Pocket FM: The Startup that Pioneered Audio Series and Made the Entertainment Industry Follow in Its Footsteps

The serialized audio drama has received a second life after 2018-born startup Pocket FM decided to resurrect this 30s era of storytelling in its modern avatar: the audio series.

Margaret Ellen Noonan (aka Peggy Noonan) was a primary speechwriter and special assistant to the 40th American President, Ronald Reagan. In her memoir, “What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era,” she wrote, “TV gives everyone an image, but radio gives birth to a million images in a million brains.”

Noonan’s comment was about the dramatic adaptation of stories, or radio drama, which dominated American radios before the arrival of cable television. The truth is, no other dramatic art form directly demands the audience as a creative partner, sparks imaginations, or could possibly take the audience anywhere in any era except for the audio drama, which single-handedly dominated the world of entertainment between the 1930s and 1960s.

Audio drama, or radio drama, is a dramatized performance that’s purely acoustic without any visual component. Dialogues, music, and sound effects create a form of art that takes the audience into a world of imagination.

The Golden Era of Audio Drama

The Halloween of 1938 is remembered for a different reason. On October 30, CBS Radio Network aired a dramatic adaptation of H.G. Wells’s science fiction novel “The War of the Worlds” as a live, full-cast audio drama. The audio retelling on nationwide radio waves seemed so real to people at the time that many even fled their homes trying to escape the “Gas Raid from Mars.” Help lines never stopped ringing that night.

The next morning, The New York Times front page read: “Radio Listeners in panic, Taking War Drama as Fact”. Until that day, no other form of entertainment had received such widespread success. What followed was a proliferation of audio drama.

Forty years later, audio drama experienced its first significant boost with the BBC Radio 4 broadcast of “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams in a serialized format.

The frenzy, however, began to fade away after 1990 with the emergence of cable television, which dominated homes over the next several decades. Yet, that, too, eventually had to make way for streaming services as the internet and smartphones proliferated.

Enters Pocket FM

Things, however, were moving at a slower pace in India until Reliance Jio entered and made mobile data one of the cheapest forms of connectivity in the world. Entertainment became a 24/7 affair, and over-the-top (OTT) players, primarily video, mushroomed.

Like many, Rohan Nayak’s daily routine included about three hours of travel to and from work. For entertainment, he explored all available audio options, including podcasts, audiobooks, and others. “What I really craved during those times was pure entertainment in audio format, and that seemed to be lacking,” Nayak said.

That frustration eventually led Nayak, along with co-founders Nishant KS and Prateek Dixit, to launch Pocket FM in September 2018, aiming to create a niche in non-music audio entertainment.

Reviving the Old Art

Non-music audio entertainment experienced a resurgence after the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced people to stay home for longer periods than ever. Pandemic-era lockdowns led to a phenomenon known as “screen fatigue,” prompting people to seek alternative forms of entertainment.

Like every entertainment platform, Pocket FM started experimenting with potential innovations, one of which was the “audio series.” “We identified an unexplored space in the entertainment industry driven by an increasing demand for audio fiction and crafted a playbook to address this opportunity across every key market,” Nayak said in a 2024 press release.

Going Global

From day one, Pocket FM had global ambitions. Following its success in India, the company made its debut in the United States in 2022, and the audio series proved to be an instant hit.

In just over a year, Pocket FM discovered its largest revenue-driving market in the US, which has since accounted for the majority of the company’s revenue.

As of late 2025, the startup plans to continue expanding into the EU, North America, and Asia.

The World Loves Audio Series

Audio series have rapidly evolved from an emerging format into a formidable revenue category. Since the company’s inception, many of the audio series Pocket FM has produced have garnered the company millions in revenue, including “My Vampire System” and “Saving Nora” — two of Pocket FM’s flagship audio series.