Hi!
We’ve got another exciting new show joining the network, a year-in-review, and more!
Black People Love Paramore has joined MaxFun!
In each episode of Black People Love Paramore, Sequoia Holmes and a guest have an engaging conversation about the underrepresented interests of Black people: things like anime, Boy Meets World, UNO, and—of course—the hit pop-punk band Paramore.
The first Black People Love Paramore episode on MaxFun came out last week and features Sequoia and Shar Jossell (We See Each Other) discussing Wendy, O, and Barbara & co. (that’s right, it’s daytime talk shows!). New episodes come out every other week, but with a 60+ episode back catalog, you’ll have plenty to keep you entertained during the off-weeks.
If you’re not sure where to start, consider “Black People Love Reba“ with Scam Goddess host and iCarly star Laci Mosley; “Black People Love The Golden Girls“ with Kid Fury from The Read podcast; or “Black People Love Phrases, Idioms, and Colloquialisms“ with jarrett hill and Tre’vell Anderson of FANTI! And of course, there’s the episode with special guest Hayley Williams, the actual lead singer of Paramore.
Subscribe to the show and tell your friends to check it out!
→ Subscribe to Black People Love Paramore
The perfect last-minute gift: a year-long membership!
Still haven’t bought all your holiday presents yet? (Don’t worry, I haven’t, either—who knew it was already December?) We’ve got the perfect last-minute gift for the MaxFunsters in your life: a MaxFun membership!
How it works: You pay up front for 12 months of membership, then the recipient chooses which shows to support and gets access to over 500 hours of bonus content. You can even set the email to the gift recipient to send on a specific date, so you can buy it now and have the email arrive to them later!
→ Purchase a gift membership
2023 Year-in-Review
We’ve had one heck of a year! New shows, a way to customize your bonus content feed, and a major transition in how the network is run. Over the past twelve months, we…
… added six new shows!
- Secretly Incredibly Fascinating (January)
- Sleeping with Celebrities (February)
- We See Each Other (May; limited run)
- Queery (July)
- Secret Histories of Nerd Mysteries (November)
- Black People Love Paramore (December)
… created a way for members to customize their BoCo!
In addition to the 500 hours of bonus content in the main feed, members can now make a custom BoCo feed that only has the shows they choose to add—plus the feeds can be loaded into most podcatchers with just one tap!
→ Access your bonus content
… hired more staff!
We hired three new employees in 2023:
- Palmira Muñiz (Producer): Palmira joined MaxFun as a producer last January, working primarily on FANTI. Palmira is a highly skilled producer and an all-around great person who’s proven a really wonderful addition to the MaxFun team!
- Ashe Vernon (Transcriber): Ashe has been transcribing for us as a contractor since 2019, but in 2023, we officially brought them on as an employee. They’re amazing at their work (and a delight to have in Slack)!
- Matt Lieb (Producer): Matt joined MaxFun last April to produce Jordan, Jesse, Go! He’s done a great job working on the show and continuing JJGo’s thirteen-year streak of being one of the funniest shows out there!
… donated $50,000 to five food banks!
During our 2023 charity sale, your generosity allowed us to donate $50,000 to five food banks across the US, which added up to about 225,000 meals!
Working with charity has been a key part of MaxFun’s values since the network was founded, and together, we’ve raised over half a million dollars for charity in the last six years. We’re so grateful we get to keep making these donations year after year because of you.
→ About the donation
… became a co-op!
In March, we announced that Maximum Fun was becoming a worker-owned cooperative. We officially completed our transition in June, and in October we had a whole month-long event all about co-ops! Worker-owned cooperatives are still relatively uncommon in the US, and a podcast network becoming a worker-owned co-op is a rarity. It’s been so amazing to make this transition with my fellow worker-owners. I’m so proud of the work that everyone has put in and everyone’s commitment to making MaxFun the best network we can.
A few weeks ago, I got this in the mail from our wonderful Board of Directors:
It was accompanied by a handwritten note from our first President of the Board, K.T. Wiegman. It’s now one of my favorite possessions (I plan on framing it as soon as I find a frame that’s a good size), and I know I’m going to treasure it for a very long time. It’s a reminder of everything our network has accomplished: everything we’ve been able to do because you, our audience, believes in us and gives us your support. With a MaxFun membership, you’re not only supporting the shows and creators you love—you’re also supporting a bunch of kind, genuine people who just want to work together to create cool stuff.
So thanks for all the support—we really couldn’t do this without you.
If you’re celebrating any holidays this December, we hope that they’re wonderful—and if you’re not celebrating anything, we hope that you have a lovely end to this year, whatever the year has brought for you. Thank you for making it possible for us to do everything listed above (and more) in 2023! We’re all so excited for what we have planned in 2024, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on.
— C.N. and your friends at MaxFun
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