A U.F.O. Podcast Zooms Past the Competition

Jul 15, 2023

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Tenderfoot TV, the studio behind “High Strange,” is leaning in while others pull back.

By Reggie Ugwu

The biggest flex in “High Strange,” Donald Albright and Payne Lindsey’s hit podcast about U.F.O.s and supposed alien encounters, comes during the end credits. A person is describing stumbling upon a flying saucer in the woods or chasing a glowing red orb past a farm when the music fades in — an eerie trickle of high-pitched percussion, the slow march of minor piano, the spectral voice of the rapper Gunna floating in at a half whisper.

“Bought a spaceship now I’m a space cadet/Big white mansion is my habitat.”

They don’t play this on “Unsolved Mysteries.”

The credits song, “Space Cadet,” from an album by the producer Metro Boomin, doubles as a neon billboard for Tenderfoot TV, the podcast and multimedia company founded by Lindsey and Albright in 2016. It’s both flashy — clearing the copyrights took around nine months and $50,000 — and purposeful, speaking in the idiom of the youthful, culturally omnivorous listeners around which Tenderfoot hopes to build a new-media powerhouse.

Since the success of its first series, “Up and Vanished,” a true crime investigation that has been downloaded 300 million times, Tenderfoot has grown into a formidable producer of investigative and documentary podcasts, including “Atlanta Monster,” “To Live and Die in LA” and, last year, “Kim Kardashian’s The System,” hosted by Kardashian. After its debut last month, “High Strange” spent two weeks in the top 5 on Apple Podcasts’ Top Shows chart, peaking at No. 2; the company says it has since averaged around 300,000 downloads per episode, the most of any of its shows outside the true crime category.

At a time when a turbulent economy has many podcast companies cutting costs and laying off workers, Tenderfoot has nearly doubled its small staff in the past year, from 9 to 17 employees. Albright and Lindsey, who jointly own the company, said Tenderfoot has been turning a profit since 2017 and is on track to exceed $10 million in revenue this year. With “High Strange” — and seven other shows in production — the company is among a handful of independent studios hoping to successfully navigate podcasting’s next frontier.

“All the success we’ve had up to this point is the launching pad for what we’re about to do next,” said Albright, in a recent joint video interview with Lindsey from Tenderfoot’s office in Atlanta. “Weekly shows, daily shows, limited series, subscriptions, television — if we can win a little bit here and a little bit there, we win overall.”

Albright, who moved to Atlanta from the Bay Area in 1997, and Lindsey, who grew up in the city, are both veterans of the local music industry, a past that informs creative and business thinking at Tenderfoot. (Metro Boomin and Gunna are hometown favorites.) They met in 2012, when Lindsey, at the time a singer-songwriter turned music video director, sent Albright an email looking for work. Albright, who was helping run a company that managed the R&B singers Lloyd and August Alsina, took a chance on Lindsey, paying the novice $2,000 to direct a music video for Alsina that went on to surpass 30 million views on YouTube. More videos and a tour documentary followed, and a partnership was born.

“We were together on a world tour, up late nights on the bus and talking about different dreams that we had,” said Lindsey, 35. “I always knew that if I ever started my own venture, I would want Donald to be a part of it.”

A few years later, while looking to branch out from video directing work, Lindsey found himself obsessing over true crime documentaries. HBO’s “The Jinx,” Netflix’s “Making a Murderer” and the podcast “Serial” had inspired a surge of interest in the genre. He decided to try his hand at making his own, this time presenting Albright with a job offer.

Tenderfoot grew out of “Up and Vanished,” which chronicled Lindsey’s overtly amateurish but sincere attempt to shed light on the unsolved disappearance in 2005 of a schoolteacher in Georgia. The podcast went viral in 2017, midway through the first season, after the Georgia Bureau of Investigation charged a suspect with murder and a man alleged to be his accomplice with attempting to conceal a death. A spokesman for the bureau said renewed news media attention played a significant role in instigating the arrests. (Ryan Duke was later found not guilty of murder but convicted of concealing a death, as was the accomplice, Bo Dukes). Up to that point, “Up and Vanished” had been downloaded 10 million times over six months. Within a month of the arrests, it received another 10 million downloads.

“People connected with Payne because he was just like the listener,” Albright, 46, said. “He wasn’t pretending to be a seasoned investigator or lawyer or anything like that. He wasn’t even really a podcaster. But people saw themselves in him. That gave us a blueprint.”

The name Tenderfoot, among the lowest ranks in Boy Scouts, is a nod to the company’s populist ethos. Lindsey and Albright initially planned to pivot to television documentaries and film (hence the “TV”) but stayed the course in podcasting after the success of “Up and Vanished.”

Tenderfoot has since produced more than two dozen podcasts, the majority of which have a true crime focus. The company has thrived in part through strategic partnerships. “Up and Vanished,” which has published four seasons tracking various cold cases, and “High Strange” are distributed and sold to advertisers by the Audacy-owned podcast company Cadence13, with which Tenderfoot has a first-look deal. The company has a separate arrangement with iHeartMedia for “Atlanta Monster,” two spinoff series and other shows. And it has created original series for HBO, Netflix and Audible.

In 2021, Courtney Holt, the former head of studios and video at Spotify, tapped the company to produce a show about a man convicted in 1998 of a triple homicide. Kim Kardashian, with whom Spotify had signed a high-profile exclusive contract, and who has a history of involvement with criminal justice causes, would be the host.

“I had been a fan of their work just as a consumer,” Holt said of the Tenderfoot duo. “They had a really interesting way of telling stories about dark subject matter that pulls you in and takes you on a journey.”

Also that year, Tenderfoot launched a premium subscription membership through Apple Podcasts, Tenderfoot+. For $4.99 per month, members get early access to the full season of “High Strange,” ad-free versions of podcasts, bonus content and other perks. Paid subscriptions, enabled by both Apple and Spotify in 2021, are still a relatively small slice of the industry but have gained traction alongside popular content monetization platforms like Patreon and Substack. Tenderfoot+ is a key plank of the company’s strategy to weather a down advertising market and — along with Wondery, NBC’s Dateline and Sony Music’s The Binge — is one of the top 5 subscriber channels on Apple Podcasts with 15,000 to 20,000 subscribers.

“If the ad market is down, no one wants to release a project,” Albright said. “But if you have a direct relationship with your audience through subscriptions, then we can put things out whenever we want and still be able to recoup our money.”

With “High Strange,” the company took its biggest step yet away from the reliable true crime space. The show, which cost over $500,000, was partly inspired by “Radio Rental,” a Tenderfoot podcast hosted by the actor Rainn Wilson and featuring stories of strange and purportedly supernatural encounters told in the first person. Lindsey, a lifelong fan of “Unsolved Mysteries,” launched the show with Wilson in 2019. In 2021, amid renewed interest in U.F.O.s — following the Pentagon’s release of a report saying it couldn’t rule out the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation — Lindsey had the idea for a podcast that would blend the investigative approach of “Up and Vanished” with the odder tone of “Radio Rental.”

“I wanted to do the non-U.F.O. U.F.O. podcast,” Lindsey said. “I don’t know what’s out there — no one does — but people can hear the evidence and make up their own mind.”

Over the course of the season, the show has walked the line between the sober (scientists on the statistical likelihood of extraterrestrial life) and the eccentric (an interview with a man who says he was abducted by a flying saucer in the 1970s). Its popularity has emboldened the creators to apply their investigative lens more broadly, including with a planned series that will address a new unsolved mystery each week.

“We just want to keep finding great stories and see where they take us,” Albright said. “As long as we’re doing that, we’ll end up in a good position.”

Reggie Ugwu is a pop culture reporter covering a range of subjects, including film, television, music and internet culture. Before joining The Times in 2017, he was a reporter for BuzzFeed News and Billboard magazine. More about Reggie Ugwu

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