Call Her Daddy’s Alex Cooper is starting her own podcast network

Spotify’s leading female podcaster is branching out. Alex Cooper has launched a new Gen Z-focused podcast network called The Unwell Network, according to an announcement viewed by The Verge. 

The new company will be a subsidiary of Trending, the media company that Cooper launched this year with her partner Matt Kaplan. Alix Earle and Madeline Argy — two TikTok personalities mostly popular with an audience born after Y2K — have come on board to host shows. Unwell has nabbed Studio71 former senior director of operations Moorea Mongelli to serve as its president. 

“We’ve curated a slate of hosts we know will transform long form content as we know it. Our team is delighted to bring the Gen Z audience content tailored just for them,” said Mongelli in a statement. 

Call Her Daddy will become a part of The Unwell Network, but the show will stay exclusive to Spotify. The network’s upcoming slate of podcasts won’t be associated with Spotify, however, and will be available on other podcast players. 

Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast — an interview show focused on sex and relationships — has been exclusive to Spotify since 2021, after she signed a $60 million deal with the audio giant. It was one of Spotify’s more expensive deals, though well below the estimated $200 million deal that the company signed with Joe Rogan in 2020. Her show is consistently the second-biggest podcast on Spotify in the US, behind Rogan’s, and has regularly gone viral with video clips from her interviews.

But the era of multimillion-dollar exclusivity podcast deals appears to be over, as Spotify aims to cut costs and shift away from its strategy of splashy exclusives. Last month, Spotify and The Ringer Podcast Network unveiled Speidi’s 16th Minute, hosted by Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, two former reality stars from The Hills, an MTV reality show that aired its last episode in 2010. Spedi won’t be exclusive to Spotify — neither will a Spotify original podcast hosted by Trevor Noah expected to launch later this year. 

That may speak to why Cooper is branching out with an eye toward Gen Z. Gen Z’s consumption of podcasts is on the rise, and they’re open to listening across a variety of platforms and forms. Monthly podcast consumption spiked by 57 percent over the past five years, according to a recent report from SXM Media and Edison Research. The cohort is also the most likely to watch podcasts on YouTube, where podcasts mimic Twitch’s streaming-style format and episodes can span multiple hours.