Pitch Party Premieres: Where Indie Podcasters Can Get Discovered

 Discover the next great podcast pilots with Pitch Party! From
RESONATE Podcast Festival and Tink Media, each episode of Pitch Party will feature a different podcast pilot from an independent producer. Audio lovers and production company reps alike can tune in to learn about forthcoming shows, as well as the process of making narrative audio with conversations with the creators of each pilot.

 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 last Friday 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.

RESONATE Podcast Festival launched in 2022 as an initiative of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University to celebrate and support the art of narrative audio. Over two days (Nov. 7-8, 2025) at the ICA at VCU’s Markel Center in Richmond, attendees can hear presentations from skilled producers, attend performances and social mixers, and get feedback from industry pros. The festival culminates in the RESONATE Pitch Party, sponsored by VPM. RESONATE, and its adjacent half-day conference, Community Podcast Day, were founded by Dr. Chioke I’Anson, Ph.D., director of the VPM + ICA Community Media Center.

Tink Media is an award-winning podcast growth and strategy company that specializes in podcast marketing, PR and creative marketing strategies to help creators achieve sustainable growth in podcasting. Lauren Passell founded Tink in 2019 after seeing a need for more
podcast-specific marketing services. Over the years, it has grown into a team that focuses on supporting not only independent podcasters, but also networks and authors looking to amplify their reach within the podcasting space. Lauren and her team have taught growth strategies on stages and in classrooms all over the world, and author two industry newsletters, Podcast the Newsletter and Podcast Marketing Magic. The team at Tink is a rare breed: marketers with specialized knowledge in the audio space and a passion for the podcasting medium.