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Spotify Has Its Own Clubhouse Now

Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos by Spotify and Betty Labs Incorporated

Given Spotify’s grand ambitions to become the all-consuming audio platform of the universe, it has become a consistent point of curiosity as to what the company will do with the increasing interest around Clubhouse and the social audio category — or “live group audio,” as I prefer to call it — more generally. Frankly, the question was never an if, but a when and a how.

This morning, we have an answer: The Swedish audio streaming platform just announced that it has acquired a Los Angeles-based startup called Betty Labs, which is perhaps best known for creating Locker Room, the sports-centric social audio app. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but I imagine it’s fairly modest compared to the flashy sums paid out for the likes of The Ringer, Megaphone, and Anchor.

It’s an intriguing move, though I say this in part because I’ve been closely watching that app as a big sports consumer for a bit. The growing social/live group audio category strikes me as a natural fit with live sporting events, and Locker Room has done enough things of late to keep me curious as an observer. This includes a bevvy of interesting partnerships, at first with New York Times NBA reporter Marc Stein, and more recently with sports podcast publishers like Locked On and Blue Wire.

Just so we’re clear, though: This development shouldn’t be read as Spotify moving into the sports-centric social audio space, because Locker Room is quite obviously a starting point for a broader implementation of live experience features that’s meant to serve the needs of Spotify’s creator constituencies, which include music artists, podcast publishers, and many other kinds of talent. On that note, you should read the shape of this move as catering more towards the vertical creator-to-listener relationship as opposed to a more horizontal peer-to-peer social relationships, which makes up a good amount of the Clubhouse experience.

Here’s the section in the press release reflecting that: “Through this new live experience, Spotify will offer a range of sports, music, and cultural programming, as well as a host of interactive features that enable creators to connect with audiences in real-time. We’ll give professional athletes, writers, musicians, songwriters, podcasters, and other global voices opportunities to host real-time discussions, debates, ask me anything (AMA) sessions and more.”

This is my understanding of what happens next: The Locker Room app will continue operating in its current form for the next few months as the Betty Labs team is integrated into Spotify. Once that’s done, the app will relaunched (with a new name to signify its more generalized identity, yet to be determined) and will remain a standalone app. On the back-end, the app will be sorted under the company’s “Future Formats” division, led by Anchor co-founder Nir Zicherman. (Fun fact: When I asked Zicherman about the company’s interest in social audio after Spotify’s big livestream event last month, he said, “We think Live is interesting, we talk about it a lot, and we’re going to be watching Clubhouse closely.”) I’m told that a key focus of the Future Formats team moving forward is to make it easy for Spotify creators to record their live sessions on the Locker Room app — or whatever it’s going to be called — and upload them as a podcast through the Anchor platform.

I am, of course, very curious to see where this goes, and additionally, how this will affect the prospects of the social/live group audio space and Clubhouse specifically. Interesting, interesting.

Serial Productions Unveils Its Next Project

The famed audio publisher now owned by the New York Times announced that its latest show will be a five-part series hosted and reported by Zoe Chace called The Improvement Association. The tagline: “A true story about election fraud,” and it features Chace traveling to Bladen County, North Carolina to “investigate the power of election fraud allegations — even when they’re not substantiated.” If I’m not mistaken, it’s connected to this story that she did back in December 2016.

The Improvement Association is scheduled to debut on April 13. The Times posted a trailer on its site.

Big fan of Chace over here, so I’m excited for this. I think her last piece for This American Life saw her zipping about the 2020 Iowa Caucuses with Dave Weigel — which, for a certain kind of nerd (i.e. me), made for a fabulous pairing.

Selected Notes

➽ Today, Entercom is announcing a big ol’ rebrand where it will be known from here on out as… *squints* Audacy? Sure! Anyway, this new name will encompass its legacy broadcast radio business, its podcasts businesses — which comprises Cadence13, Pineapple Street, and Podcorn — plus its digital audio platform, RADIO.COM.

➽ Speaking of Pineapple Street: I hear Max Linsky is working on a new solo creative project where he interviews a wide range of people over the age of seventy about the way they look at their lives. In other words, it’s basically Longform, but about the twilight of your existence. I think that’ll be out within a few weeks.

➽ Also today: Acast is launching Acast+, which the company describes as a suite of subscription tools meant to help podcast creators offer ad-free streams, exclusive content, and early-access options to their paying subscribers. This rollout comes not long after Acast announced its partnership with Patreon, and all seems to be organized around an intent to provide more direct revenue options for creators. I’m told that Acast+ tools will easily plug into open ecosystem platforms like Apple Podcasts and the myriad third-party apps that rely on it, but it won’t be compatible with distribution over Spotify, since that platform exercises a closed approach.

➽ Sony Music Entertainment has announced a new distribution partnership with Tinkercast, the children’s media company that houses Mindy Thomas and Guy Raz’s Wow in the World, which sees the former pushing into the kids podcast category.

➽ I’m very sorry to hear that Jason Smith, CEO of Starburns Audio, died unexpectedly last Friday. He leaves behind a wife and a daughter, and his friends has set up a GoFundMe page to raise funds to support his family and help his daughter go to college, which you can find here.

Expanding the Editor Pipeline

The motivation behind Edit Mode, a seven-week training program from the Association of Independents in Radio (AIR)’s SoundPath learning platform and the Editors Collective, is simple and straightforward: There’s a huge demand these days for story editors with tangible experience working on narrative audio projects, and there’s simply too little supply to match it.

The individuals who make up the loosely organized Editors Collective — Julie Caine, Jen Chien, Leila Day, and Casey Miner, who came up together as a cohort at KALW in San Francisco — began to notice this gap a few years ago, which primarily manifested through a growing volume of inquiries throughout the audio community. These inquiries sought story editors to work on the many narrative projects popping up in the wake of the podcast boom: people who could improve the shape and structure of a multi-part serial, consider as many angles and perspectives, assess and account for key blind spots. And according to Chien and Miner, who spoke with me over the phone last week, that gap appears to have persisted well into this day. “It still seems like there’s nowhere near enough story editors to meet the need,” said Miner, who nowadays works as an independent editor.

As a result of this market dynamic, competition for people with such capabilities has grown dramatically over the past few years. This is said to be especially true for story editors of color, whose perspectives I imagine have only become increasingly recognized as crucial in the wake of the many, many, many media workplace reckonings in recent memory. “I can only speak from my own experience, but as someone who identifies as a person of color and an audio editor, I’ve been recruited many times… and talking to other folks at this job level and description, it sounds like people are getting poached and recruited from all angles,” said Jen Chien, who currently works as the executive editor at Lantigua Williams & Co.

There are many factors that contribute to this dearth in talent supply, but in my mind, two factors stand out above all. The first has to do with opportunity. Prior to the (very) recent rise of podcasting, there were simply very few opportunities to consistently work on narrative audio projects, as broadcast radio wasn’t a terribly efficient facilitator of such programming. Because there was little work, there were few opportunities to gain story editing experience, and because there were few opportunities, there was little chance for supply to take proper shape. And what confluences of opportunities, work, and supply did happen in the pre-podcast age tended to amass around the same kind of person. This should be an old nut by now, but here’s Miner listing out the characteristics of that archetype: “Coastal, upper middle class, white, college educated, probably from public radio.”

The second factor is the fact that, even with the increased demand for the skill set today, there still seems to be little opportunity to get new hands dirty with that kind of work. My sense is that much of this is the result of risk aversion: Publishers aren’t typically eager to give people with little-to-no story editing experience the chance to work on a story, generally opting instead to lean on the few people who do have substantial audio editing credits (or in some cases, importing experienced editors from other media industries, who themselves probably come out from similar demographics). But because there’s a tendency to allocate opportunity among already experienced hands, newer hands won’t get as many chances — if not any chance at all — to take shots on goal. Consequently, this results in the editor class being extremely concentrated and the pathway towards increasing the supply of narrative audio editors considerably cloudy, even when it comes to those with the closest proximity to such opportunities (i.e. those who already work within audio publishers). It’s one of those annoying infinite loops: You can’t get more experience if you don’t already have experience, but you can’t get experience without experience.

Which brings us back to Edit Mode. Here, the idea is to provide a hands-on, mentor-centric training program that gives participants the opportunity to work on a story that will ultimately get published, thus giving their resumes a tangible editing credit that they can use to qualify for more editing jobs. Put simply, the program seems positioned to function as a vessel that can take on some of the risk from publishers — mitigating their aversions in part by relying on experienced mentors — to spread more editing experience around to more people, and in doing so, contribute to the expansion of the editor pipeline while bringing a more diverse group of people into the mix.

(I should say: This isn’t the only editor training program that’s popping up right now. At this writing, Neon Hum Media is in the middle of staging its own editor bootcamp led by Catherine Saint Louis, who I interviewed in an early episode of my dearly departed Servant of Pod podcast about the role of podcast editors.)

It should be noted, though, that Edit Mode is principally geared towards people who already have some experience with narrative audio work. While this may structurally keep out a lot of fresh hands — after all, it’s probably the case that only certain kinds of people have been able to access such work so far — the reason for this is intimately tied to how the program is designed. “You’d need some familiarity with the form to get the most out of the training we’re planning,” said Chien. “We’re also trying not to have too great a spread in terms of experience level, as it would be tough to tailor the workshop across too broad a brush.”

Speaking of which, the program is built around two main components. The first is the instructional stuff: intensive classes, workshops, and seminars that take place over three weekends meant to get some clean hands dirty. The second is oriented around networking: Working editors from around the industry are brought in to guest-teach classes and provide one-on-one mentorship. Such mentorship, by the way, is itself a mechanism for career advancement: After all, people tend to hire people they already have some shared experience with.

The reality of that dynamic also grounds another aspect that’s central to the program: an emphasis on a cohort model, which in some way is meant to evoke the experiences that the four Editors Collective members had coming up through KALW. Each cohort is kept intentionally small, around ten people (who will each be given a $1,000 stipend, FYI), and while that might seem to run counter to the philosophical enterprise of growing the pool, that concentrated focus is described to be an expression of how the collective interprets the overarching pipeline problem. “Even though it does mean less access, keeping groups to a smaller size allows for a real community to develop that will help people as they move on to their careers,” said Chien. “A lot of hires really do come down to who you know. That’s just a fact of life.”

She added: “It’s a type of exclusivity, but it’s also an attempt to build an ongoing network, which is why we’re hoping to keep this going beyond this one cohort.” On that note, the collective has secured funding for one more cohort after this debut workshop, but that’s all they have guaranteed from AIR for now. They’re hoping to get more funding, perhaps from other partnerships, to support future iterations of the Edit Mode program.

Whether or not there will be more cohorts in the years to come, there will at least be twenty more people running around the podcast industry with one more tangible credit, some more confidence, and a new professional peer network to help tackle the editor gap in the audio business. This, in turn, will hopefully complicate the impulse on the part of employers who might believe the editor pipeline “just isn’t there yet.”

“We can’t tell companies who to hire, but we can try to make that pool bigger,” said Chien. “We believe people are ready. They just haven’t been given the chance yet. We want to give them that extra lift to push their head up and say, ‘I’m ready, and I’ve proven it.’”

Applications for Edit Mode are open until April 2, and the program starts on June 5.

The Chance Pleasures of a Branded Real Estate Podcast

By Aria Bracci

If you heard a podcast host say, “We’re very well aware of the obstacles: We’re on an audio platform talking about things you need to see to experience and believe,” what might you assume this podcast is about? Movies? Magic? Bigfoot?

In this case, it’s a different topic, one that’s been garnering lots of attention while we’ve all been stuck at home: other people’s homes.

House Party, a branded show from realtor.com, is a chatcast about news and pop culture as it relates to real estate, and though it started in late 2018, it fits snugly into the recent boom of people longingly browsing properties they would never actually rent or purchase. The writers at Saturday Night Live have parodied the phenomenon, saying, “The pleasure you once got from sex now comes from looking at other people’s houses”; the writers at Curbed have captured the phenomenon in a series: “My Week in Zillow Saves.”

Realtor.com editors Rachel Stults and Natalie Way host House Party, covering such things as the particular interior details of The Weeknd’s Hidden Hills mansion. With the hosts’ familiar rapport, as well as the designated discussion segments, House Party is reminiscent of many daytime talk programs (particularly with, say, the recognizable jingle that signals the pivot to a certain topic, similar to how the strings would come in as “Travel Trivia” began on Live with Regis and Kelly). The difference, of course, is that this is an audio-only endeavor, meaning it’s possible that the audience might be left feeling unfulfilled without the visual component of what’s being discussed.

To help tie up those loose ends, a listener might end up going to realtor.com itself, where the show notes for each episode contain a tidy list of links, such as for professional photos of the properties mentioned. I ask Stults if this is a marketing tactic to drive traffic to the site. “I wish I could say that’s what it was!” laughs Stults, who admits that this was never actually the point. The show originated from the realtor.com staff finding the drama of their own housing chronicles — as well as the drama of higher-profile figures — fun, engaging, and interesting to listen to, at least in their internal meetings and conversations; pulling relevant visuals into one place was a bit of an afterthought (something like, “oh, right — the audience can’t see what we’re seeing”).

At first, I was drawn to looking at the pictures, and even though Stults describes that action as “asking a lot of the listener,” it truly didn’t take much effort; the links helped with that. What’s more, I didn’t feel compelled to linger on the site. It was enough to see Bon Jovi’s bizarre interior decorating choices, then move on. (It’s also, obviously, easy enough to just Google these things and never touch the site at all.)

Considering the fairly minimal interaction with realtor.com itself, let me remind you of the fundamental purpose of branded podcasts. Like any number of shows that fit that description, they ultimately exist to increase exposure, to rev up consumer’s recognition of companies, and, eventually, to yield revenue. It’s advertising, but theoretically softer (and maybe more consensual?). Stults says the goal of House Party is “to entertain, to inform and to convey the tone of realtor.com,” which, if everything worked as it should, would then mean that consumers would readily think of — and then use — the site when they need housing.

Shouldn’t listening to the show feel grimy and transactional, then, like when a salesperson takes the time to ask you where you got your shirt, even though you both know you’re really there to get nickel-and-dimed on a car lease? Along that vein, in the SNL skit about scouring housing listings, which positions the activity as quasipornographic, the equivalent of the cold shower is the real estate agent. Once someone wants your money, the fantasy no longer exists in your head. In this case, when the entranced Zillow voyeur actually picks up the phone to contact the listing agent, “Donna Lazaritti with ReMax” answers. The caller realizes, uncomfortably quickly, that the property was tantalizing because it was flawless, out of reach; when you’re not in the market or financial position to buy, the realtor — the middleman between you and the fantasy — shakes you out of your daze.

On House Party, the middlemen — the hosts — have the opposite effect. What’s more, it’s an effect that works even on a listener like me, who’s decidedly not a “My Week in Zillow Saves” kind of person. This is due in part to the hosts letting their own excitement and interest shine through, as well as to the hosts’ ever-improving approach to the show’s content. For example, Stults says, when describing properties, they’ve learned to tailor their focus to colors and wacky architectural elements, rather than square footage. Increasingly rich visual descriptions make looking up pictures less necessary, and if you’re still inclined to peek, there’s no pressure to do it specifically on realtor.com; this might not serve traditional capitalist goals, but it makes the show more enjoyable.

As both a piece of branded content and a chatcast about a topic you might think would fall flat without visuals, House Party feels neither impersonal nor unfulfilling. A feat in itself, it also speaks to something larger about the allure of real estate as entertainment: It allows spectators to place themselves in it.

As mentioned earlier, House Party isn’t a deliberate vehicle to get more active renters or buyers onto the company site. (For the record, it’s also not a service-oriented podcast for realtors, which, Stults says, “is a very popular podcast topic out there.” I can confirm this: It’s what overwhelmingly comes up when searching for real-estate-related shows.) The show isn’t even, in the immediate sense, to drive sales or deals. The similarly editorial content on realtor.com, like weekly aggregate lists of the oldest or most expensive listings, doesn’t serve to do that either, says Stults. It’s not an earnest effort to sell those homes; it’s just for fun.

“We’re here, honestly, for entertainment,” Stults says of the podcast specifically. “We’re trying to be for everybody.”

And for everybody it is. It doesn’t matter if a house being discussed belongs to Shaq or is “the worst house on the street.” In fact, Stults says, when the team pulls together the most-clicked articles on the site each week, they’re often not about celebrity homes at all, just interesting ones. The absence of characters makes your gaze not only permissible but necessary for bringing it to life, which is also what allows an audio-only show about real estate, when executed well, to still draw you in.

As I said, I’m not the kind of person who would scroll through real estate on Curbed, or even on realtor.com. I’m a pragmatic browser, and I look for listings exclusively within my price range and only if I have genuine intent to move. I might, however, look at listings in places I’d never before pictured myself moving, considering versions of my life that seem slightly out of reach.

It does take a little imagination, as does another activity I wouldn’t have necessarily pictured myself doing: listening to House Party. But being presented with the bare bones of other people’s lives can help you determine how you’d like to flesh out yours, a realization about “real estate as entertainment” that I’m not sure I would’ve had if not for this show.

Unlike when you’re in a spiral in the depths of Instagram, where the focus might be a stranger’s physique or blemish-free skin or interpersonal relationships, looking at properties leaves room for the observer. Real estate is just a stage; the story is yours.

A Talent Agent on the Pandemic and the Hollywood-Podcast Industrial Complex

It should be clear by now that talent agents play an increasingly crucial role in the formation of the podcast business: They create markets for projects and creators, serve as rapid facilitators of information in the industry, and are generally incentivized to amp up the level of competition in the ecosystem, which may be a good or bad thing depending on which side of the deal you’re on. I typically enjoy checking in with agents, largely because we’re basically talking about a group of people whose entire job requires closely reading the whole field. And as the country gradually inches towards the other side of the pandemic — and some sort of return to whatever one might consider “normal” — I figured this was probably as good a time as any to take stock of the year that came before and the year that lies before us through the eyes of the podcast talent agent.

Caroline Edwards was appointed the Director of Podcast Initiatives at ICM Partners two years ago, after working in the agency’s political department for a number of years. (When asked if she missed politics, she replied: “Definitely, especially this last year. It was, uh, a big one.”) The turn towards the nascent but growing podcast deals space marked a kind of return for Edwards: She had worked in television development for years before her stint in political consulting, and in early 2019, she found herself interested in getting back into the storytelling business. When she asked her bosses for a change in scenery, the agency was in the midst of planning out podcast department, and they asked if she was interested to lead it. She took the position, and as you can imagine, she’s been pretty busy with the job ever since.

I caught up with Edwards over the phone earlier this month, taking the opportunity to get a sense of what the industry looks like now from her vantage point, how her work has shifted over the course of the pandemic, and what areas she’s interested in focusing more on moving forward.

***

Hot Pod: How has the past year affected your workload?

Caroline Edwards: It’s been interesting. Obviously, when the pandemic hit, there was some amount of anxiety, but as things progressed, my work just skyrocketed. I was busier this past year than I’ve ever been in the podcast space.

I think that happened for a few reasons. First of all, I work in a traditional agency that services clients in television, film, news, and sports, among many other things, so everyone who was previously unavailable now had more time, and they started looking into podcasting because it was the one entertainment space that continued forward, basically without a hitch.

There was also just more demand for content. Sure, there was some dip with listening at the outset, but things eventually leveled out. People eventually figured new schedules and new listening times, perhaps when they’re walking around the neighborhood or when they’re cooking every night. When people listened changed, but the amount people listened to didn’t, and if anything, it seemed to have increased at the end of the day. So it became apparent that this was a space where people could still make money.

HP: So, the volume of listening and interest might have gone up, but have the nature of the opportunities changed over the past year? Did you find yourself packaging different kinds of projects than before?

Edwards: Totally. We saw some changes in how people want to spend their listening time. One of the biggest shifts I saw was a big dip in true crime content, which, I mean, makes sense. We couldn’t sell anything with true crime for a while, and I had to table all of those projects. But what’s interesting now, a year later, is that non-violent true crime has come back a little bit.

HP: So, scams and cons, things like that?

Edwards: Yeah. Non-violent, true crime investigative stories, basically. One example is a deal I did last year for the Maria Butina Spy Affair project with Wondery that came out this month. I’ve sold two other ones that should be announced in the next couple of weeks. People seem to still be interested in intriguing investigative stuff, but they’re a little less enthusiastic about violence.

Another genre that’s been interesting is self-help, which has been really popular. How do I be a good spouse or parent? How do I deal with all the anxiety over what’s going on in the pandemic? I did a deal last year for Sarah Knight around her No Fucks Given podcast that came out at the start of this year, and it was all about how to reassess your priorities and how to take care of yourself. That show blew up, it’s been charting pretty well, and the numbers have been growing steadily. So I’ve found myself getting more requests for that kind of thing.

There’s also been a greater look towards comedy, which is an area I’ve always been excited about. Personally, I’ve been thinking about how to figure out the half-hour scripted comedy format — something like Will & Grace or How I Met Your Mother, but for podcasts. I think that’s going to be really successful one day. Anyway, in addition to nonviolent true crime and self-help, I’ve also been getting a lot of requests for comedy projects.

HP: I imagine a lot of your work comes from clients in other media, but to what extent have you been doing more work with clients native to podcasting?

Edwards: It’s certainly become more robust. They’ve mostly come through referral, which is really nice. I tend to take on clients who might’ve grown a certain amount but feel like they haven’t gotten the attention they need where they are, and maybe they need some help. Working with people who are native to podcasting has been great because they fully understand the space. They know it’s a full-time job. Gone are the days where the podcast was just a side hustle.

For the most part, the issue has been marketing, but sometimes I have a podcast that’s gotten big enough that they can’t keep up with the amount of work and just need some support. In that instance, the work is to help find them a place where they can get that.

And of course, I also work with podcast production companies. I service their whole fleet of shows and help them build relationships, whether it’s work for hire or original work. That’s the nice thing about being in a full-service agency: If there’s a show that could be a book, I could bring them over to the book department. If it could be a television project, we have a TV department, and so on. The idea is to help create all these small businesses around the same creator. That’s the goal.

HP: My sense is that because there’s been more energy and interest around podcasting — and this has been true for a while now, but it seems especially the case over the pandemic — there’s also been increased hype and expectation, which may not be super helpful or productive. When you work with someone for the first time, how do you set expectations?

Edwards: It’s always a long conversation, and of course, it’s important to be honest. The reality is, podcasting is still the Wild West in many ways, right? It’s growing very fast, and it’s also changing very fast: Something that applies today may not apply tomorrow.

All I can really say is, “Okay, here are some examples of what’s happened and how those things typically look like,” and emphasize that the marketplace only bears what it does for certain people. I’d tell them that I’d take their project, bring it out to the market, have a bunch of conversations, and see what happens. Sometimes it’s luck, sometimes what’s going on in the world changes, and sometimes nothing happens.

It’s not unlike the same pathway as doing a television show, right? The likelihood you’re going to write a script, have that script be purchased, and then have that project actually go into production — it’s a long road.

With any of this, it’s important to have the right people on your team to support you, and it’s also important to make sure you’re getting honest feedback, that you’re communicating. It’s not easy, and it’s a very saturated market.

HP: Speaking of communicating, what do you typically find as your biggest challenges as an agent in the podcast business?

Edwards: Well, simply the fact that a lot of people don’t know what agents do. There’s an education curve where I have to explain what my job is, how it operates, how much it costs. There’s more of an innate understanding among people in the television, film, and theater business, but because podcasting and the people within it are relatively new to this stuff, that’s been a bit of a hurdle.

One thing I’ve found that’s been pretty interesting is that there’s also some distrust of agents in this community. I’ve had some introductions where people are like, “Oh, I don’t know about this.” A lot of it, I think, is about understanding that it’s a relationship. Not all agents are for everyone. It’s a very personal thing, having someone help grow your business.

HP: Where would you say that distrust comes from?

Edwards: I think a couple of places. A lot of podcasters started out on their own, so they’re scrappy and have hustled by themselves for so long. So there’s this feeling of like, “I’m going to have to give up something?” That’s probably pretty scary, and by the way, I completely understand that.

Then there’s also… I’m sure you’ve seen Entourage. Agents have a reputation of being hustlers, which can be a good thing, can be a bad thing. Podcasting hasn’t become completely Hollywoodized yet, so I think people are very wary of the stereotype of the Hollywood agent.

HP: Finally, what do you think you’re going to focus on over the next year?

Edwards: One thing I’m planning to focus on this year — and probably for the next couple more years — is the kids genre. I’m really about the kids space, and I’ve been seeing more big buyers jumping in and asking me who they should be meeting with. It’s an incredible opportunity for education, for stuff that can help kids expand their minds and be entertained without staring at a screen. My sense is that there’s going to be some pushback on technology when it comes to kids, so a more traditional storytelling type of entertainment could see a chance for a surge.

Another focus I have is on the international marketplace. It’s still a blip compared to what’s happening in the U.S. at the moment, but it’s not always going to be that way. I’m certain we’ll see it grow. ICM is now partnered with this agency in Sweden called Albatros, and I’m working with colleagues over there to talk about some cross-international opportunities, doing projects in the native language of certain regions. I think Spanish-speaking countries could get really interesting, too. The international front is probably going to happen sooner than some people might think.

And finally, I’m still very interested in scripted comedy stuff, which I mentioned earlier. I just think it’s such a huge opportunity, and whoever figures it out is going to be very successful.

Spotify Has Its Own Clubhouse Now