RESONATE Podcast Festival at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Tink Media Present Pitch Party, the Podcast
This fall, RESONATE Podcast Festival and Tink Media are teaming up to debut Pitch Party, a new podcast feed that champions the art of narrative audio by providing a platform where independent show creators can get discovered and funded.
The concept grew out of the RESONATE Pitch Party, an annual competition sponsored by VPM Media, in which three contestants pitch their storytelling podcast ideas in front of festivalgoers and judges for a chance to win $10,000 to create their pilot episode.
Developed by the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, which organizes and presents RESONATE each fall, the competition holds the potential for serendipitous industry matchmaking, as happened in 2024 when a podcast production company representative who was in the audience subsequently offered the winner a contract to produce their show.
For Pitch Party, the podcast iteration, every episode will feature a different podcast pilot from an independent producer. Production company reps can listen to the curated feed to decide if a given show is a good fit for them. In addition, audio lovers can tune in to learn about forthcoming shows—as well as the process of making narrative audio, through bonus episodes featuring conversations with the creators of each pilot.
“RESONATE has become known for its belief in narrative audio,” says Chioke I’Anson, who founded the festival in 2022 in his role as director of community media at the ICA at VCU. “We’ve found people who are making quality narrative shows. We’ll put their indie pilots into one podcast feed and send it to the many companies we’ve connected with through RESONATE.
It’s a public initiative to connect podcast creators with opportunity. It’s also our statement in support of the kind of artistic storytelling we at the ICA want to see in the world.” Getting picked up by a company can be a critical step for makers of storytelling podcasts, which—unlike their conversation-driven counterparts, chatcasts—can take weeks or months to research, script-write, edit and sound-score a single episode.
That investment of time and labor has yielded some of the medium’s most enduring and celebrated shows (think This American Life, Serial, etc.), but it can make this kind of podcast prohibitively costly to produce without company backing to help with upfront costs, promotion and advertiser procurement.
“There’s a problem in podcasting, where there are people making great shows that make no money, and there are a lot of cool ideas for shows that could exist, but they can’t get the support they need,” says I’Anson. “Chatcasts are popular and cheaper to produce, and as a result, narrative podcasts have kind of been crowded out and left behind in the last few years, even as those that remain garner critical acclaim. Pitch Party is our way of cutting through the noise to help great stories get heard.”
Partnering with the VPM+ ICA Community Media Center and RESONATE to produce and promote Pitch Party is festival sponsor Tink Media, a podcast growth company that operates two leading industry newsletters in addition to offering creative client services like podcast consultations and out-of-the-box marketing and PR strategies.
“Pitch Party could not be more aligned with Tink’s passion—shining a light on the hugely unsupported indie creators we believe are making the best things and the work they do,” says Lauren Passell, founder of Tink Media. “At Tink, we’re podcast people first. We love audio and we love RESONATE.
It’s a thrill and an honor to bring our energy to something we care about and put all this nerdy audio marketing knowledge we have to good use.” Starting on October 10th, Pitch Party will be releasing weekly episodes across all podcast platforms. As a curated feed, it comprises pilots that I’Anson, Passell and their collaborators come across through their work at RESONATE and Tink. They are not currently fielding unsolicited submissions. Anyone can enter the annual RESONATE Pitch Party contest, however; that submissions period opens each June and closes in August.
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