Should Your Museum Start a Podcast?

Zoe Goldman never planned to become a podcast producer. Her background is in art history, not journalism or audio production, and she is the first to admit that her route into the medium was accidental. “I sort of fell into podcasting,” she says. Today she produces podcasts at the Getty in Los Angeles, where she has helped build a slate of shows ranging from intimate archival series to scripted historical fiction for children.

That accidental path has made her something of a kindred spirit for museum professionals across the sector, many of whom find themselves drawn to audio out of passion for their collections rather than any formal training. And when Goldman talks about podcasting, the conversation is less about microphones and editing suites than about a more fundamental question: should your museum be making a podcast at all?

The case for pressing record

For Goldman, the strongest argument for podcasting is intimacy. A podcast is a one-on-one conversation that happens in someone’s headphones, at home or in the car, and a more casual, human tone thrives in that setting. It is also a way for a museum to step outside its own walls and into people’s daily routines. She points to Pew Research findings showing that podcast listeners tend to be habitual, with 42 percent listening multiple times a week.

“It’s probably hard to encourage museum visits to become part of someone’s every day,” she says, “but hearing from your museum via a podcast might slot easily and comfortably into their day.”

Learning is the other big draw. Pew found it is the second most common reason people listen, just behind entertainment, with 88 percent of listeners hoping to learn something from their shows. For institutions whose entire purpose is to teach, Goldman sees an obvious match. Podcasts are also relatively cheap compared with publishing books or producing professional video, and they are a gift for any organisation sitting on interesting audio material.

What audio cannot do

Goldman is just as clear-eyed about the medium’s weaknesses. Anything that depends on close looking is a poor fit, and she notes that even video podcasts are often half-watched, playing in the background while attention drifts elsewhere.

She also pushes back on the assumption that everyone is a potential listener. Podcasts live on specific apps and platforms, and plenty of people simply do not use them. Her advice is to think of your audience as consisting largely of people who already listen to podcasts. Converting a non-listener is far harder than winning over someone who already has the habit but has not yet found your show.

Then there is the slow grind of growth. Audiences build gradually, through word of mouth and repeat exposure, which makes podcasting better suited to institutions willing to publish over the long term than to those wanting a few one-off releases. Teams new to audio should also expect a learning curve, plus modest startup costs for decent USB microphones and editing software. Free tools like Audacity and AI-assisted options like Descript are lowering those barriers, though Goldman cautions that editing from a transcript rather than a waveform can sometimes produce choppy cuts.

Two ideas, two different answers

Ask Goldman how this thinking plays out in practice and she offers two proposals Getty has weighed up, with very different outcomes.

The first came from curators at the Getty Research Institute, who wondered whether recently digitised archival audio could become a show. The tapes were difficult to make publicly accessible because of rights clearances, but they were extraordinary material, often recorded for personal use and capturing artists at their most candid and vulnerable. That vulnerability played straight into podcasting’s great strength, intimacy. And with around 9,700 hours of digital and digitised audiovisual content in the archives, there was material to sustain a show for years. The idea became Recording Artists, one of the institution’s flagship series.

The second proposal, an internal podcast to keep staff up to date via a private feed, was turned down. Colleagues who were not already podcast listeners would likely miss important updates, and neither the group proposing the idea nor Goldman’s team had the capacity to take it on. The time required simply did not match the expected payoff.

From vague concept to specific vision

For ideas that clear that first hurdle, Goldman has a well-worn set of questions. The first is deceptively simple: who, exactly, is the audience? She urges teams to go far beyond “a general public who loves our museum” and picture an ideal listener in detail. Are they experts or newcomers? Young or old? Local or international? That specificity shapes the tone and content of a show, gives it an identity, and proves useful later on. When a podcast takes off and everyone at the institution wants to be featured, a clearly defined audience gives you a principled reason to say yes or no.

Next comes scope and cadence. How big is the topic, and what release schedule can it sustain? A predictable rhythm helps listeners build the show into their routine and helps the team manage its workload. Which leads naturally to capacity: who will actually do this work, and how stretched are they already? Goldman likes to point out that Getty’s first show was produced part-time by an office administrator with a little time to spare, hosted by the highly motivated head of the institution, with an outside contractor handling recording and editing. A simpler format with a small budget for help does not demand an army.

She also asks whether an idea is time sensitive, what can be outsourced (almost everything, for a price, and she recommends the Association of Independents in Radio’s rates guide for setting realistic budgets), and who the stakeholders are. That last question covers everyone from curators who control access to objects, to departments whose goals the show might serve and who might therefore share the costs.

Five years to bring objects to life

Goldman’s favourite illustration of this process is If Objects Could Talk, Getty’s first podcast for children and families, which launched in autumn 2025 after five years in development. The original concept was loose, something like Night at the Museum meets Toy Story, with works of art coming to life. With no deadline pressing and her own role split between podcasts and book editing, the idea matured slowly, refined in the gaps between other projects as her department grew and shifted.

Conversations with podcasters working in children’s media shaped the audience: research showed that younger kids usually listen with their parents, who also choose the media, so the show was aimed at the ten-and-under crowd and the adults beside them. Colleagues in interpretive content suggested focusing on particular galleries so families could use the podcast to plan a visit and flagged that the antiquities collection was overdue for family-friendly material. And because the format demanded a fully scripted, voice-acted world, Goldman brought in outside writers who knew children’s content, voice actors, and a sound designer to build it out properly.

Pilot before you commit

If there is one stage Goldman would never skip, it is the pilot. A pilot moves a team from idea to practicalities in a low-stakes way, builds internal support, and reveals exactly which skills are missing before anything public is promised.

She offers a recent example: a wellness-adjacent show, due out this summer, that grew from an in-person experience at the museum. The first pilot tried to replicate that experience directly, and it fell flat with test listeners. Their feedback about what they actually wanted to hear, and when they wanted to hear it, sent the team back to restructure the concept and rerecord. The second version delivered the proof of concept needed to move into full production.

The hard part: finding listeners

Once a show is out, Goldman believes the most difficult work begins. Her starting point is to return to that carefully imagined listener and go where they already are, whether that is neighbourhood groups, newsletters or signage in the galleries. Since existing podcast listeners are the likeliest converts, other shows become a key channel too, through paid advertising, ad swaps or appearing as a guest.

But the secret weapon museums hold over independent podcasters, she argues, is the institution itself. When Getty promotes new episodes in its weekly newsletter, web traffic jumps noticeably, reaching people who never subscribe through podcast apps. Placing the kids’ show on a web page about family visits, rather than the usual promotional spots, now drives around nine percent of that podcast’s overall web traffic.

Her parting advice is to keep launch day expectations low. There are no subscribers yet, and growth takes time. For museums, though, that matters less than it might. Much of the content is evergreen, so slow growth simply means that when listeners do find you, there is a richer back catalogue waiting for them.

Zoe Goldman shared her experiences of podcast development at the Getty at the recent Museum Digital Summit.