In September, comedy creators Hannah Berner and Paige DeSorbo signed a four-year, reportedly $160M deal with SiriusXM to exclusively distribute their podcast, Giggly Squad.
This is the latest in a series of creator podcast deals struck by SiriusXM in recent years, following those with Alex Cooper, Trevor Noah, and Crime Junkie.
Rewind the tape: SiriusXM was born from a dying medium. In the early 2000s, traditional radio was losing listeners to iPods and the internet, and two rival startups—Sirius and XM—bet that people would pay for radio if it was national, ad-free, and built around talent you couldn’t hear anywhere else.
The two companies merged in 2009, and since then have expanded the definition of “radio” across music, talk shows, podcasts & more by buying the voices people will follow anywhere.
Fast forward to today: The morning talk shows and Top 40 countdowns that built radio have been replaced by podcasts built by creators who have a deep relationship with their audience.
Just weeks after the SiriusXM deal was announced, the Giggly Squad duo sold out Madison Square Garden in 30 minutes, becoming the first female podcast to headline the venue in a sold-out show.
The duo was named in TIME100 Creators 2025, and since then, Berner and DeSorbo’s Giggly Squad multiverse has expanded beyond their weekly show to live events, a NYT bestselling book, weekly newsletter, solo comedy tours, and product lines.
In a recent interview, SiriusXM SVP of podcast content Adam Sachs talked about where the future of podcasting is headed:
“When we’re making these deals, we are increasingly thinking about a podcast as audio, video, social, and live. It’s those four legs of the stool, and we want to be a part of all of it,” Sachs said.
In other words: What appears to just be SiriusXM collecting creator shows is really a long-term strategy in building the deepest possible relationship with an audience everywhere that audience wants to show up—through your car radio and beyond.
