Do You Have a Development Deal With Audible Yet?
In The Miranda Obsession, listeners are treated to a series of late-night phone calls between a mysterious woman and a who’s who of Hollywood men. Using just her voice, the woman — known as Miranda — charms and seduces them into staying on the phone to gossip and reveal secrets they wouldn’t otherwise have told a complete stranger.
It’s a story, first reported in Vanity Fair, that was “tailor-made for audio,” as Rachel Brosnahan describes it. Through her production arm Scrap Paper Pictures, Brosnahan executive produces and stars as the titular Miranda in an Audible Original adaptation of the story, joined by a cast that includes Josh Groban and Milo Ventimiglia. The project was also Brosnahan and Scrap Paper Pictures’ “first foray into audio,” she says, and Audible emerged as the ideal partner. “It can be intimidating to say to anyone, ‘We want to tell a story exclusively through a series of phone calls and hope that you can build something over the course of eight episodes that would keep a listener engaged,’ ” Brosnahan says, adding that the Audible team “trusted us implicitly and made that very clear to us.”
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While the podcast and audio space has become dominated by conversations about Spotify, iHeartMedia or Apple, the Amazon-owned audio company has become a home for top talent in Hollywood seeking to transition into the podcast space with premium narrative projects across fiction and nonfiction — a move away from the more traditional interview or recap podcasts more commonly hosted by film and TV talent.
In the past two years alone, Audible has inked rich, multiyear deals with the production companies of stars like Kerry Washington, Issa Rae, George Clooney, Lena Waithe, Laura Dern, Queen Latifah, LeBron James, Kevin Hart and Charlamagne tha God. Many of the partnerships represent the first creative entry into audio for talent who have traditionally found success in film and TV.
The studio and content operations are led by Rachel Ghiazza, executive vp and head of U.S. content, and Zola Mashariki, head of Audible Studios. Ghiazza joined Audible in 2019 after more than five years at Spotify, while Mashariki was brought on in 2021 after a two-decade career in film and TV at Searchlight Pictures (during its Fox Searchlight days), BET Networks and the Just Mercy production company One Community (previously known as Good Films).
The combination of Ghiazza’s and Mashariki’s bona fides in digital media and entertainment has made for successful pitches to talent who want both support from an in-house team and the creative freedom to tackle unusual projects. “They’re very selective in terms of what they want to produce … [but] they don’t get in the way of things,” says author James Patterson, who has a multi-project and first-look development deal for a slate of audio-only projects with Audible.
Seated outdoors at the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood in late April, Ghiazza and Mashariki emphasize that they are eyeing the long game with talent. “We’re not trying to do, necessarily, a one-and-done situation,” Ghiazza says of Audible’s approach to dealmaking. “We’re signing up to be partners for a really long time.”
Audible isn’t a newcomer to the audio space, having made its name in audiobooks beginning in the late ’90s and early 2000s. But it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that the service began pursuing podcasts in earnest through Audible-produced original series. As competitors like Spotify have made splashy announcements of their own, bringing on names like Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Audible has been stealthily striking dozens of development and first-look deals with talent to bolster its own library of audio storytelling across fiction and nonfiction. Meanwhile, sister companies Amazon Music and Wondery have begun claiming exclusive licensing and ad deals with true-crime hits like My Favorite Murder and unscripted interview shows like SmartLess and How I Built This.
Audible’s concerted push into releasing premium, audio-only storytelling comes during a period of massive growth for the podcast industry. A recent report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau found that podcast revenue hit $1.4 billion in 2021 — a figure that is forecasted to nearly triple in the next three years to $4.2 billion.
But Audible’s business model is primarily dependent on subscriptions and à la carte purchases. In addition to its top-tier subscription that gives users credits to purchase audiobooks or other titles outside of Audible’s existing library for $14.95 a month, the company released a cheaper subscription model, Audible Plus, that gives subscribers access to exclusive Audio Originals, third-party podcasts and select audiobooks for $7.95 a month. The company has also dabbled with a free, ad-supported model in India, though there aren’t any immediate plans to do the same in the U.S.
“Sometimes, the best way to showcase what your brand is, is just to let people listen to it, and so we’re certainly thinking about the [subscription] models in different ways,” Ghiazza says.
The company, which was acquired by Amazon in 2008 for $300 million, is notoriously tight-lipped about its subscription numbers, with spokespeople only noting that the service has “millions” of global subscribers, making it difficult to compare the service’s reach to other subscription-based audio and podcast platforms like Spotify, which boasts 182 million global paid subscribers, and iHeartMedia, a radio giant with stations in 160 U.S. markets and growing podcast ambitions. But because of its primarily subscription-based model, most of the shows created through Audible’s development and first-look deals with top talent have existed behind the paywall, potentially hindering a show’s ability to become popular with a wide audience.
Courtesy of Audible
“Accessibility to stories is something that’s really important to me,” Brosnahan says. “But at the same time, Audible has such a rabid and wide-reaching subscriber base, so in terms of us feeling like [The Miranda Obsession] would reach the kind of audience that we hope, I think we feel very, very confident that Audible subscribers will love this.”
Ghiazza says Audible looks at distribution on a project-by-project basis, meaning there are instances when a show may be distributed widely on other platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. But the distribution plan is part of the conversation from the very beginning, allowing creators to collaborate with Audible on the best approach to reach audiences, Ghiazza notes. For example, Brosnahan’s The Miranda Obsession is only available to Audible subscribers, whereas Bob and Nate Odenkirk’s Audible Original, Summer in Argyle, can be streamed for free across Spotify and Apple, in addition to the Audible platform.
“Because I’ve never produced in audio before, it felt really important for us to have partners who understood the space and would champion us creatively,” Kerry Washington, whose Simpson Street Productions has a three-project deal with Audible, says of her decision to work with the company. “It comes down to feeling like we have trusted partners who really have our back and are invested in us and the stories that we’re telling.”
Mashariki says Audible is also able to give creatives the ability to pursue passion projects in a way that may not be possible through the traditional studio model. “Audio is much cheaper, [so] we can take much more risk and say, ‘Let’s try that and let’s see,’ because we are building for a future that is unknown, so we have to actually have some stuff that we may not know exactly what it is, but we love it and believe in it.”
Audible Originals have cost as little as $20,000 to $30,000 to produce, while others can get as high as the multiple millions when talent costs and production values are accounted for, Ghiazza says — with the two executives noting that the low end of that range allows for less experienced creatives to work with Audible. It also doesn’t hurt that the average production cycle is around four months for a project, Mashariki adds, which allows Audible to experiment more regularly in comparison to projects in TV or film.
“We don’t necessarily need somebody to have proven that they’ve done it 15 times before they come to us,” Mashariki says. “We can actually surround them with experts in their field to help support what they’re doing and get them going and try some things.”
A version of this story first appeared in the May 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
