It’s a tough time to be an artist who plays arenas. Earlier this year, the Black Keys made headlines when they canned an entire American arena tour due to catastrophically low ticket sales; same goes for Jennifer Lopez, who rebranded a flailing album tour as a greatest hits show before scrapping the thing altogether. If your name doesn’t begin with “Taylor” and end with “Swift,” ticket sales just aren’t a sure thing like they used to be.
If you’re a podcaster? Well, that’s a different story. Later this year, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart are bringing their wildly popular The Rest Is Politics chatshow to the O2 arena – the very same venue that recently hosted mega-selling runs by pop stars including Madonna, SZA and Doja Cat. Earlier this summer, the comedy podcast ShxtsnGigs booked a show at the 20,000-capacity venue, too. This weekend’s Reading and Leeds festivals – events best known for riotous crowds, landmark bands and unhinged A-Level celebrations – just announced that this year will debut the Aux, a stage exclusively featuring gen Z-oriented content creators and podcasters such as TikToker Ayamé Ponder and comedy duo Chunkz and Filly. So how, exactly, has this seemingly innocuous format – favoured by mild-mannered commuters the world over – taken over the live scene?
Tom Whiter, head of content at Goalhanger, the production house that makes The Rest Is Politics, says that it’s the intimacy of podcasting that makes listeners want to experience their favourite shows live. “You definitely build up that parasocial relationship – as a listener, you think Rory and Alastair really are your friends because they’re the companions in your ears,” he says. “When you realise there are other people out there who share that same idea of the closeness of their relationship with the presenters, a community forms. The live show is a nice way for everybody to come together and celebrate it in one space.”
Lauren Garroni, who co-hosts the popular pop culture podcast Every Outfit with Chelsea Fairless, says that she and Fairless have seen their shows spark new friendships among audience members. “People are like, ‘I bought a single ticket’, they meet other people who have gone solo, and they become friends with each other,” she says. “People tell us they’re going to brunch with people they would never have known if they hadn’t come to a live show.”
There’s also, says Fairless, an element of natural curiosity at play. “Part of the appeal is the fundamental desire to understand something more – with podcasting, you only get so much,” she says. “A lot of people that listen to the podcast have no idea what we look like, and some people are curious about that sort of thing.”
For Chunkz and Filly, taking their show to the stage at Reading and Leeds allows them to celebrate the fanbase they’ve built up over the course of their podcast, and take in the energy of a real crowd. “It’s very wholesome just to be on stage with one of my best friends and perform to a crowd of people. I feel like we’ve been searching for that euphoric moment, and we can receive it at live shows,” says Chunkz.
The simple, intimate nature of podcasting might be at the heart of its appeal, but it’s also the main obstacle when it comes to translating a show to the live stage. Whiter says that the goal, whenever doing a Rest Is Politics live show, is to make it “feel live and fresh and new every time we do it,” by addressing the specifics of the venue and the crowd, rather than just having Campbell and Stewart sit on stage and do a regular episode of the show. For Fairless and Garroni, it’s about doing things that podcasting specifically doesn’t allow, such as utilising visual cues; one recurring bit, in which they display illustrations from Kim Cattrall’s book on sexual wellness, “always brings the house down,” says Garroni. Every Outfit’s shows follow a loose 90 minute script that allows “freedom to banter,” says Garroni, in part because the pair don’t consider themselves natural performers.
“It’s bizarre being on a stage performing, as someone who has never really had the desire to be a performer – podcasting is something that we do in isolation,” says Fairless. “It’s funny, we do the podcast because we’re antisocial and we just want to talk to each other about this stuff.”
Although many festivals are now programming dedicated podcast stages, Reading and Leeds’ the Aux skews towards comedy podcasts hosted by creators such as Ponder, who got her start making reaction videos on TikTok. Ponder will debut the live version of her podcast In Ayamé We Trust at Reading and Leeds, and says she doesn’t consider herself a main draw of the event as much as a zone where a punter can get away from festival chaos. “I don’t think anyone would want to see my podcast instead of a band – I think the podcast tent will provide a very different space, like, you get to see Artemas and all the other people playing, but also one of the social media people you follow is there.”
Ponder says that the constantly changing nature of fame and the evolution of social media – a world in which basically anyone can become a celebrity if they’re able to piggyback on a viral moment, or prove funny enough not to get unfollowed – has opened the door for people to idolise media figures in the way they idolise musicians and actors. “I wouldn’t say that I’m like, on the same level as Sabrina Carpenter, but I do think a lot of people are starting to listen to podcasts where they would have traditionally listened to music,” she says. “They’re becoming quite a big part of peoples’ lives.”
The data supports this: According to a 2023 report by Spotify, gen Z increased its podcast listenership by 58% between 2022 and 2023, driving some 250m podcast streams in the first half of 2023. Most listeners polled said they listen to podcasts for basically the same reasons everyone else does: to gain deeper insight on topics they’re interested in, hear differing opinions across the political spectrum, or simply wind down with some mindless content.
Chunkz says that podcasters are a more relatable kind of celebrity for audiences, as opposed to musicians. “With musicians, the majority of the time, I feel like they have that mysterious element to them – apart from performing, they don’t do much,” he says. There are simply more opportunities for a listener to get inside the head of their favourite podcaster: where an artist like Taylor Swift tends to hold her audience at arm’s length, forgoing press and only occasionally posting on social media, podcasters such as Joe Rogan are releasing hours of brand new content a day.
“I feel like people relate to us much more because of the fact that we’re much more personable, and we’re actually giving them more of our lives on our podcast,” Chunkz adds. “We speak for an hour a week, compared to [an artist who] just drops a song and then maybe you won’t see them until they drop another song.”
Fairless says that she and Garroni understand the close relationship that can be forged between listener and host because of their own podcast-listening experience. “Historically you find the rock star, the rapper, that speaks to something in you, and it makes sense that people would find that with podcasts,” she says. “I feel like a lot of people that listen to our podcast, specifically the people who listen to the four non-paywalled episodes a month and the paywalled episodes, they probably know me as well as some of my close friends at this point, just because they’re listening to me talk for six, seven hours a month, which is crazy.”
For Whiter, the rise of live podcasting can be directly linked to an increased interest in live experiences. “Definitely there’s that sense, coming out of Covid, that people wanted to go out and experience things with other people again,” he says.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether podcasting will really find an audience at festivals such as Reading and Leeds: vodka and Red Bull-fuelled orgies of teen debauchery that aren’t historically known for their audience’s patience and decorum. The Aux hasn’t been programmed because audiences have stopped listening to music, but because they now listen to vast swathes of all kinds of content. A lot of people simply hate silence, and need hours of content to fill it.
Ponder says that she won’t be upset if the audience chooses to skip her show in favour of, say, The Prodigy or Skrillex. “I’m not going to try to compete with all the other artists, and I won’t take it personally if people want to go to watch the main artists – I won’t cry about it,” she says. “My biggest fear would probably be that no one’s in the tent and I just have to perform to me and my producer. Although I’m used to that!”
