zuckerberg is a publisher and therefore there have to be regulations in place to see them as publishers”) he’s probably not a font of great insight into building and sustaining a media business. And so the show gets trapped between selling to podcast enthusiasts and selling to podcast professionals, bestriding these two audiences with the wobbly legs of a flapper doing the Charleston.
Beyond the panels, beyond the free magic 8-balls (‘the podcast predictor’), the show feels largely like an opportunity for the industry to pause for breath. The past couple of years have been turbulent, as an overinflated (bloated, in the parlance of Big Tech) industry has suffered a brutal correction. Job cuts, slashed deals, depressing audience figures. But, at the same time, podcasting is now mature enough that it can sustain the enthusiasm of both advertisers and commissioners, who are probably still watching, nervously, the development of content on YouTube and vertical social, like TikTok and Reels. Those content creators might be due a big expo – with all the bells and whistles, the turkey and trimmings – which will be a more frenzied affair. Most of the attendees of Podcast Show 2025 seemed to be there as an opportunity to refresh acquaintances, to catch-up with potential partners, and to sustain a loose network. Opportunities to learn or to sell felt much rarer.
Leaving the show – as the tannoy announced that the whole shebang was now “closed” – things felt quiet. There are always after-show parties taking place – to which I am, routinely, not invited – but most of the delegates seemed to be slinking off back home. Maybe this is the sign of an industry maturing, that more sensible, grow-up people with real, balanced home lives are at the wheel. But it is also clear that the party itself is somewhat over. The indulgence of the past few years has given way to a wearier reality.
The show will close – today – with a panel featuring the team from Goalhanger, the wildly successful podcast company behind The Rest is History and The Rest is Politics. It is indicative of where the industry is headed that this talk won’t just be a reflection on how they built a UK-based media business with a £100m+ probable valuation in the course of just a couple of years, but a look to the future. They’ll be moderated by the Managing Director of YouTube UK & Ireland, and Google’s video arm is sponsoring the panel. All around the festival this year, video has been the spectre at the feast, the golden goose, the coming storm, and countless other clichéd metaphors.
The truth is that right now, the shoulder of Big Tech and finance is trying to push the newly matured podcast industry – complete with deep voice and scraggly stubble – into the video space. They still don’t really trust the maturity of video-first content creators, and that’s understandable. Most of the financial decision makers here are Gen X and most of the audio creators are Millennials. The video folk? They’re largely Gen Z. To expect Gen X to put their faith in a bunch of babyish wide-eyed naïfs? Too much. And so the constant repetition, on the shop floor, was video, video, video, like Blairite Tourette’s at a Blockbuster. I only saw one microphone manufacturer, Audio-Technica, exhibiting at the festival, yet there were several video displays, including Canon where I spend a good 15 minutes receiving the hard-sell about upgrading my set-up to the one used by Diary of a CEO (cue: mime of vomiting).
Perhaps this is the cunning plan, conducted in boardrooms far away from beheadphoned losers like me. They’ve already spent big on turning podcasting into a serious business, with acquisitions and mergers, checks and balances. Perhaps it’s easier, then, to just fold video into that corporate infrastructure than it would be to start building something new, from the ground up, especially if it might end up as a competitor to pre-existing investments.
Or maybe we’ll just keep talking about the transition to video forever. After all, The Podcast Show and I share an interest there. Uncertainty generates commentary like nothing else. And we can both grow fat on the indecision of people Googling, “does my podcast need to be video now?”
Follow me on Bluesky, I dare you.