Inside the Soundproof Revolution: How Next Chapter Podcasts Is Quietly Rewriting the Rules of Audio
With an eye for the offbeat, a passion for justice, and a fearless sense of storytelling, this indie studio is making some of the most intriguing—and bold—podcasts in the business.
In an era when podcasting has become a battleground of celebrity vanity projects and corporate spinoffs, one studio is taking a different approach: telling stories that bite, hum, resonate—and sometimes, provoke.
Nestled behind the sleek website of Next Chapter Podcasts is a lean, boundary-pushing operation with creative ambition that rivals its heavyweight competitors. The company, founded by audio veteran Jeremiah Tittle, has been steadily building a portfolio of genre-bending, mission-forward series that have flown under the radar—until now.
With the March 26 debut of Targeted, a new video podcast dissecting the mechanics of modern character assassination, Next Chapter seems poised to move from niche to narrative power player. But don’t mistake them for upstarts trying to ride the podcasting wave. This is a studio led by people who believe storytelling isn’t just a business—it’s an act of cultural reckoning.
From Control Rooms to Creative Risks
Tittle, who cut his teeth at SiriusXM and Westwood One, doesn’t carry the glossy profile of a media mogul. That’s by design. What he brings instead is a producer’s ear, a journalist’s instinct, and a taste for the kind of stories that legacy outlets hesitate to touch.
“There’s an intimacy in audio that no other medium offers,” Tittle said in a recent interview. “It gives you space to sit with a person’s truth—especially when that truth is messy, complicated, or hard to monetize.”
Launched in 2018, Next Chapter Podcasts started as a quiet rebellion against formula. Where others chased clickbait and ad revenue, Tittle’s team leaned into complexity. Today, the studio’s output reflects that ethos: podcasts that dance between genres, unearth cultural blind spots, and make room for voices pushed to the edge.
Curated Chaos: A Catalogue Without Borders
One scroll through the Next Chapter library reveals a company allergic to sameness. There’s The 500 with Josh Adam Meyers, a rollicking countdown of Rolling Stone’s greatest albums that’s part musical memoir, part stand-up catharsis. There’s Play On Podcasts, a partnership with Play On Shakespeare that reimagines the Bard with 21st-century swagger—think hip-hop Macbeth and sci-fi Pericles.
Even its youth programming sidesteps predictability. The Ten News, a current events podcast aimed at 8–12-year-olds, manages to cover Supreme Court rulings and climate science without talking down to its audience—or their parents.
Then there are the more cerebral experiments: In the Cards, an existential rom-com about a loser and his tarot reader, and Divided by Design, a deep dive into the architecture of systemic racism in America. If the podcast world is a bookstore, Next Chapter is the shelf where someone’s slipped in a few banned books and a handwritten manifesto.
Collaborations That Push the Needle
What sets Next Chapter apart isn’t just its output—it’s who they work with. The studio has formed partnerships with museums, non-profits, and education initiatives, using its platform to surface institutional memory and community narratives.
Take Our New South, a co-production with the Levine Museum of the New South that examines how cities across the American South are grappling with migration, race, and identity. Or A Hit Dog Will Holler, a raw, audio-only play co-produced with Radiotopia that threads social commentary into a story of friendship, fear, and survival.
These are not shows built for quick monetization. They are crafted with a kind of deliberate care that makes their impact last long after the final credits roll.
The Calculated Fury of Targeted
Next Chapter’s latest offering is Targeted, a hybrid video podcast that dissects how people fall prey to invisible power structures. Hosted by Zach Abramowitz, a lawyer-turned-media-strategist with a taste for legal intrigue, the show investigates what happens when institutions use media, money, and bureaucracy to ruin reputations.
It’s part true crime, part geopolitical thriller, and entirely unafraid.
“We think of targeting as something that happens to whistleblowers or political enemies,” Abramowitz says in the trailer. “But the tools used to dismantle them—smear campaigns, sanctions, legal slow-drips—are now available to anyone with power and motivation.”
Each episode examines a different individual caught in a high-stakes showdown. Some are well-known dissidents. Others are private citizens blindsided by systems too big to fight. The show features voices like Jonathan Taylor, a whistleblower in the oil industry; Nathan Law, the exiled Hong Kong activist; and Russian lawyer Pavel Ivlev, who fled his homeland after facing prosecution.
The tone is urgent, the production crisp, and the implications chilling.
A Story That Hits Close to Home
In one of Targeted’s most sobering episodes, the podcast profiles Gaurav Srivastava, a previously low-profile commodities investor who became the subject of an unexpected and devastating smear campaign. According to the episode, what began as a business disagreement in 2022 escalated into a full-blown reputational siege—complete with lawsuits, coordinated media stories, and social fallout that reached into his family life.
Srivastava’s story doesn’t seek to resolve the business conflict—it asks a different question: when information can be weaponized in seconds, who gets to control the narrative?
It’s a question Targeted poses in every episode—and one that feels increasingly relevant in a world where virality often outpaces veracity.
Next Chapter Podcasts isn’t trying to be everything to everyone. But in a landscape where so many audio producers are content to chase trends, it’s refreshing—maybe even necessary—to watch a studio chart its own course with brains, backbone, and a bit of bravado.
And if Targeted is any indication, the indie outfit that started with Shakespeare and rock albums may now be taking on something far riskier: the truth.
