People are clamoring for white noise podcasts to drown out our dystopia

I love ambient sound, but I’m particularly a fan of white noise. Turn on that static hush, crank up the volume, and I’ll be heading onward to dreamland in a matter of minutes, baby. But as much as I enjoy the radio frequency equivalent of “shhhhhh,” I never considered it to be a money-making endeavor. If anything, white noise is the opposite of progress, right? Like, how could that possibly be lucrative? Then I read about how some guy was able to quit his damn day job after his Spotify white noise podcast started generating over $18,000 a month.

According to Bloomberg, a former cybersecurity worker named Todd Moore and his five (five!) employees are making roughly $612.50 per day from ad revenue and subscriptions through Spotify’s podcast-hosting software, Anchor — which adds up to roughly $18,375 every 30 or so days.

Good on you, Todd. Say, I have a new business venture for you: It’s like your white noise program, but it’s just a series of recordings of me screaming into a pillow for hours on end. Feel free to hit me up for a collab.

Business is (quietly) booming — As Bloomberg explains, white noise and similarly ambient programming regularly crops up in both Spotify and Apple’s most popular shows, but the “genre” isn’t a big venture for larger production houses. This means that the industry is mostly dominated by smaller, independent producers, thereby allowing them to personally rake in a bunch of money for what might seem like a ludicrously simple premise. Which it is.

But while people like Todd Moore are making bank off their dulcet drones, other enthusiasts are really just doing it as a hobby. “I didn’t even intend for people to listen to this,” another podcaster told Bloomberg. That didn’t matter to the Spotify algorithm gods, however, which boosted the program to now reach around 100,000 listeners a day.

It just goes to show you how chaotic and random this world can be... you know, like how “white noise” usually sounds.