Magnificent Noise’s Eric Nuzum on Covering Audio as an Industry Insider

Jeff Umbro: This is Podcast Perspectives, a show about the latest news in the podcast industry and the people behind it. I'm your host, Jeff Umbro, founder and CEO of The Podglomerate. Today I'm speaking with Eric Nuzum, co-founder of the production company Magnificent Noise and writer of the newsletter Audio Insurgent.

Eric has more experience than most in the audio industry, starting in public radio in the late 90s, helping to launch NPR's podcast division in the early 2000s, before moving to Audible 11 years later to help launch their commercial division, and then in 2018 launching Magnificent Noise, a boutique podcast production company that works with folks from CNN, ESPN, The Met, Stanford, and many more very high-profile, prestigious clients.

Today, on the podcast, we will chat about his newsletter covering the podcast industry, how he's thinking about the state of that industry, and how his agency approaches production. Let's get to it.

Well, thank you so much for joining us, Eric. How are you?

Eric Nuzum: I'm doing well. Thanks.

Jeff Umbro: You have done a million different things. So I figured for this interview, we'll break it into three sections. The first section will be your industry writing. Why do you write about the podcast industry as somebody who is working in that industry?

Eric Nuzum: There's two reasons. One is very practical: I get work as a consultant and producer as a result of the things that I say and do in that newsletter. I think it attracts people who are looking for someone to help them with problems. That on its own is worth doing. Also, writing for me – and writing about audio –  is not new, even though Audio Insurgent is about two, almost two and a half years old.

I've been writing about media for longer than 20 years. I continue to write even through the evolution of podcasting, [I] even [wrote] when I was [at] NPR. I didn't publish as much when I was at NPR because NPR is very sensitive to what I would say, but I still did publish some. And then Audible also was a little sensitive about me writing externally, though I did continue to do some. 

And then I had a couple of people approach me about writing a book about podcasting, and I had said no. And then one day I changed my mind – what made the difference, I have no idea. But I ended up saying I would write a book contract and then realized I wouldn't be able to do that while working at Audible. 

And that was one of the [reasons] we started Magnificent Noise and left Audible. The plan was Jesse was pregnant with her third child and I had this book. I had said I would write and I had to finish. I'm like, “okay, you go off and create a life. I'm going to go write this book and then we'll meet up in a couple of months and we'll start Magnificent Noise.” And that's basically what we did.

Jeff Umbro: One of the things that I'm always very curious about, including with making this show, is we work in an industry that is not that large. I'm constantly worried about stepping on toes and upsetting the wrong people because they're the same people that hire us for jobs in the future, or [have] historically. How do you navigate that? And is it something you even think about?

Eric Nuzum: I have a reputation for speaking plainly and clearly about things, even when [it’s] uncomfortable. I’ve never had someone drop me as a client or not take me because they felt I was too opinionated or opinionated the wrong way.

My opinions have caught up with me before. I remember when I was at NPR once, I had written a piece and spoken at a conference advocating for NPR [to put] its main magazine programs on Sirius satellite radio. It was a very unpopular opinion in the public radio system at the time. And shortly after I got hired at NPR, a stage manager actually brought it up in a board meeting, [and said] “how can we trust you when he's working here now? He was an advocate for this idea.” which was a cheap shot, but…

Jeff Umbro: There are a handful of articles I'll see over the years where I just [think] like, “oh wow, that's a strong opinion to put out in writing to the universe.” I don't really feel that way with your writing. 

Eric Nuzum: Even though I have a reputation for speaking plainly, I am very careful and thoughtful about what I say and I do give thought to [whether] this [is] something I want to have out in the world and can never take back.

And see, I think generally I'm not afraid to make mistakes and I'm not afraid to take risks that [aren't] guaranteed to work out. And so I think that this is perhaps an extension of that. I put a lot of thought into the decisions I make, the things I advocate for, and the things that I advise to clients I work with. I give it a lot of thought and I think I spend a lot of time educating myself so that my opinions are informed, but I am happy to be wrong. I am happy to be very publicly wrong. 

And also you'll find I will correct myself and say, “you know, I said this and now I don't believe that anymore.” People come back to me and say, “oh, five years ago you wrote this thing and said X.” I'm like, “yeah, that was five years ago. The world has changed. I'm allowed to change my opinion.” Right?

Jeff Umbro: And I want to be very clear, because as I'm listening to this, I do think it sounds like I'm accusing you or something, but I promise I'm not. I think that you do an amazing job and I think there's a lot of writing in every industry where people are not as thoughtful. And sometimes that's just inexperience and sometimes it's intentional. But I think about that a lot with podcast media specifically, because – I'm probably wrong here – but I would guess that there's like 1000 people in the world that are working in this industry right now. That's very small.

So what results have you seen from your writing, both direct and indirect? What kind of success have you seen there? 

Eric Nuzum: Well, it's interesting. I think the main motivation I have for writing is because it helps me figure out [my feelings]. My mother used to make me do this when I was a child. She would tell me to write my feelings, write how I felt as a way of dealing with my feelings, just to help me understand why I'm angry, why am I mad, why am I feeling sad, why am I really excited? 

And I think I've kept that now when I'm looking at moves the companies make, or I look at changes in the industry, I'm like, “what do I think about this?” And the way I process it is by writing it down. 

But when I think of the effect, it's really weird because sometimes I'll put something out in the world and it'll feel absolutely cathartic to have this out. I just released a multi-part [newsletter] about public radio in the United States. [It] was actually [an] accumulation of almost a year's worth of thinking. I've been writing, taking notes on… And to put it out in the world, like I couldn't sleep the night before. I was so nervous about how people would react to it.

And I put it out in the world – they always go on at 6am – I get up that morning ]and] I'm like, “what changed?” It's like, nothing changed. But then a couple of people reached out, a couple of major market stations, who [said they] were convening groups of people together to talk about what I wrote.

And it was actually a framework. I don't really expect people to do literally what I say. What I want them to do is to see the problem and to come up with a solution on their own and implement it. And that's really gratifying to see that when someone comes up with an answer that I hadn't even thought of.

Jeff Umbro: As someone who also works with many public radio stations, I totally get it. That series of articles really did pinpoint an identity situation with a lot of public media stations that we've worked with, where everyone can very clearly recognize the problem, but the solutions are still playing under the old rule book. It's very clear which stations are throwing that rule book out the window and really succeeding because of it. 

As you point out, and as most people realize, a lot of these public radio journalists are just the best at what they do, they've been doing it for a long time. They're really talented and creative. And if you let them do the thing that they're good at, it doesn't really matter what format or rules you're using to do it – within reason – people want to listen to those shows, that content, and those stories.

This is actually a great transition to get into the second bucket, which is going to be the podcast industry. So I am curious what you think of the podcast industry right now? And the follow up is what you think of the broadcast industry?

Eric Nuzum: Let's switch that around and let's talk about broadcast first, because I think there's lessons in there for what's happening for podcasting right now. 

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 did a lot of things that completely radicalized and revolutionized the broadcast industry, mostly by removing some of the arcane and archaic ownership restrictions. And at the time there were people ringing alarm bells saying, this is going to destroy this industry because it's going to change it at a DNA level. And ownership was the catalyst, but I don't know if that was really the problem. 

I think broadcast switched from being in the broadcasting, community-voice business of connecting with listeners and creating a community – it got out of that business and got into the advertising business. Now, there's nothing wrong with the advertising business, but it's like, are we creating something that a lot of people listen to, love, get excited about, and then [we find] smart ways to monetize that? Or are we just trying to trick people into sticking around long enough for us to give them an ad? 

I think that that is definitely what happened in broadcast radio and I think to some extent broadcast television. [The idea is:] let's just keep people around long enough to show a 12-minute run of advertising, knowing that at the end of that, we're going to burn all those people away. But then we're going to start again because we're promising we're going to have some outrageous thing or something that really doesn't really connect with people. 

That's what I really feel about the broadcast industries. It made a bunch of decisions and inflicted a lot of pain on itself. And they figured by the time the pain was felt, they wouldn't be around anymore. And it ended up being true.

Jeff Umbro: I read the obituary of one of the founders of Clear Channel a couple of years ago, and there was a quote in there saying that [the show’s iHeart produces are] a vehicle for – and I don't actually remember if they referred to iHeart or Clear Channel – but the shows they were producing were a vehicle for advertising, directly confirming what you're suggesting in that answer. 

And so how do you feel that that will or is impacting the commercial podcast space? 

Eric Nuzum: So the podcast industry has always been driven by people who are really passionate about talking about something to a group of people who appreciate it and see its value. I don't care if you're talking about a high school football team, [or] telling a mysterious story as a narrative, or you're talking about history, or you're advocating for a marginalized community, or just trying to create a safe gathering space for people who care about something.

It’s all driven by passion, all driven by the importance of being able to get something out, and know that someone out there is receiving it – it can be a handful of people or it can be millions of people. But that basic equation doesn't change. 

The challenges figure out how to monetize it. And I think that the economic instability that the industry has seen has been a natural correction of this unbridled enthusiasm [and] infusion of money with no clear idea how it's ever going to be recouped. There're [also] the general advertising woes that have plagued any media company that uses advertising.

I think another big contributor [to] this problem has been, for many years, a very small number of people, including myself, were sounding the alarm bells about the over-dependence on advertising as a revenue source. There are like four different sources of revenue. Advertising alone is great when the money is just flying in [and]  you don't have enough inventory to fill all the orders you're getting for advertising. Then when that cycle goes down, you're going to really be grateful that you have these other forms of revenue, and nobody did.

And now everybody's hurting as a result of it. The people who aren't hurting are the people who did think about some of those issues. A lot of this is natural. None of it is surprising. I think that it leaves the industry in an incredibly conservative place without a lot of risk tolerance, without a lot of vision beyond selling ads in the next quarter or next two quarters. And that too is cyclical and it will circle back again, undoubtedly. I hope as quickly as possible. 

But there will be somebody who does something really adventurous and fun and finds a way to pay for it and does really well with it. And that will inspire other people to do the same thing. Here we go again for another loop to loop.

Jeff Umbro: It's so funny, I talk about this all the time. I had a meeting with another public radio station the other day. And they were very concerned about the last year in advertising and what their revenues were looking like. And I made a comment, very similar to what you just did, [that] it's all cyclical. Two years from now, we're going to be back to where we were two years ago, where the money was flowing and then we're going to have another crash at some point after that.

I guess my question for you is – you've been watching this for 20 plus years – has it been happening? I know scale is different, but has this been the case since day one or is this more something that we've seen since Serial? Since 2014?

Eric Nuzum: I think that the current meteoric rise and very quick correction is much more extreme than anything we've ever seen. And a couple of years from now, we'll look back at this time and think this was quaint compared to what we're doing at that point. 

Jeff Umbro: I hope not, but…

Eric Nuzum: Well, it's probably likely to happen. As the medium grows, the stakes grow. 

I get very angry when I see these companies laying off dozens, or in some cases hundreds of people because of their own shitty decision making. They brought these people on, didn't give them the right set of instructions or give them what they needed to succeed, and who loses their job? The executives who thought it all [up]? No, they're fine. In fact, sometimes they walk away great. But the people they hired who trusted them, who believed in them, they're the ones who got hurt. And that really makes me angry.

But let's not confuse that with the many of the projects they're working on we're never going to be sustainable. They had been poorly engineered. They've been poorly managed. And in those circumstances, that situation was inevitable and just all happened at once.

But I think that the economic correction forced a lot of podcast companies to make decisions that they knew they needed to make, but they just weren't pushed to do it. A lot of these cancellations had to happen.

Jeff Umbro: On several episodes of this show, we've talked about that. I spoke with Brian Barletta on a recent episode about this new iOS 17 change. And it's great that we're going to get more robust data that's a lot more accurate. But at the same time, this is going to directly correspond to revenue for a lot of these older, bigger companies, which is going to directly correspond with future layoffs. So it's one of those things where sometimes it is management, sometimes it is like poor decision making, and sometimes it's just a maturing industry.

So for the third topic I want to spend some time talking about Magnificent Noise and where you guys fit into this industry, because I think that you are a lean, diligent, and thoughtful company in terms of what you do and how you do it. So just to start, can you walk us through the structure of what you do and how you do it?

Eric Nuzum: Yeah, so Magnificent Noises was started by Jesse Baker and myself in 2018. One of the first things we thought was important – we've rethought and questioned this a number of times – [was] we wanted to stay small, like not grow too fast. Because we felt that when people were hiring us, they were hiring us. Like the two of us. And we needed to make sure that we had our hands on everything that the company did, not necessarily on a day to day basis, but that we had influenced and affected how this sounds and how good it can be. And that's why people hire us is because they just didn't want someone to be a factory. They want someone to care about this product.

And we do a mixture of [kinds of work], depending on the month. I probably spend 30 percent of my time doing consulting and 70 percent of my time running shows and overseeing shows. 

We occupy a very unique space, not just because we're not trying to scale up, but we're also not really a consumer facing company. We work for other companies for the most part. We put [out] a handful of original shows, but for the most part, we help other people create things. We've worked on the Esther Perel podcast since they started, and it [gets] a million downloads an episode, down to some things which are equally breathtaking and interesting that may get 10,000 downloads an episode. 

And so our reputation is for being very exact and doing things that don't exist in the world. We're not afraid to invent something new. What we tell people all the time is if you just want to have a couple of voices, you want to sit around the table and have an off-the-cuff conversation, there are so many talented producers who could do that for you, and that's not going to be interesting to us. So we tend to refer a lot of that work to other people. 

So we do the hard stuff. 

Jeff Umbro: And it shows. The shows that you guys create are listened to by millions of people. You've won all kinds of awards. You get critical acclaim left and right. You mentioned earlier that there are certain clients that are not the right fit for you. Who is a client that is who you're looking for? Like, what's the profile?

Eric Nuzum: So I'd say that as a company, we work with a lot of fairly large institutions: media companies, philanthropic organizations, major talent... Because I think we know how to handle those things well from our experience with it. 

We have a show that the CEO of Ford [hosts]. His name is Jim Farley. [When] he walks in the door, he's excited to have this conversation. There's a passion and drive there. It's odd because the show's called Drive. He's ready to go and this is a break for him. It's fun and he enjoys doing it and he's ready to go. And he's just like a hundred percent in that moment. You can't fake being interested in something or excited about something and he brings that. That's what I think makes the show work so well. So I think that the primary thing for us and what the profile is, is somebody who's really excited to do this project. 

Another thing about our clients – I have a vibe check that I use for myself, where if I'm not excited to tell someone about what I'm working on, that's usually a sign that I should refer that project to somebody else. If we do interviews for episodes and I'm not wanting to tell everyone I know what I learned in that episode, it's somebody else's project, not ours. 

Not everything we do works. We're not going to take something off our website because it didn't do as well as we wanted it to do, right? And even then, the problem was that the concept didn't quite work out the way that we expected it to. But when we started, there was every belief in this was going to be a magical thing. And sometimes it's a little magical, and sometimes it isn't. But that's just the process. You [can’t] be afraid of that. 

Jeff Umbro: Defining your client's sound is a core value at Magnificent Noise. What does that mean? And how do you do it?

Eric Nuzum: One of the things we do at Magnificent Noise is for almost every project we actually have a little exercise at the beginning, where everyone who works on it, from us, the client, [the] whole group of people comes up with personas of who we think that audience is. And we all present them to each other and we talk about how they're the same or different. And we tend to walk out of that room picking just one, who it's got to be right for this person. 

We did the project with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We came up with a profile [and] named her “Hannah from Topeka.” [She] was this middle-of-America, slightly conservative middle-road voter, swing voter, little socially conservative, but Hannah felt the world should be more fair. And [we] should provide fairness to people. That was something that motivated and drove her. 

So every editorial meeting, we would talk about Hannah from Topeka. We would talk about [what she needs] to hear about our conversation on this topic that she's going to give a shit about?

And the Gates Foundation, being such an interesting client and partner, actually got together a focus group of people who fit that profile. And they played them excerpts of the show and asked them for feedback. And asked them to stack rank, which were their favorites. And the production team, before we heard the results, all came up with our list of what would the Hannahs think of these shows? How would they rate them from 1 to 5? 

None of us got them right at all. We were completely wrong. And even with all of our attention to Hannah, it ended up being that we had made some serious misjudgments about Hannah. But we learned about Hannah as a result of that process and it affected everything from the way we chose the music, to the pacing, [we hired] Jen Hatmaker to host the show – we'd never heard of [her] before we started, but she's an influencer for Hannahs.

So we spent a lot of time radically changing the sound of the show to make it appeal not to us, but to this audience. And that's an example of how you have to find out what something sounds like.

Jeff Umbro: Eric, thank you so much for joining us. This has been an absolute pleasure, and we'll have you back again soon.

Eric Nuzum: My pleasure.

Jeff Umbro: Thank you so much Eric for joining us on the show. Anybody who's interested in learning more or speaking with Eric can head to magnificentnoise.com or they can subscribe to Eric's free newsletter, The Audio Insurgent. 

For more podcast related news, info, and takes, you can follow me on Twitter, at Jeff Umbro. Podcast Perspectives is a production of the Podglomerate. If you are looking for help producing, distributing, or monetizing your podcast, you can find us at thepodglomerate.com. Shoot us an email at listen@thepodglomerate.com or follow us on all social platforms @podlomerate. 

This episode was produced by Chris Boniello and Henry Lavoie. And thank you to our marketing team, Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Annabella Pena, and Vanessa Ullman. And a special thank you to Dan Christo. Thanks for listening, and I will catch you next week.