The audience cross-pollination in Spain🇪🇸, Latin America🌎, and Latinos in the United States🇺🇸, with Nuria Net of Shake It Easy Media
Eurowaves #40 Interview
Nuria Net is the Founder and CEO of Shake It Easy Media, a content studio working across formats for Latino audiences globally. Recent podcast productions include La Semanal Live for Amazon Music, Faith Curious for Trinity Church NYC, Reggaeton con La Gata for iHeart, and Grammofonías for the Latin Recording Academy. She is an executive producer of Corinna y el Rey, a nonfiction bilingual narrative series that became Spain’s most talked-about podcast. She is also the creator and executive producer of Punk In Translation, an audio documentary series in English and Spanish that won an Ondas Global Podcast Award.
Co-founder of Remezcla, a pioneering digital media outlet for Latin culture launched in New York in 2006, she also served as its content director.
A graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, she has worked at Univision, MTV, and The New York Times, and has written for Rolling Stone, Billboard and El País. She is an adjunct professor in the Communications department of the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid. In 2023 and 2024, Forbes named her one of the “50 Best in Podcasting” in Spain.
You can connect with Nuria on LinkedIn here.
What’s your podcast origin story?
I’m a journalist who has gone through all the formats: I started in print magazines, then moved to blogs (started a big Latin culture site in NYC in the early aughts), and subsequently moved to radio and TV newsrooms in New York City. I became a podcast fan when I moved from New York City to Miami and started commuting to work by car, in 2011 and then was really attracted to the format as a storyteller. I was the music editor for digital at Univision (TV network) so I started my own music interview podcast as part of our entertainment coverage to experiment with the format. Without asking for permission or without any clear plan; I kinda sneaked it in.
How was Shake It Easy Media born and what did it teach you about the podcasting landscape, specifically about cross-border and multilingual podcasts?
Moving to Spain after living and working in the US in both English and Spanish gave me an advantage in understanding not only the big opportunities in audio but also the cross-pollination of audiences in Spain, Latin America, and Latinos in the United States. When I moved to Spain in 2018, I decided to start my own podcast studio because I saw the opportunity, especially in Spanish. It was hard to find jobs in Spain newly arrived and without a network, plus I became pregnant with my second child and had a toddler at home. How was I going to make it all work? I had all the entrepreneurial and media experience coming from the US and I saw how the podcast industry had grown. In Spain, there was everything to be done. Then the pandemic came and naturally with my US-based network I started getting commissions and projects in podcasts for clients there, so I decided to start my company in the US even though I am physically based in Spain. I hire people across the US, Latin America, and Spain based on the project or production.
Introduce us to Las Cosmos. What was your initial strategy and mission?
Once I moved to Spain in 2018, I realized that Latin music and culture was really the dominating youth culture. Yet, I saw a complete dissonance with mass media and institutions who were ignorant of Latin American culture. Despite Madrid having over one million people of Latin American descent, I still see a lack of representation in the voices, faces, accents and bylines of Latinos in Spain. It’s just very obvious that this is a huge, underserved market. Again, I went through the same situation in the USA when I started Remezcla in 2004, which is now one of the leading Latin-centered media platforms in the US. So my mission since the beginning has been to elevate Latin music and talent, much of which is already based in Spain and Europe. There are so many talented artists from Latin America or second-generation artists living in Europe and we’re here to celebrate them.
With Las Cosmos, was there a moment when you got a skyrocketing growth momentum? As an independent podcaster, what advice do you have for maximizing that momentum?
I reached out to a Cuban orchestra conductor based in Germany after seeing her videos on Instagram. I thought she was a very cool, young, Afrolatina in the stuffy classical world and I wanted to know her story. Little did I know that she would end up working with Rosalía as the conductor on her tour. So my interview with Yudania Gomez Heredia at Las Cosmos podcast became the first interview she ever gave the day after the world tour kicked off in Lyon. The interview went viral. It was amazing. I ended up collaborating with El Pais newspaper and other opportunities that arose from it.
What are a few things the European podcasting industry can learn from the Latin American market?
Be flexible, adaptable, and open. Think about collaborations. It seems basic, but I’ve found that people in Europe tend to be very closed off, making it hard to connect. Maybe it’s shyness?
Finally, what are your predictions for the next few years in the podcasting industry?
Personality-driven short-form video content spins off into its own industry and we can be left alone to tell audio stories in artsy, long-winded, narrative and experimental ways. The audience is still there and there’s room for more. Not sure how we monetize though, jaja.
Share 2-3 recommendations of your favorite podcasts that deserve more love.
I will plug my own.
Tumble en Español is a science podcast for kids and families about science discovery. It’s the Spanish adaptation of the popular English-language show Tumble Science Podcast for Kids from our partners at Tumble Media. Get your kids away from screens and listen to podcasts together in the living room, in the car! We recently premiered an interactive audio series around plastic pollution in oceans and rivers. You can take your kids out to help identify and clean up pollution in your community anywhere in the world. It’s making science and podcasting, interactive, fun and educational. Available in English and Spanish. Press release about the results of a study of our course applied to schools and families.
American Colony is my new independent documentary audio series funded by the Mellon Foundation, a co-production between Shake It Easy Media and The Latino Newsletter. On the 250th anniversary of the United States’ declaration of independence from British colonial rule we turn our attention to Puerto Rico still an American colony after 128 years. We examine how Puerto Rico’s political status as experienced by people on the island and in the diaspora, affects our every day lives. Premiering July 4th :)
Thank you, Nuria!