People are listening: Everybody Knows podcast gets over 74,000 downloads in September

Everybody Knows, the investigative podcast into the music industry’s insidious underbelly and what stalled the #MeToo movement here, had 43,430 listeners to its episodes in the month of September.

The podcast also had 74,665 downloads.

The numbers were released today as part of the audio industry’s Australian Podcast Ranker, which ranks the podcasts of participating publishers according to the number of unique monthly listeners they have.

Everybody Knows came in at #77.

The Ranker said the numbers reflected four episodes. Everybody Knows did release five episodes in September, however the first episode also went out across the feed of Schwartz Media stablemate 7am. 

7am produced 30 episodes throughout the period, including the first Everybody Knows episode ‘The Company’. 7am had 400,417 monthly listeners and 1,396,968 downloads.

The journalist behind the podcast, Ruby Jones, told TMN that even though she knew there were issues, barriers and illegal activity happening in the music industry, she didn’t realise just how bad it would be.

“The more people I spoke to, the more I realised that this kind of stuff was pretty entrenched in the music industry. It was endemic. There were so many stories. I was surprised by how many stories there were. And I was also surprised by how much of an open secret it seemed to be in the industry – this kind of behaviour, how it had been tolerated for a really long time,” she said.

Jones said she also spent a lot of time thinking about who might, and who should, listen to Everybody Knows. 

“I think what’s likely to happen is that a lot of women will listen to it, because I think a lot of what we’re speaking to are experiences that women will feel incredibly familiar with and will recognise a lot of them… There’s a spectrum of things that happen at workplaces and happen to women of Australia, and I want to explore that. But I really hope that men listen to it as well. That’s my goal. I think that anyone who cares about equality should listen to it really.”

Jones hopes that both women and men listened to the podcast

Schwartz Media’s head of audio, Osman Faruqi, noted that part of the frustration that comes with reporting on these issues, is when they only reach the people who already know what’s going on.

“I have no doubt that women who listen to this series will have shivers go down their spine and will relate to so many parts of it,” he said.

“But there’s a part of me that’s frustrated that these kinds of stories don’t seem to resonate as much with men, so there is obviously a huge part of us crafting this in that we wanted to go beyond the usual suspects. We want this to go as far as possible.”

Faruqi noted Jones had been working on the story for months, before a lot of the recent action and change we’ve seen play out in the public domain came to light.

This, he said, showed her instinct and appetite for the story was spot on, but also that the industry was ready and raring for change.

“I think sometimes people who are really close to something don’t understand just how significant it is until they talk to other people and realise that ‘Oh, wow, there’s actually dozens of us that have had these experiences’. And you don’t always know that, and I think that the surprising element was maybe just… how many people there are who had similar experiences and just maybe never found the opportunity or the encouragement to speak up about it.”