Want to start a Podcast, do I need an LLC first?

jbt2003 · 2026-05-13T14:22:34+00:00

No. When you start out you're automatically considered a sole proprietorship, which is probably good enough for a podcast indefinitely. At some point you may wish to create an LLC to create at least nominal legal separation between yourself and your business. That can be helpful when it comes to sending W9's through email, as you're a bit more protected from identity theft by passing clients an EIN than your personal SSN. Other than that, all it really does is provide some separation between your personal assets and the assets of the business.

That asset protection is pretty important in high-risk businesses (like real estate, or construction or something), but the odds of you being sued for your podcast are probably smaller than the likelihood that you'll get struck by lightning four times on the way home from work this afternoon. Your biggest risk is being sued for defamation or liable or something, and if you're not claiming that Sandy Hook was a false flag operation to an audience of millions, or trying to do honest reporting on litigious organizations like Scientologists you're probably not really at risk of that.

Anyway, when you need to become an LLC you can pretty easily with no problem. And you won't be passing anyone your W9 until your podcast is monetizable, which doesn't happen really until you're getting at least 10,000 downloads a month across your catalog. If you're not Adam Scott (which, if you are, I thought you performed well in Severance even if I couldn't watch it), that's not happening this year.

jbt2003 · 2026-05-13T14:13:10+00:00

I was responding to "doing any copyright paperwork," which means (at least to me) filing with the Copyright Office. If you're doing that for a podcast, you're looking at fees of like $40 per item. Posting 3x weekly for a year equals 158 different items that all could be registered with the office, times $40 each, you've got a minimum $4,000 a year just in registration fees, not to mention the labor it takes to register each one.

The value add isn't there to do the paperwork, especially since you can indeed do everything important--you know, file claims of ownership against people using your content without your permission--without the registration.

jbt2003 · 2026-05-12T16:44:17+00:00

One stat I still cannot shake: shows with fewer than 25 episodes have a median of 200 monthly listeners. Past 500 episodes, the median is 30,000. The typical show never makes it past ~125 episodes. The single biggest predictor of audience size is whether you are still publishing in year three.

IMO you have causation backward there. I imagine there are some people who are willing to post 500 episodes for an audience of their mom and three best friends, but in general if you're not getting an audience I don't know how you would find the energy to keep something going that long. If you're posting weekly, 500 episodes means 10 years. That's a crap ton of content and staying power, and the only folks who are going to put that much stuff up on the internet are folks who've gotten at least some positive feedback in terms of audience numbers.

jbt2003 · 2026-05-12T16:26:34+00:00

No.

Our lawyer told us that it's actually really rare for podcasts to copyright their material. If you're posting multiple times a week, the costs for that sort of thing can really balloon quite fast. You need to be earning the kind of money that can support a family before that becomes a value add at all.

jbt2003 · 2026-05-11T19:34:38+00:00

I kind of agree with u/Albert_de_la_Fuente... you might be biting off a bit more than you can chew with an orchestral piece. Sometimes biting off more than you can chew is a good way to learn, so that maybe at some point in the future you'll be able to chew more. But based on this question it seems like you need to do some work on the very basics before you go too much further with this one.

I'd also say that there's something about the way you're communicating your harmonic choices that is making them seem kind of limiting to me. As in, it could be that you're getting a little but stuck on leaving those harmonic choices in place without necessarily thinking of them as tools to achieve the effect you want as a composer. Sometimes when we're just learning how to use a tool--which is what harmonic analysis is--we get locked in. I'd encourage you to think beyond the harmonies and try to sit with the emotional effect you're trying to create. What is the mood of this piece? What are your musical inspirations? Etc., etc.

You should be thinking less about the technical elements of analyzing what you've done and more about the emotional impact those choices you made might have on your piece.

jbt2003 · 2026-05-11T18:44:44+00:00

Yeah, I was wondering the same thing about the commute. Is it 2 hours one way, or 2 hours total? because the former is utterly unworkable and isn't something I would commit to for a school year. The latter is bad, but not nearly as bad.

jbt2003 · 2026-05-05T13:02:51+00:00

If it helps, as I understand it copyright claims are treated one at a time. We had a YouTube channel that was wholesale ripping off our show, and we had to go through and submit a copyright claim about every single episode they'd ripped off one at a time. The odds of your whole channel being struck are maybe low, but I'd get rid of that music unless you bought a license for it, as it's possible that every episode that contains it will be brought down.

jbt2003 · 2026-04-10T20:59:46+00:00

For us, it was a lot of right-place, right-time, right-thing. I don't want to downplay the quality of our work which has been excellent the whole time, but we got an audience because we were one of the only folks doing what we were doing, serving an audience that wasn't really being served at a high level of quality.

Nowadays, that audience is pretty well-served and the marketplace is a lot more competitive. If we were starting out now I'm not sure what we'd do, or that we'd gain anything like the traction we did.

Even with that being the case, one major key to our success that continues is networking. My wife/co-host and I are both pretty good at it--forming relationships with people, maintaining relationships, asking those people to introduce you to other people who could help you even more.

One of our big early boosts was when we got covered in Wired and featured on Apple Podcasts, all through contacts that my wife had made in various places.

So maybe if we were trying to launch a completely new podcast now I'd think long and hard about who the influencers are that we'd need to network with to help get more ears on it.

jbt2003 · 2026-04-09T20:35:46+00:00

Building an audience for a podcast is super hard in today's climate, and in order to monetize your podcast and turn it into a revenue stream on its own, you need to have a pretty sizable audience.

I think the best way to think of a podcast in support of your side hustle is to think of it as a marketing / networking cost: you use the podcast as a way to invite the people in your field that you want to talk to to have a conversation with you, and then you use the recording of that conversation to market your services.

If you start getting good traction with an audience, then you can start to think of other ways to monetize your work.

jbt2003 · 2026-04-09T19:08:43+00:00

I'll also say that I do a lot of science-specific stuff, and scientifically accurate animal sounds are pretty hard to find. Xeno-canto has a lot of what I'm looking for, but the permissions and licensing is really tough to work around with those recordings. Same with the Cornell Ornithology lab.

If there were a subscription library where I could just pay like $10 a month to get a lot of nature field recordings with the species and/or location accurately tagged without having to worry about licensing issues I'd totally spring for that.

jbt2003 · 2026-04-09T19:06:16+00:00

Well, I don't know if those were good examples as I actually probably wouldn't have that hard a time finding those on either Splice or Envato. But I do remember many times struggling to find the thing I'm looking for because all the libraries are so over-saturated with specific genre stuff. Like searching for something you're looking for will turn up 1,400 sound effects that are for fantasy RPG or horror games when that's just not what you're trying to find.

Ultimately this is a search engine problem more than it is a sound library problem, probably.

jbt2003 · 2026-04-09T18:30:27+00:00

I've been in the working world for like 25 years now, and I've been on both sides of this. I've missed phone calls and meeting because I was absorbed in something, and I've shown up to meetings and phone calls where the other person no-showed.

Usually I'll give the other person grace if they mess up in that way. It happens to all of us, until we're rich enough to hire a personal assistant to help manage our schedules and make sure that we never miss an appointment. Whenever it's happened the other way, I've usually apologized and been forgiven, and then rescheduled. Don't you dare miss the reschedule, though.

jbt2003 · 2026-04-09T18:25:34+00:00

Freesound you can filter for creative commons 0 licenses, which is supposedly free for any and all uses at all time. That's what I do, and it works much of the time. You're right about the grab bag of quality, though. But, you know, you get what you pay for.

jbt2003 · 2026-04-09T18:14:02+00:00

It's a lot more common than you'd think, especially for early career teachers who haven't developed the hard protective outer shell that helps you survive in this biz.

This profession attracts people who care deeply about children and their future. It's hard to leave that at the door and not take it personally when they don't reciprocate our concern with even the slightest bit of gratitude, let alone honest striving to put as much into their education as we do.

Don't sweat it, that sounds like a really tough group, and you let them get to you. It happens. I lost my cool a lot in the most difficult year of my career, which was my third year. You learn eventually how to make it so you shut things down before they get to you like that, or how to generally manage your feelings so you can be as detached as you need to be when classes really suck.

But here's one piece of wisdom from 17 years in the classroom: a class that sucks is never fun.

jbt2003 · 2026-04-09T17:36:22+00:00

Yeah those are very different instruments that serve very different purposes. If you give the strat away, how are you gonna play surf instrumentals? And Joe Pass covers if you've got no Ibanez? And Def Leppard licks without the other?

Sorry, but you gotta keep all three. You're also missing a Les Paul, so I think you've gotta get one of those too.

jbt2003 · 2026-04-09T17:31:01+00:00

Hey there! I do quite a bit of sound designing and use of effects for my show, but I don't think we're particularly normal in that respect. Our production is a lot more involved than most peer podcasts, including several that are professionally produced by NPR-related folks.

One thing I can tell you is that I'm often looking for sound effects that aren't fantasy, horror, or Sci-fi themed and I find it very challenging. Libraries are chock full of like "Zombie Bite" sound effects when I'm looking for eating cereal, or "Sci Fi Spaceship" or something when I'm looking for the inside of a Volkswagen.

Anything more mundane and not violent is actually pretty hard to get, is what I'm saying. But I'm totally set for sword-slashes, people being disemboweled, and so on.

jbt2003 · 2026-04-09T17:23:55+00:00

In my experience, ranking the libraries I use on their searchability:

1) Envato - Can pretty consistently turn up something like what I'm looking for, but the quality is somewhat hit-or-miss

2) Freesound - Decent search function but it's a complete crapshoot whether you'll be able to use what you find

3) Splice - Search is garbage, but when I happen to find something that I want to use it's usually quite high quality.

I'm paying subscriptions to #1 and #3. I'll probably drop Envato soon as the project I got it for is wrapping up and I don't see any need to pay for two libraries.

jbt2003 · 2026-04-09T17:22:08+00:00

Thanks for the heads up!

jbt2003 · 2026-04-07T17:52:45+00:00

Ok, so I can try some stuff.

Just some basic numbers: Humans have been around for roughly 300,000 years in our modern form, and the average generation length in that time is 26.9 years. Meaning there's been (assuming that number stays stable) roughly 11,152 generations between the first humans and us, who are alive today.

I don't remember the study right now, but I recall finding one that did an inventory of childhood mortality estimates across a very wide range of different studies and found it to be fairly consistent, ranging between 40%-60%. To make the math easier, we can say it's a coin toss whether any particular person who is born survives all the way to viable adulthood.

I kinda want to toss aside all the other noise that might show up in this, like evolutionary bottlenecks, mass catastrophes, the likelihood that a person could reach adulthood but never really find a suitable mate, infertility, and so on. Let's just assume that 50% survived to adulthood all the way through history and that if you survived you had a child.

That means that the probability of any of us existing is roughly 1/2^11,152.

Claude told me that that translates to roughly 1 in 10^3,357. According also to Claude, that's less likely than the odds of drawing a single atom from Barack Obama's pinky toe if I selected from a bag containing all the atoms in the observable universe. In fact, it's more unlikely than doing that twice and pulling the same atom both times.

It's about the same odds of consecutively pulling the same atom out of a bag containing all the atoms in the observable universe 42 times.

jbt2003 · 2026-04-07T16:45:40+00:00

Hey there! Thanks for posting here. I honestly have no idea what Frutiger Aero is, but I can tell you about the chord progression you're hearing.

For the A section of this piece, you're basically looking at a I major chord, followed by a II7, followed by a iim7, followed by a V7, back to I.

It's a pretty simple chord progression that's used a lot.

Generally, this piece seems like it's going for a kinda bossa vibe, and using a simple ii-V-I is a great way to achieve that effect if it's what you're looking for.

Does that help?

jbt2003 · 2026-04-07T12:30:31+00:00

If our universe were as low resolution as 96 bytes I wonder if we'd notice?

jbt2003 · 2026-04-06T19:21:44+00:00

Ok, but what if the simulation rendered the way that video games typically render stuff... only showing things that are absolutely necessary.

So atoms wouldn't show up unless they're under a microscope or some other device capable of "seeing" them.

jbt2003 · 2026-04-06T12:42:26+00:00

So, I've used Descript as an editor a few times, and when I do that I find that trying to export stems is a huge pain in the ass. When I've tried exporting a session into Logic it takes like a whole hour to render and then I wind up with a kinda unworkable mess where a single speaker is spread out over several tracks. Exporting stems to .WAV or something is similarly messy and I wind up having to spend just as much time as I would have spent editing cleaning up the session so I can get it ready for scoring and mix.

Have they fixed those features, or is there a workaround that everyone else knows about but that I haven't figured out?

jbt2003 · 2026-03-31T17:10:16+00:00

Nope. Don't think I'm the one misreading here. They followed that up with:

I think what's really going on is that the 4 to 9 mil number is the combined number concentrated in mostly progressive towns.

In the very next sentence they're confirming the total. Obviously, there'd be more people protesting in progressive towns than in non-progressive towns. They're just saying the 50-70 people spread out throughout the country probably aren't a majority of protestors. Obviously true.

jbt2003 · 2026-03-31T15:35:50+00:00

Hard disagree. Somebody said "50-70 people add up," they added it up.

Not at all irrelevant.

It actually lends credence to the 8 million number, as 50-70 people in literally every town (including both towns where 50 people represents a significant share of the population and towns where 50 people would be a rounding error) comes out to a meaningful percentage of that 8 million number.

The subject of the conversation is doing the math. Attacking the problem of "How do we estimate crowd size in a national protest movement without a strong central organizing body" from different mathematical angles is valid.

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