Picture this. You have a long commute to work, and it takes you an hour to reach. You sit in the train, or your car, or in a rickshaw, utterly bored. You open your phone but you don’t want to waste your time on scrolling reels, but it’s too loud outside to fully pay attention on a TV show right now. Here come in, podcasts. Although the medium has hit mainstream in India fairly recently, podcasts have long been a laid-back way to learn something new, while you drive, do laundry, or while you’re cooking, making it the most lucrative choice for content creation.

Raj Shamani and Ranveer Allahbadia aka BeerBiceps

The biggest podcasts of today are all hosted by influencers, be it Moments of Silence with Sakshi Shivdasani and Naina Bhan, Untriggered with Amin Jazayeri, or The Ranveer Show by Ranveer Allahbadia. In 2021, Allahbadia made a deal with Spotify to make his podcast exclusive to the platform, releasing on Spotify one day before it appeared on his YouTube channel. This deal made him the first independent Indian creator to have an exclusive podcast deal with Spotify.