Podcast signs $60 million Spotify deal

[duncanthetall]

Sounds like you absolutely LOOOOOOOOVE it more than them
ass nikka

Stop projecting, fakkit

 

[RareHunter]

All this money to talk about getting banged all day? Lol.

 

[null]

 

[Sonny Bonds]

Don't even know what Barstool really does, how big it is, and I don't know anyone who even listens/watches it. It's basically just sports podcasts, shows, and skits, and articles, right? Mostly on social media and on the website? Right-wing leaning?

The president of Barstool has been on Fox News multiple times when Robinhood was stopping people from trading Gamestop. And I think he's also talked shyt about Biden as well.

I'm not entirely sure what they do. I think they're a media company for podcasts, bloggers, and YouTubers. But Call Her Daddy is consistently in the top 5 on Apple Podcasts. I think they also do sports betting.

 

[old pig]

The real story here is that there used to be 2 hosts, but they had a falling out about a year ago.

The other host left and started her own podcast a little while ago. I wonder how she feels about the Spotify deal. I'd be upset.

ok…I knew this podcast sounded familiar…ironically I only heard of it cuz joe budden spoke on their situation on his podcast a good while ago

 

[old pig]

Which one.. take ya pick... Budden.. Rogan... game six

lmaooo

 

[BlackAchilles]

You know in Interview With A Vampire, when Lestat drinks the dead blood, and he “dies”? That’s what she looks like.

Might have to watch this tonite off the strength of that reference

 

[Roid Jones]

Not surprised at this, there is a market for everything, I want potential black creatives to understand this

 

[ThrobbingHood]

Coli nikkas we need to get our collective heads together and create a podcast...

TheColi Court

Like the breakfast club minus the celeb guests. we talk shyt about hiphop, social media, black celebs etc

Who's with me?

Breh, years ago, I invested a ton of money trying to start a podcast with me and my boys. Our WhatsApp group was hilarious and I tried to monetize it. It went well for a while but you know…. nikkas!

If guys on here really want to do it then go ahead. Black social media influencers and podcasters are eating. No where near as much as CACs but as someone said earlier, we always get low balled, despite the fact we get ripped off the most. CAC culture has been bland.

 

[bnew]

Alex Cooper: $0 to $160m in 6 years​

Breaking down the contracts that sent the "Call Her Daddy" podcaster from unemployed ($0) to Barstool Sports ($70k) to Spotify ($60m) and, now, SiriusXM ($100m) in 6 years.​

Trungphan2

Aug 21, 2024

21 2 Share



Alex Cooper interviewing Post Malone aka the man behind “White Iverson”, which I listened to 10,000x in the summer of 2015 (YouTube / Call Her Daddy)

Alex Cooper just signed a $100m deal with SiriusXM.

The multi-year agreement allows the satellite radio provider to exclusively paywall content and sell ads for Cooper’s podcast Call Her Daddy (and a network of other shows that she is producing under the brand Unwell for her media company Trending).

This is the latest peak in a 6-year professional climb that has seen Cooper go from unemployed in 2018 to a $70k contract with Barstool Sports to a $60m contract with Spotify in 2021 and, now, her first 9-figure deal.

Call Her Daddy is one of the world’s biggest podcasts: #2 on Spotify in 2023 with 10 million listeners an episode — aka The Daddy Gang — according to the Wall Street Journal (and not far behind Joe Rogan, who does 11-12 million listeners an episode including me usually at 3.5x speed).

It’s been a meteoric rise for the 30-year old, who graduated from Boston University with a degree in film and TV studies before moving to New York and launching Call Her Daddy with her roommate Sofia Franklyn (who would become an ex-cohost as we’ll discuss later).

The show was originally described as “locker talk for girls” and covered a lot of relationship, sex and early-20s partying lifestyle stuff (I haven’t done many of these episodes but did hear the “gluck gluck 9000” bit, which is equally wild to listen to at 1x speed as it is at 3.5x speed).

Cooper now primarily does deep dives celebrity interviews including John Mayer, Jane Fonda, Heidi Klum, Simone Biles and (the absolute legend) Post Malone.

This journey from raunchy content to top-tier celebrity interviews echoes the path taken by Howard Stern, SiruisXM’s marquee name and one-time radio shock jock.

Cooper made the transition at warp speed, though. Before launching Call Her Daddy just 6 years ago, Cooper said that she “didn’t even know what an RSS feed was”.

But she went all in and became a true craftsperson of the format. In a viral 2020 YouTube video explaining her break-up with co-host Sofia, Cooper explained her process:

[Call Her Daddy] is not edited like any other podcast. When we first started, I had never heard of a podcast but I was blogging and I knew that our millennial generation and Gen Z…have a very short time span of attention.

In five minutes we're all bored, so the goal was to essentially edit the Call Her Daddy podcast like a vlog. […]

[We] will record 3 hours worth of content and then I will edit it down to about an hour. I spend more time editing the show than we do writing and recording. […]

To give you guys an idea: the editing [for one episode] will take me about 7 hours to 20 hours. It's a multi-day process usually. And I'm proud of it. I think it's an amazing idea. I think that the Millennials obviously love the show and I think the editing is great. You never find a boring moment.

I give you all of this context as a pre-amble to discuss the original 3-year contract that Cooper signed with Barstool Sports, the huge sports and comedy media platform founded by Dave Portnoy.

Why? Because Cooper’s aforementioned break-up with Sofia led to terms of their Barstool contract becoming public and provided very interesting details.

When Cooper announced that she was signing with Spotify for $60m in June 2021, I wrote the following thread on Twitter about her Barstool Sports deal:



Portnoy re-tweeted the thread and I’ve reproduced it for this piece with updated details.

---

Call Her Daddy​

In 2018, Alex Cooper launched Call Her Daddy on Barstool with only $70k in guaranteed money. Three years later, she closed a $60m deal with Spotify.

It’s a fascinating business story for internet-first media.

Fortunately, Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy has laid it all out in two separate podcasts: 1) the first one was in May 2020 when Call Her Daddy was on hiatus during a contract dispute; and 2) the second one was when Cooper left Barstool Sports for Spotify.

Some background on the show: Call Her Daddy — a female-led podcast that covers sex, culture, relationships etc.— launched in 2018 on with two hosts (Alex, Sofia). They split in 2020. By 2021, Cooper had taken the show to the #5 most-streamed on Spotify.



The catalyst for Call Her Daddy’s rise took place four episodes into the show.

Portnoy randomly saw a teaser clip for the show on Instagram and was very impressed. He had mutual friends with Cooper from the New York social scene and set up a meeting.

Here is how Portnoy remembers finding the podcast (every pull quote moving forward is from Portnoy):

The first time I saw Call Her Daddy was on Alex’s Instagram feed. I saw a little teaser, like a two-minute clip.

I’m like “oh, this is pretty interesting. What is this? I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

So, I reached out to Alex to find out what she was doing with the podcast that set off probably a chain of 6 to 8 meetings with just Alex. We didn’t know who [former co-host] Sofia was.

[Alex] actually told me she did all the editing herself, which impressed me. This is somebody who is very smart. And I think could have a chance to do something big.

Barstool has an incredible track record of launching media careers — particularly in sports (Dan “Big Cat” Katz, Kevin “KFC” Clancy, Eric “PFT Commenter” Sollenberger, Pat McAfee, Paul Bissonnette, Ryan Whitney) — but the site didn’t really have anything similar to Call Her Daddy.

For Barstool, the show was an opportunity to go after an entirely new demographic (Gen-Z and millennial females).

In 2018, Barstool offered Alex and Sofia each a 3-year deal:

• ~$70k base
  
• % of merchandise
  
• bonus on podcast downloads
  

But, crucially, Barstool kept the Call Her Daddy intellectual property (IP):

If [Alex and Sofia didn’t] give us ownership of Call Her Daddy, it made no sense. We don’t want to blow [them] up and then have [them] walk out the door.

We didn’t want that to be the situation. We came to an agreement. It was either take it or leave it. We weren’t going to do this deal if we didn’t get the IP. So, we got the IP.

Why would Cooper and her partner take the deal? Portnoy’s pitch for any content creator is that Barstool Sports is a fast-track to success by combining a person’s talent and hard work with Barstool’s distribution and marketing savvy:

I told Alex what I tell every single person that I signed here on the content side: “At the end of the three years — or however long your contract is — the best-case scenario when you walk out the door, you’re a huge star and you can renegotiate with us for a lot more money. Or your value is so great, you can go somewhere else.”

You can ask any of the 200 people who work here. If you have success, we’re more than happy to renegotiate. There’s nothing we like doing more than paying people more money because they’re doing well.

Call Her Daddy is an instant smash hit and the girls end up making very good bank in the first year: Alex pull in $506k while Sofia makes $461k (Cooper — who did editing and ran the social media and marketing — made more money because Portnoy and former Barstool Sports CEO Erika Ayers Badan gave her a raise after a few months for the extra work).

While the original contract was for 3 years, the girls were allowed to renegotiate it at the end of every year.

With the show’s success, the duo pushed for a new contract in year 2:

• $1m guaranteed
  
• Become freelancers (not Barstool employees)
  
• 50% of merch, ads etc.
  
• Get back the Call Her Daddy IP
  

Barstool balked at the offer and found out that the girls — with the help of Sofia's boyfriend (who worked at HBO and Portnoy called “Suitman” or “a bad guy from James Bond movie who thinks he’s smarter than he is”) — are shopping Call Her Daddy to other podcast networks.

One of the competing offers for the show is from the Wondery podcast network, which is now owned by Amazon (the girls would call the new show “The Fathers”).

Portnoy and Barstool was ready to take legal action if that deal was signed:

[They are] under a 3-year contract. What makes you think you can just get up and leave? Like what company would sign somebody, if the second they get bigger, you’re just going to walk out the door.

The analogy that I always used with them was like an athlete analogy. If you sign a 3-year contract with the Boston Red Sox and at the All-Star Break, you’re doing really well…well, you can’t just pick up and go to the New York Yankees because they’re going to pay you more. You gotta wait until the contract is done.

 

[bnew]

During the contract stand-off, the Call Her Daddy podcast feed goes offline for 5 weeks in the Spring of 2020. This was early-COVID and Portnoy said that Barstool Sports was losing out on $100k of advertising per episode. It wasn’t a huge impact on the company but it was the start of the pandemic and he felt it was important to keep every revenue line going.

To get the show back on the air, Portnoy offers the girls:

• $500k base salary
  
• 7.5% of merchandise
  
• A 6-month reduction in the contract length
  
• Barstool gets 80% of any alcohol sales (if Call Her Daddy releases a drink)

Most importantly, the girls will get the Call Her Daddy IP back after the end of the contract.

Portnoy made this offer to the girls in person on the rooftop of his apartment. Cooper wants to jump on the deal (in her YouTube video I mentioned at the top, she recalled thinking that the only other major media talent to get their IP back after similar media legal battles was David Letterman and Howard Stern).

Sofia doesn’t like the deal and this is when the two split. There is obviously an element of “she-said-she-said” (you can listen to Sofia reflecting on the break-up here) but it is clear that Alex is the only one that wanted to take that rooftop offer.

Alex returns to the show and continues growing the podcast into a hit. Fast forward to June 2021, Spotify is amidst a major podcast investment phase and inks Cooper to an exclusive $60m deal over 3 years.

For its part, Barstool Sports was able to keep a percentage of the Call Her Daddy merchandise for a few years.

Portnoy talked about Cooper’s time at Barstool and explained why the math didn’t make sense once her 3-year contract expired:

I know how much Call Her Daddy made before and we would have had to play it perfectly to warrant [the amount of money that Spotify paid].

If we do a contract like [$60m over three years], we’re going to be in your ass about it. It’s so much money. It’s like “Hey, you got to do this ad”. I don’t want to be in that position [of always pushing you to make money]. And it’s like, she didn’t really [want that] either.

Once you have a star, it almost gets to the point in a weird way that there’s such little margin to make anything on it because the agents are driving [prices] up. These are big-time agents, like those repping athletes. She’s on that level.

Portnoy also shared thoughts on why the deal made sense for Spotify at the time:

It always helps the company that you’re going to because you’re bringing the audience. We already had the audience.

It’s a huge difference when the company that’s acquiring — who didn’t have the talent — is always going to benefit more than the company that already had it in terms of building audience.

Was Alex going to bring us tons of audience in the next 3 years? Probably not. She’s already brought the majority of her audience. Spotify is throwing money around. And I don’t think they necessarily want to look at her to turn a profit. They’re just building audience and competing versus Apple. That type of thing.

Podcasts follow power laws just like every other media format (by one measure “the top 25 podcasts reach ~ 50% of U.S. weekly listeners”). At the end of the day, superstar creators (e.g., Rogan, Cooper, Stern) are like top-tier athletes and they get to dictate their own destiny:

We wanted to keep her. Clearly, she’s a monster. And for that reason — that she’s a monster — she got big offers.

This is the nature of the beast. You signed somebody who is unknown, she explodes. It’s not different than an athlete contract. She was always going to make millions. She was that big. She has [Joe] Rogan-esque numbers.

Losing Cooper was no doubt a hit. It was a situation Barstool Sports was built for, though.

And Portnoy ended up doing one of the craziest media deals ever a few years later: Over a series of transactions from 2020 to 2023, he sold Barstool Sports to Penn Gaming for ~$500m with the goal to build a media-gambling juggernaught. The combination didn’t work out as planned and Penn sold Barstool Sports back to Portnoy for $1 with certain non-compete agreements and the rights to 50% of any future Barstool sale or liquidity event.

Portnoy says he will never sell again. So, he effectively sold Barstool Sports for $500m and got it back for a $1 (and the company makes $100m+ a year). Wild.

Anyway, let’s get back to Cooper.

---

Why Cooper is Leaving Spotify for SiriusXM?​

The rationale that Portnoy laid out for why Barstool didn’t keep Cooper has echoes with her decision to leave Spotify and sign with SiriusXM.

Who needs the audience?

Spotify has grown its podcast platform significantly in the past few years. Per WSJ, it now has 100 million podcast listeners (a 10x increase from 2019) and has topped Apple, the former go-to app for the industry. Apple — which is literally the source for the word “podcast” (a combination of “iPod” and “broadcast”) — was the leader in the space by default. But the entire podcast industry ($10B+) is a drop in the bucket for Apple ($383B revenue in 2023), so the Apple Podcast app has always been an afterthought. Legit, the app has been basically unchanged for the past two decades. They don’t give AF and Apple is now 3rd behind Spotify and YouTube for podcasts (the Google-owned site is now #1 based on strength of discovery and the industry's pivot to video-first content).

The reason that Spotify made the $1B+ push into podcasting was to pivot its business away from just music. Why? Because Spotify has to pay record labels 60-70% of its revenue for rights to stream the songs.

Podcasting offers a way for Spotify to keep listeners on the app and sell ads against that usage (thus diversifying from mostly subscriptions and providing a revenue stream that actually improves its margins with scale).

Cooper’s $60m contract was part of Spotify’s spending spree to become the world’s leading podcast platform including deals for:

• Content: Joe Rogan in 2020 ($200m); The Ringer in 2020 (~$200m); Gimlet Media in 2019 ($230m)
  
• Technology: Anchor in 2019 (~$100m for podcasting creation software); Megaphone in 2020 ($235m for a podcast hosting service); Podsights and Chartable in 2022 (<$50m for advertising measurement tools)
  

To be sure, Spotify's podcasting unit has seen a lot of turmoil and there have been huge flops (like Prince Harry and Meghan Markle receiving $20m to produce…ugh, basically nothing).

Over the past year, Spotify has really tightened its podcast spend following a round of layoffs and new (less splashy) offers for talent. Trevor Noah’s deal is emblematic of the changing approach: it’s a $4m contract and Spotify gets to “collect revenue” from the podcast until it re-coups the investment (and then the split is 50/50 on future ad sales).

While Joe Rogan recently re-upped with Spotify for $250m, the structure is set up so that Spotify can re-coup the investment by selling ads across Rogan’s various distribution channels (it’s no longer exclusive to Spotify).

With Cooper’s contract about to expire, it was clear that she wanted more than Spotify was willing to offer.

Enter SiriusXM. The satellite radio service knows about the economics of paying a single voice huge dollars. Since 2005, Sirius has given Howard Stern bigger and bigger contracts. He is now making $100m a year. Is he worth that much? One analyst estimated that if Stern left Sirius, the platform would lose 15% of its subscriber base.

But Stern’s contract is up in 2025 and SiriusXM may be trying to create some leverage or have a plan B. Call Her Daddy — and Cooper’s network of new talent — isn’t the only $100m investment by Sirius this year. In January, the ~$13B media company spent $100m on a 3-year deal for exclusive rights to the SmartLess podcast hosted by Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes.

It’s worthwhile to do a quick sanity check on these reported figures. Understandably, talent and companies float out large headline numbers. I’m going to say that Cooper’s $60m deal with Spotify was fully paid out. She was royalty on the platform and Spotify was spending big.

As for Cooper’s $100m+ SiriusXM deal: I haven’t confirmed yet but think it is over 3 years (same as Smartless). That’s ~$33m a year. If Cooper does 10 million listens an episode and publishes 2x a week, that’s 100 core pieces of ad inventory. Let’s assume she does the ad reads and give her a high cost per mille (CPM) — aka cost per thousand listens — of $30. That’s ~$30m a year in ads. It’s a wash and even if the CPM is lower, SiriusXM definitely modelled in the value of her attracting new subscribers and preventing churn. Finally, the market will reward the stock for having a younger talent (Stern is 66 years old) to anchor the product moving forward if the integration works out well.

It makes sense and whatever happens with Stern’s next contract, it’s clear that Cooper is grabbing the torch and is well on her way to being her generation’s Oprah (after Cooper's deal was announced, Travis and Jason Kelce were able to parlay their popular New Heights podcast — which has been around for only 2 years — into a $100m deal with Wondery, and the pair will help anchor that podcast network with their audience).

I’ll wrap this up with a conversation from Call Her Daddy in May. Portnoy went on the podcast for the first time since Cooper left Barstool Sports. Both of them were at the Kentucky Derby and chopped it up for 40 minutes.

At the end of the episode, Cooper asked Portnoy, “do you still owe me money?”

He shot back, “what were you doing before [Call Her Daddy]?”

She laughed and said, “I was unemployed. I was on unemployment checks blogging it up.”

From unemployed to $60m in 3 years then to $100m in another 3 years.

Of course, there’s always timing and luck with this type of outsized success. Cooper was able to combine her media instincts with hard work along with the right partner (Barstool) during a digital craze (lockdown COVID) and built the right following (Gen Z/millennial females) at the exact moment a major tech platform (Spotify) was willing to back up the Brinks truck to acquire a podcast audience…and that contract expires as another major audio player (SiriusXM) is looking for a young foundational talent.

Add it all up and Cooper is playing the media mogul game at 3.5x speed.

 

[50CentStan]

Stupid which bytch content makes a lot of money. Sad

 

[Diddly Drogba]

Stupid which bytch content makes a lot of money. Sad

Don't be a hater congratulate her