Black Podcasting Built a Media Empire While Cable News Argued About Representation

While Black America was being told, by the very institutions that had excluded it for a century, that representation in legacy media was the frontier of progress — that seeing a Black face behind the anchor desk or in the editor’s chair of a magazine that had ignored Black life for decades was the victory worth fighting for — something else was happening. Something quieter at first, then louder, then deafening in its implications for anyone willing to listen. Black podcasters, operating from bedrooms and basement studios and rented office spaces, with equipment that cost less than a single segment of cable news production, were building the most powerful independent media ecosystem in the United States. They were doing it without asking permission. They were doing it without corporate gatekeepers. They were doing it without the editorial filters that had decided, for generations, which Black voices were acceptable for mainstream consumption and which were too raw, too honest, too Black. And by the time the legacy media institutions noticed what had happened, it was already over. The battle for Black media independence had been won — not in boardrooms or diversity committees, but in podcast feeds.

The numbers are staggering and they deserve to be stated plainly. Edison Research and Triton Digital, which produce the Infinite Dial study — the longest-running survey of digital media consumer behavior in America — have documented that Black Americans are among the most avid podcast listeners in the country. As of their most recent data, approximately 43% of Black Americans aged 12 and older listen to podcasts monthly, a figure that has grown consistently year over year and that outpaces several other demographic groups. Black podcast listeners consume more episodes per week than the national average. They are more likely to listen to entire episodes rather than sampling. They are, by every metric the industry uses to measure audience value, a premium audience.

The Economics of Independence

Here is where the story becomes instructive, because the economics of Black podcasting reveal something fundamental about the relationship between media independence and economic power. When Spotify signed Joe Rogan to an exclusive deal worth a reported $200 million, the transaction was treated as a landmark event in the podcasting industry. And it was. But consider this: the collective audience of the top Black podcasts in America — The Joe Budden Podcast, The Read, Earn Your Leisure, The Breakfast Club podcast, Drink Champs, Brilliant Idiots, 85 South Show, and dozens of others — rivals or exceeds Rogan’s reach in key demographics. The combined weekly downloads of just the top twenty Black podcasts number in the tens of millions. And the total investment that platforms and advertisers have made in these shows is a fraction — a small, embarrassing fraction — of what has been invested in a single white podcast host.

This disparity is not incidental. It is structural. It reflects the same valuation gap that has existed in every American media industry since the first newspaper was printed: Black audiences are assumed to be less valuable, Black content is assumed to have a lower ceiling, and Black creators are assumed to need institutional validation before they can be taken seriously as businesses. The podcasting industry, despite its reputation for disruption, has replicated this pattern with remarkable fidelity. Spotify, Apple, iHeartMedia, and other platforms have invested billions in podcast content and infrastructure. The percentage of that investment directed to Black creators is not proportional to Black audience share, Black listener engagement, or Black content’s demonstrated commercial performance.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
— James Baldwin, 1962

Earn Your Leisure and the Financial Literacy Revolution

If you want to understand what Black podcasting has accomplished that legacy media never could, begin with Earn Your Leisure. Founded by Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings, two former teachers from the Bronx, EYL began as a straightforward financial literacy podcast and has grown into a media and education platform that reaches millions. Their content covers investing, entrepreneurship, real estate, business strategy, and economic empowerment, and it does so in language that is accessible, culturally specific, and unapologetically Black. They do not translate financial concepts from white institutional language into something Black audiences can understand. They speak directly, in the idiom of their community, about building wealth.

The impact is documented and measurable. EYL’s annual Invest Fest conference in Atlanta draws tens of thousands of attendees and has become one of the largest financial education events in the country. Their podcast episodes regularly exceed one million downloads. Their social media reach extends into the tens of millions. And they have accomplished this without a single segment on MSNBC, without a New York Times profile that treated them as curiosities, without the blessing of the legacy media institutions that still consider themselves the arbiters of which voices matter.

What Bilal and Millings understood — and what the media diversity advocates missed — is that the goal was never to get a seat at someone else’s table. The goal was to build your own table, set your own menu, and invite your own guests. And when you do that, when you remove the gatekeeper entirely, something remarkable happens: the content becomes better, the audience becomes more engaged, and the economic model becomes self-sustaining, because the creator is accountable to the audience rather than to the institution that employs them.

The Breakfast Club and the Power of Unfiltered Conversation

The Breakfast Club, hosted by DJ Envy, Angela Yee (until her departure), and Charlamagne tha God, represents a different model of Black podcasting power — one that began in traditional radio and migrated to the podcast format with an audience already in place. At its peak, The Breakfast Club was arguably the most influential media platform in Black America. Presidential candidates appeared on the show not as a novelty but as a necessity. Joe Biden’s infamous “you ain’t Black” comment was made on The Breakfast Club. Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and virtually every major political figure seeking Black support made the pilgrimage to the studio.

The show’s power derived from something that legacy media could not replicate: the unfiltered, extended conversation. A cable news interview lasts four to seven minutes. A Breakfast Club interview lasts thirty minutes to an hour. In that extended format, rehearsed talking points collapse. Authenticity, or its absence, becomes visible. The audience, which is sophisticated and unforgiving, renders its judgment in real time through social media. No press secretary can control this environment. No communications strategy can survive it. And that is precisely why it works: the format itself is a filter for honesty, and the audience values honesty above all else.

The Joe Budden Model: Ownership as Strategy

Joe Budden’s trajectory in podcasting is perhaps the most instructive case study in the economics of Black media independence. Budden, a former rapper, launched The Joe Budden Podcast and built it into one of the most popular podcasts in the country. Spotify signed him to an exclusive deal reportedly worth $10 to $25 million. Then Budden walked away. He left the deal, publicly, because he believed Spotify was undervaluing his content, extracting data from his audience that benefited the platform rather than the creator, and failing to offer equity or meaningful revenue sharing.

The decision was widely debated, but its logic was sound: Budden calculated that the long-term value of owning his audience, his content, and his distribution was greater than the short-term value of a platform deal. He returned to independent distribution, launched a subscription network, and maintained an audience of millions. The lesson was not lost on other Black podcasters. Ownership — of content, of audience data, of distribution channels — is the strategy that transforms a media career into a media business. And a media business, unlike a media career, builds generational wealth.

What the iHeartMedia Black Podcast Network Reveals

When iHeartMedia launched its Black Effect Podcast Network in partnership with Charlamagne tha God, it was an acknowledgment of something the industry could no longer ignore: Black podcasting was not a niche. It was a market. The network, which hosts dozens of shows across genres from comedy to news to wellness to finance, was designed to aggregate Black podcast audiences into a single platform that could command premium advertising rates. It was, in other words, the institutional media world’s attempt to catch up with what independent Black podcasters had already built.

The network’s existence is both a validation and a cautionary tale. Validation because it confirms the commercial power of Black podcast content. Cautionary because it represents the familiar pattern of institutional capture: independent creators build something valuable, a corporation offers resources and scale in exchange for a share of the value, and the question of who ultimately controls the content and profits becomes, over time, the only question that matters.

The Blueprint for Black Media Independence

What Black podcasting has demonstrated, with the clarity of a controlled experiment, is that the gatekeeping model of media was never a natural law. It was an artifact of technology and capital requirements. When you needed a printing press to publish, a broadcast license to air, and millions of dollars of equipment to produce, gatekeepers were inevitable. The people who controlled the capital controlled the message. But podcasting requires a microphone, a computer, and an internet connection. The capital barrier is essentially zero. And when the capital barrier is zero, the gatekeeper is unnecessary, and when the gatekeeper is unnecessary, the question of “representation” in legacy institutions becomes, not irrelevant exactly, but secondary to a far more powerful question: what can we build ourselves?

The answer, as documented by audience data, revenue figures, and cultural influence, is: everything. Black podcasters have built news platforms, education empires, entertainment franchises, and political media operations that rival or exceed the influence of cable news networks, major newspapers, and legacy magazines. They have done it on their own terms, with their own voices, serving their own communities. And they have proven that the Black audience — far from being the niche market that legacy media imagined — is enormous, engaged, loyal, and willing to pay for content that respects its intelligence.

The blueprint is clear. Own your content. Own your audience data. Build direct relationships with your listeners that no platform can intermediate. Diversify revenue across advertising, subscriptions, live events, merchandise, and educational products. And never, under any circumstances, allow the value of your voice to be determined by an institution that did not recognize that value until you had already proven it without them.

This is not a metaphor for Black economic empowerment. It is Black economic empowerment, happening in real time, documented by the data, and available as a model for every other sector where Black Americans have been told that progress requires permission from institutions that were never designed to grant it. The microphone is open. The audience is listening. The only question that remains is whether the next generation of Black media creators will follow the podcasting model — build it yourself, own it yourself, serve your community directly — or whether they will be seduced, once again, by the promise of representation in someone else’s house.