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The NY Times is reporting that Sirius XM bought podcaster Roman Mars’ company 99% Invisible Inc which was home to his show 99% Invisible that looks at the hidden world of design in everyday life, and its spinoffs and book deals.
The terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed, but this will bring Roman Mars and his 13 employees under the umbrella of Stitcher was purchased by Sirius last year for $325 Million. They say that Mars will also be producing as yet unnamed shows for Stitcher.
They report that Mars was feeling lost with the sea of changes in the podcasting industry with all of the major purchases in the last few years.
“What does it mean that Facebook is getting into audio? Or that Apple is changing the ‘subscribe’ button to a ‘follow’ button? I don’t know and I don’t want to figure it out,” Mars said. “I feel at sea in this business in a way that I haven’t up to this point. Everyone is trying to crack this question of how to get people to pay for premium audio. But one of the things I liked about Sirius was they were like, ‘We already did that a decade ago and make $8 billion a year.’ They’d already figured it out.”
Megan Liberman, head of talk and entertainment programming at SiriusXM is hoping that this acquisition casts a net for other shows to come onboard. “We want the best creative talent that’s out there to know that we are a friendly home for them,” she said.
Podcast Business Journal’s own Joshua Dudley previously interviewed Roman Mars for the San Francisco Chronicle.