Kattie Laur: What's Holding Back Canadian Podcasting?

A great chat with producer and audience growth specialist Kattie Laur to unpack what’s really holding back Canadian podcasting – and, unsurprisingly, we keep coming back to money, funding, and marketing. We talk about why Canada lacks meaningful grant support, why brands are hesitant to invest in podcasts, and how a realistic budget needs to split resources between production and promotion.

Kattie shares her experience pitching the CBC, her work in branded podcasts, and why companies need to choose between making a genuine audience-first show or simply buying ads on existing podcasts. We dig into government-funded podcasts, transparency around downloads, and how to think about ROI beyond raw numbers.

We also get into discoverability, the impact (and pressure) of video, platform politics at Apple and Spotify, and why Canadian indie shows struggle while big broadcasters thrive. By the end, we’ve at least sketched out how funding, advocacy, and smarter marketing could actually move Canadian podcasting forward.

Kattie has a very good newsletter worth paying for called Pod The North.

Please sign up for the SOUNDING OFF Newsletter. All the things that went unsaid on the show.

Also we added the Sound Off Podcast to the The Open Podcast Prefix Project (OP3) A free and open-source podcast prefix analytics service committed to open data and listener privacy. You can be a nosey parker by checking out our downloads here.

Thanks to the following organizations for supporting the show:

Megatrax - Licensed Music for your radio station or podcast production company.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.