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Why Podcast Pioneer Joe Budden Will Never Sell Out
Posted
August 10, 2026
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610
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August 10, 2026
610
43
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5:41Now PlayingBack in 2015, talent manager Ian Schwartzman emailed Spotify with a request—his client, rapper Joe Budden, wanted to add episodes of his newly launched podcast to his artist profile on the music streaming platform. “And the response I got was comical,” Schwartzman tells Forbes, “It was, ‘What is podcasting?’”
A decade later, podcasting has become a cornerstone of media, and Spotify is competing with companies such as Amazon, iHeartMedia, SiriusXM and now even Netflix in a market that has grown from less than $100 million in annual revenue a decade ago into a $9 billion industry. Budden and Schwartzman have spent the intervening years doing everything they can to earn a slice of that ever-growing pie, bootstrapping The Joe Budden Network to an estimated $20 million in earnings over the past 12 months, enough to be ranked among the highest-paid podcasters in the world for 2026. And unlike nearly every other performer on that list, they did it without a broad distribution and ad sales deal from a major media company, or a private equity investor.
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