Eric Ingrum's Project Blog

Lately I've been obsessed with monetizing Double Feature. The podcast has always been a way for me to experiment with marketing and some other music-industry things without a lot of risk so I'll kind of know what I'm doing when I finish the ZEP. How do you promote an album these days? How do you distribute? How do you finance it? It's even been way for me to practice production stuff like mastering, micing for voices, etc.

Now that the podcast has a a few listeners I'm starting to wonder how you squeeze some money out of it. I don't think anyone makes any real money podcasting, but it would be nice if it was at least self subtenant. Podcasts cost about a hundred dollars a year to run. Ours is a little more expensive for a few stupid reasons, but if you're going to pay for your own hosting and have you're own site those are the hard numbers.

For the past two years we've been ignoring that fee, but now we're running into some equipment purchases that have to be made and it's starting to add up. The idea was that Double Feature's audio would get better and better as we did the show. If we're going to maintain the quality we're at now (and even improve, hopefully) we're going to need to buy some new gear. Even just padding the studio would go a really long way.

So that leads to the newfound obsession of making money with Double Feature. I've been reading a bunch of stuff (including this great article How to Make Money Podcasting, which ironically used a picture of our show). The problem isn't so much a last of ideas, but that there's so many different ways and I don't really know what's best suited for the show. I don't want to go the advertising route...I fell like it's pretty annoying and not really effective...another popular one is donations, but that feels really tacky. Lots to think about.