"I Don’t Like Being Told What To Do.” Podcast Pioneer Joe Budden On Staying Independent

If a career in hip-hop and podcasting has taught him anything, it’s that talent shouldn’t trust big media companies. So he built his own empire and became one of the highest-paid voices in America. B ack in 2015, talent manager Ian Schwartzman emailed Spotify with a request—his client, rapper Joe Budden, wanted to add episodes of his newly launched podcast to his artist profile on the music streaming platform. “And the response I got was comical,” Schwartzman tells Forbes , “It was, ‘What is podcasting?’”