The numbers tell a story about who is building podcasting's future — and who is profiting from it. Black and Latino listeners now represent the fastest-growing segment of podcast audiences, propelling the medium past traditional talk radio in share of spoken-word listening. But as those audiences grow, the creators who look like them are largely building on rented land: platforms they don't control, networks they don't own, and revenue models where they capture only a fraction of the value they generate.
It is a familiar pattern in American media. A marginalized community creates cultural value. Corporate platforms monetize that value. The creators get visibility. The platforms get equity.
Gabriel Soto, a researcher at Edison Research who tracks audio consumption trends, told Axios that Black and Latino listeners have been "some of the biggest drivers behind podcast consumption growth." Latino audiences over-index on podcast listening in part because the population skews younger. Black audiences report spending about an hour more per day with audio than the rest of the U.S. population. That level of engagement has made podcast audiences especially attractive to advertisers and media companies seeking to reach younger, more diverse listeners — which means the cultural labor of Black and brown creators is directly generating the audience metrics that advertisers pay premiums for.
But distribution and monetization in podcasting are overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube. Even large podcast networks like iHeartMedia rely on those platforms to distribute and monetize their shows. For independent creators — especially those who are Black or brown — that means building an audience with no structural path to ownership. You can have a million downloads a month and still be one algorithm change away from irrelevance.
Juleyka Lantigua is an exception. A Latina owner who launched the podcast production company LWC Studios in 2017, she has spent years watching creators from fast-growing audiences generate cultural value while capturing only a fraction of the revenue. Her position is blunt: "Ownership is destiny. The only way to secure a long-term future for an idea is to own the means of production and distribution."
That framing — ownership as the only durable form of power in a platform economy — is not new. It is the same analysis that has driven conversations about economic inequality in the creator economy and about racial wealth gaps in media and tech. What makes podcasting distinct is the scale of the mismatch between who is listening and who is profiting. In an industry where Black and Latino audiences are driving growth, the ownership class remains overwhelmingly white.
A few Black network owners are attempting to occupy positions of structural control. Radio host Charlamagne Tha God founded the Black Effect Podcast Network in 2020 with the explicit goal of becoming the "BET of podcasting" — a long-term home for Black-owned shows. Washington media entrepreneur Angel Livas launched Alive Podcast Network in 2022 with two shows; it now hosts more than 100 podcasts on platforms including Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV, and Samsung TV. The network operates a mobile platform and subscription model, with half of the $4.99 monthly fee going to a creator the listener selects. Livas is also opening Alive Studios, a production hub in downtown Washington.
"We've spent years helping creators build their shows," Livas said. "Now the focus is making sure they have a platform where they can actually own what they create." She is also launching her own podcast, which debuted last week and will feature a different guest throughout the month. "The future of podcasting isn't just distribution," she said. "It's ownership."
But these are individual success stories in a structural problem. For every Black Effect or Alive Podcast Network, there are hundreds of Black and Latino creators building audiences on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube — platforms where the terms of service can change overnight, where monetization is opaque, and where the creator has no equity stake in the infrastructure that distributes their work. The platform economy is designed to extract value from creative labor while limiting the creator's claim to ownership. Podcasting, despite its decentralized origins, has consolidated into that same model.
The economic consequences are not abstract. When Black and brown creators do not own the platforms or networks that distribute their work, they lose access to the compounding value that ownership generates. A white-owned podcast network can sell to a larger media company and convert years of audience-building into an equity payout. A Black creator on a platform they don't own can build the same audience and have nothing to sell. The gap is not just in revenue — it is in wealth. And in an industry where the fastest-growing audiences are Black and Latino, that gap is being actively widened by the current ownership structure.
There is also a content risk. Platforms control not just distribution but also discoverability. They control which shows get recommended, which shows appear in curated playlists, which shows get promotional support. When the people making those decisions do not reflect the audiences driving growth, the result is predictable: shows that serve Black and Latino listeners are undervalued, underpromoted, and structurally disadvantaged in the attention economy that determines which podcasts succeed.
The solution is not complicated, but it requires a shift in how the industry defines success. Podcasting needs more Black and Latino owners — not just creators, but people who control the means of production and distribution. That means funding for Black- and Latino-owned networks. It means equitable revenue-sharing models that do not treat creators as interchangeable content suppliers. It means platforms that are accountable to the communities that built their growth, not just to shareholders.
The current trajectory is unsustainable. An industry that relies on Black and Latino audiences to drive its growth while excluding those communities from ownership is not just inequitable — it is fragile. Cultural value flows where it is respected. And respect, in a capitalist system, is measured in equity.
