How Joe Budden Made the Internet Work for Him

F
or more than a decade, Joe Budden, host of The Joe Budden Podcast, has been a fixture on the rap internet, most recognizable for his, uh, passionate commentary about all things hip-hop. Historically, his rants have existed on a gradient of intensity from visibly annoyed to existen­tially pissed off (like in his famous interview with a teenage Lil Yachty, who was unaware of what the term “360 deal” meant). In person, however, Budden has a surprising air of Zen. He speaks in a calm, measured tone, even as he tells me about the rush-hour traffic into Manhattan from his home base in New Jersey.

Budden first found fame as a rapper in the early 2000s, and is probably best known for his chart-topping hit “Pump It Up.” Today, he and his podcast co-hosts — who currently include Queenzflip, Mona Love, Ice, Ish, Parks, and Marc Lamont Hill — command an audience that sets the zeitgeist, boasting more than 70,000 paid Patreon subscribers. His show is not just among rap’s longest-running commentary series, it’s also one of the most profitable, on pace to earn $20 million in revenue in 2025. Over the past year, The Joe Budden Podcast has fortified its status as essential listening, covering a whirlwind of news in the hip-hop world — from Kendrick Lamar versus Drake to Young Thug’s snitching allegations. With the recent addition of Hill, an academic and former CNN commentator, the show has seamlessly pivoted into more political topics.

“It’s been a pretty good year,” Budden says modestly. “We just put our heads down and go to work. The topics have been kind to us, the energy is good, and we feel good about where we sit.”

As it happens, Budden was a trending topic on X the day we met. On a recent episode of the podcast, Hill and Queenzflip had gotten into a heated exchange that seemingly almost came to blows. Therein lies the brilliance of The Joe Budden Podcast: It lives somewhere between the highbrow sensibility of PBS News Hour and the raw, uncut personality of barbershop talk.

“It’s organized chaos,” Budden says. “We come in Tuesdays and Fridays and do a think tank. We get the Sharpies, make a board — everything we’re passionate about speaking on, and make a soup out of it. I never want to be formulaic, like, ‘This is what’s going on, this is what I’m asking y’all to talk about.’ It has to feel good. That’s the art of it.”

So what should listeners make of the viral shouting matches and controversies on the show? Budden assures me that, despite what some might think, none of it is staged. “There’s a format, but there’s no script,” he explains. “Everybody plays their role and contributes. By the end, it turns into a beautiful picture.”

In 2018, Budden signed a two-year licensing deal with Spotify to bring his show to the platform exclusively for around $2 million per year. The alignment was part of the streaming giant’s podcasting strategy, which included signing Joe Rogan for a whopping $200 million over three years. But as it came time to renew in 2020, Budden and his business partner Ian Schwartzman decided to move to a direct-to-consumer subscription model, partnering with Patreon at the start of 2021. “At Spotify, you’re working in conjunction with them, and you aren’t reaping so many of the benefits of the scaling,” he says. Still, you wonder how many millions Budden left on the table.

Since first launching in 2015, The Joe Budden Podcast has been an experiment in programming. The live-wire lineup of co-hosts embodies the perspective brought by the social media era, where content creators are expected, if not required, to present themselves in their rawest possible form. There’s a balance in characters that, to Budden’s credit, has the feeling of an all-star sports team, though he assembled the group with relationships in mind above all. “Parks is the longest-tenured — he’s the engineer and on-air personality. Ice, I’ve known forever. Friendship is still the fabric of this thing,” he says. “Then we got Mona, who’s a comedian with incredible timing, and Flip, who’s infectious. Everybody brings something unique. When we come together, it’s like Voltron. The sum is greater than the parts.”

THAT BUDDEN HAS BECOME one of the most influential voices in Black media isn’t much of a surprise. You could even say it was calculated. Shortly after the release of “Pump It Up,” he had an on-air stint on New York’s Hot 97. He stopped because Def Jam, his record label at the time, gave him an ultimatum: Keep your rap career, or stick with radio. “If you’re telling me at 23, 24 years old, ‘Hey, you have to make a decision,’ for me, I would be able to talk in my fifties and sixties. I wouldn’t be able to go out and tour,” he explains. “So that was always in the back pocket for me. ‘Let me go over here and rap, since you’re saying I can’t do both, and I’ll get back to that later.’”

Budden was prescient in other ways. As early as 2001, he was navigating rap message boards, where audiences would discuss new music in real time. “It was market re­search,” he recalls. “Def Jam, at the time, wasn’t paying too much attention to social media. That’s where you grew community.”

Despite his embrace of technology, Budden still appreciates physical media. He recalls the power of the early-2000s mixtape circuit, where CDs distributed amongst rap fans made for a legible subculture. “So much good rap music got lost because of that transition,” he says. “When Drama got locked up and they started arresting DJs and guys selling CDs on 34th Street, that was a real turning point. Napster was happening at the same time. There was a fight going on for rights and ownership, and a lot of us had no idea. We were just doing it for the love.”

“Now, it’s regulated,” he adds. “Same thing they did with weed, they did with music. It’s regulated.”

He says he still buys albums, opting to purchase digital downloads over streaming. “If somebody hits a button one day, and we can’t stream anymore, I still want my music,” he says. “There’s nothing I love more than music, on Earth. I want my music, I’m buying it. Streaming was looked at like bootlegging when I was coming up. It should be looked at as bootlegging now.”

That said, Budden isn’t one to wallow in nostalgia; he simply stays on the front lines. Even before there was any concept of livestreaming, and before many of today’s content creators were even born, Budden would webcast on the now-defunct platform UStream. Much like streamers like Kai Cenat, it was just him in a room, riffing. People in the industry at the time thought he was crazy for playing unfinished music on air.

“I sat in front of these things and did everything that was outlawed back then,” he says. “There’s a value in these people hearing and seeing the creation of the song, and how it comes together. But not at that time. A little too ahead of the curve.”

That early pushback had a way of shaping how Budden approached podcasting. He says the decision to take the show independent was “scary but empowering.” And it was his experiences in the music industry that moved him forward. “What was going through my mind? ‘I won’t allow myself to be treated the way I was treated yesterday, so tomorrow has to be different.’”