Back 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?’”

A decade later, podcasting has become a cornerstone of media, and Spotify is competing with companies such as Amazon, iHeartMedia, SiriusXM and now even Netflix in a market that has grown from less than $100 million in annual revenue a decade ago into a $9 billion industry. Budden and Schwartzman have spent the intervening years doing everything they can to earn a slice of that ever-growing pie, bootstrapping The Joe Budden Network to an estimated $20 million in earnings over the past 12 months, enough to be ranked among the highest-paid podcasters in the world for 2026. And unlike nearly every other performer on that list, they did it without a broad distribution and ad sales deal from a major media company, or a private equity investor.

“Honestly, I don’t like being told what to do,” the 45-year-old Budden says of his desire for independence. “One of the worst things to me is having to rely on somebody else to give me what I'm either owed, what I deserve, or what I am willing to go out and work for.”

In Budden’s mind, that’s a lesson learned the hard way. Born and raised in Spanish Harlem, he signed his first recording contract with Def Jam at 21, leading to a self-titled album in 2003 and a Grammy nomination for his single, “Pump It Up.” But clashes with the label started almost immediately over both creative control and financial fair play. Budden soon built a reputation as someone who wasn’t afraid to air out his grievances into any available microphone, from a brief stint as a guest host of New York City’s Hot 97 radio station to the VH1 reality show Love & Hip-Hop and regular YouTube vlogs, which he started appearing on as early as 2007.

The Highest-Paid Podcasters Of 2026

Those platforms gave Budden a place to document his........

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