Podcasts in India compete with almost anything on the Internet—the founders of IVM Podcasts explain why

Amit Doshi and Kavita Rajwade founded IVM Podcasts in 2015 to build a culture of “talk radio” in India

In 2022, when the founders of podcast network IVM (Indus Vox Media) Podcasts Amit Doshi and Kavita Rajwade launched an audio show hosted by Navya Naveli Nanda, the granddaughter of one of the biggest superstar couples of India, they expected intrigue and excitement. However, what they didn’t hope to have on their radar was a generation of listeners who had never heard of the word ‘podcast’ until then. “It was beamed straight into their homes, and we had grandparents of listeners tuning in to listen to Jaya Bachchan,” says Rajwade, about What the Hell Navya, Season One. The podcast united three generations of Bachchan women—Jaya, her daughter Shweta and granddaughter Navya—where conversations ranged from sexual compatibility to what shows they binge-watched during lockdowns.

Founded in 2015, this was, however, not the first time the network tasted success. They launched with four shows, of which Cyrus Says, hosted by comedian and satirist Cyrus Broacha—a well-loved face from the ’90s and noughties era of MTV—became their flagship podcast. On it, Broacha deliberates with his guests over the banalities of life in urban India, politics, sports, civic sense (or the lack of it), kids, traffic, and everything in between.

If you are a fervent audiophile in India, names of shows like Chitthiyaan by actor Gajraj Rao, A Century of Stories by food author and journalist Kunal Vijaykar, or even The Habit Coach by Ashdin Doctor, might sound familiar. At present, IVM has over a hundred original shows in five languages.

According to this report by Financial Express, the podcast audience base in India has grown from a meagre four million in 2016 to a staggering 90 million in 2024. The data, therefore, begs the question: how does one go about building a podcast, especially in times when anyone can record a clip and release it on the Internet to become the next viral sensation? “You either reverse-engineer an idea, where you find the person first and then figure out what they should talk about. Or, you get subject-matter experts to speak about their areas of expertise,” says Rajwade.

Bringing podcasts to a radio-loving nation 

Doshi and Rajwade met through common friends about a decade ago. Soon after, Rajwade, a veteran in the music marketing space, and Doshi, an assistant director on film sets in the ’90s, joined forces to formally introduce India, a radio-loving nation, to podcasts. 

“One of the things that was missing in Indian media at that point was long form conversations. Listening to intelligent people talk about things that they know about people is one of the best ways to absorb knowledge, but it’s also fun. You think of television debates, or even radio plays, and in an hour you have 34-35 minutes of music, six-seven minutes of RJ-ing, and 18-20 minutes of advertisements. But long form conversational stuff just wasn’t there, and that’s the gap we wanted to fill,” says Doshi, about bringing the “talk radio” culture to the country.

A survey by Swiss company Digital Radio Mondiale—an array of digital audio broadcasting technologies designed to work over the bands currently used for analogue radio—reveals that radio continues to be the preferred medium of information and entertainment in India, which is mostly consumed at home, with seven out of 10 radio listeners tuning in between 30 minutes to two hours every day.

In the past, Doshi has dabbled in Internet- and tech-based businesses such as WAT Media and Webodrome Arise Technologies, while Rajwade brings nearly two decades of experience in building ventures. Together, they set out to look for the numerous “smart people hiding in their homes,” who brought with them a host of interesting ideas that they would go on to cast, and turn into several hundred hours of conversations on things commonplace, yet oft-neglected. “Our podcast How to Citizen was entirely on class eight civics—a subject we did not pay much attention to and should have—and revisited those lessons because people really just lack that,” says Rajwade. “Learning became important, and we wanted to make learning fun and build ideas around that."

A report by Statista shows that top podcast genres in India include news policy, comedy, and entertainment, followed by business and finance. In the same vein, IVM’s catalogue traverses the whole range, with shows on finance, demystifying journalism and media, all things policy, pop culture, and more, as they slowly populate their repertoire for a diverse audience. “Different kinds of people are different kinds of learners—some visual, some auditory, and the percentage of those different kinds of learners does not change across age cohorts. So there are people in every generation who are looking for such long form audio, and we are here to give them that,” explains Doshi.

Catering to shorter attention spans

The founders, however, do not deny the trends of changing times, with their biggest competitors being anyone on the Internet who wants your attention. Hence, the questions they ask every time they build a podcast from scratch is whether a conversation can hold its own in the audio format. The video is secondary. “On YouTube, we see almost 30 per cent completion rates for one-hour-long episodes of Cyrus’s podcast, which is great, and YouTube loves that. But then, on YouTube, every time you play something, they’ll keep recommending other things for you to watch,” Doshi points out. “But not so with audio—where we have 90 per cent completion rates. You just put on your headphones and can keep doing something else while listening to a podcast.”

Clearly, it’s a multitasking medium, which is why, rather unsurprisingly, IVM witnessed major peaks during the Coronavirus lockdown, when people had their earphones on throughout the day, and the curve flattened at record numbers like never before. “That’s when so many new people discovered us,” says Rajwade. In fact, a widely circulated KPMG report titled KPMG in India’s Media and Entertainment published in 2020 supports Rajwade’s claims. It notes that India’s podcast consumption shot up by 29.3 per cent in the first year of the pandemic.

Moreover, a survey conducted by IVM themselves—in association with mobile research platform InMobi Pulse and InMobi-owned Glance—shows that 81 per cent of podcast listeners in India heard their first podcast in 2022. However, as curbs were lifted and the world opened up again, listening trends returned to their usual patterns, with people tuning in during their commute to and from work in the mornings and evenings, respectively.

How podcasts are different from other mediums

One can’t just take radio scripts, read them out, and call it a podcast, states Rajwade. It needs meticulous research, development, and production that sets it apart from radio shows that are different from the “conversation” method of storytelling. “If the subject is anecdotal, where a person needs to recount incidents from their lives to tell a story, then it obviously stretches out for more than 30 minutes. But a podcast on finance can have 10- or 15-minute-long episodes because that is how much time you need to explain a topic like that," she says.

Moreover, not every idea lends itself to the medium, even though, according to the duo, everyone today wants to be a podcaster, because it is the “cool thing to do”.

So, how does one make their podcast stand out in the era of self-publishing, where anyone with a microphone and Internet connection can create one? “It’s the difference between a song recorded at home, and one that perhaps AR Rahman has recorded in a studio,” says Doshi. “User-generated content is becoming more and more prevalent these days, but we make sure all the bells and whistles are in place to give a show the best shot it deserves,” he adds.

It’s also the age for intent-driven content, which allows podcasts as a medium to thrive, as the audience for such shows is always cut out, waiting to be discovered as one goes looking for knowledge on the subject the podcast deals in.

The founders, however, are having to steadily pivot towards video, as that is where the bang for the buck lies now. “We are trying to figure out if there is something in podcasts that lends itself that well to the vertical video medium [such as Instagram reels],” says Rajwade. “But it’s also more time- and resource-intensive, when compared to pure audio, which means not every podcast can be turned into a video,” adds Doshi.

Their next project involves Uorfi Javed, the Instagram influencer known for her ingenious sartorial choices. She is arguably a bona fide celebrity born into the burgeoning visual culture, which, as Doshi points out, suffers from a serious case of informational clutter. “But it will be interesting to see how this podcast plays out with Uorfi,” Rajwade says about an Internet star whose voice might soon compete with her images for virality.

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