Waste watch: Illinois spends $4.4M on podcast, music studios

Illinois’ broken budgeting process allows legislators to hand taxpayer money to podcasting and production studios.

Illinois state lawmakers are putting roughly $4.4 million behind projects to subsidize media production studios primarily in Chicago – using money from taxpayers across the state.

Recipients of these grants for podcasting and music production studios include:

• $1.5M to Jackson Action Coalition for Soul City Studios in Chicago
• $1.2M to True Star Media in Chicago
• $625K to the Altitude Program NFP in Chicago
• $600K to Third Coast Music in Chicago
• $450K to Side Street Studios in Elgin

All five of these organizations are private entities with their own revenue streams.

True Star Media brought in $2.3 million in revenues in 2024, with state grants making up a significant portion of this revenue. The organization should use the over $750,000 in revenue earned from program services to cover its operating expenses, rather than state funding.

True Star also has several large corporate partners that it could more fully rely on, including Adobe, State Farm and AT&T. True Star supports the community by offering youth career training, but this programming should be strictly private.

Some organizations are also subsidized by their localities. The Jackson Action Coalition, the developer of Soul City Studios, received a $250K grant from the City of Chicago. Other organizations, like Side Street Studios and Third Coast Music, have private community partners as well.

While music and podcasts are valuable aspects of the community, the state should not be responsible for subsidizing them. Media production should reside exclusively within the private sphere; it is not a responsibility of the state. The use of capital funds for these non-essential projects exacerbates Illinois’s mounting debt.

There is no sign that these grants were competitively given through a merit-based system. These recipient organizations may have been picked for a good reason, it is only fair to share the process with the public. Taxpayers do not know why these appropriations are made in the first place, and do not know how the funds will be spent.

One solution is using competitive grants with objective evaluation criteria and reporting requirements are scored and tracked by a state agency. This ensures the funds are allocated and used properly.

Lawmakers claimed the 2026 budget contained no pork, but a closer look shows 2,815 items over $200,000 lawmakers decided to fund in the final hours of the legislative session – rushed, harmful to taxpayers and with no time for public scrutiny.

Those include $40 million for a sports complex at the alma mater of Illinois House Speaker Chris Welch.

Taxpayers deserve a more transparent budgeting process to hold legislators accountable for wasteful spending on non-essential projects. This means setting a spending cap, banning “gut-and-replace” tactics, allowing at least 72 hours for public review of the budget in its final form to comply with the state’s constitutional rule, and requiring lawmakers to publicly disclose and justify all earmarked spending requests.

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